"Race" in College Admission FAQ & Discussion 11

Applying to College
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<p>This part would make me livid not only because of the racial angle, but also the rank disrespect for a faculty member for completely meaningless reasons.* </p>

<p>Especially if the faculty member concerned is making a good faith effort to be a good faculty member to the class. </p>

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<li>Incidentally, this is a factor in why I tend to be skeptical of native-born American students’ complaints about Profs/TAs with supposed foreign accents. Especially considering several against friends/faculty I’ve known or met regularly IRL who had that accusation leveled in online Professor reviews are actually as American-born as they are…but whose crime was to “look foreign”.</li>
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<p>“supposed foreign accents”???</p>

<p>They dont have accents? They arent actually foreign accents? </p>

<p>Why are these nasty native-born American students making up these suppositions about accents? I had an electronics class I had to drop because it was impossible to tell the difference between the professor’s pronunciation of ‘alpha’ and ‘R4’ (as in resistance #4). It wasn’t a mass delusion because there were a few snapping pencils with this guy.</p>

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<p>I think a persons comfort level with what is " critical mass" can vary. As much as a college wishes to increase diversity, I imagine that also takes some time and growth. Still, a student has the choice to be part of that or not. As difficult as it may be for the doctor mentioned in the article to practice and raise a family in a small town, his presence there is a gift to the community. I personally think that bonds between people are the best way to bridge differences. Perhaps this is the way some of the minority students have made peace with the school over time. Some of the students may have come to college with narrow views and changed them. Still the OPs daughter does not have to sign on for that. She has other choices. Another thought about the elderly man at the nursing home is that he may have had dementia and thought he was in another era. It isn’t right for anyone to endure cruel comments and I hope the OPs daughter can find a better fit school for her if she wishes. I’m not excusing the behavior of the students she’s encountered and while it would be impossible to regulate what every student says, perhaps they can establish some ways to educate the students and hopefully prevent some of these incidents in the future.</p>

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<p>Some people are sooo overly sensitive. </p>

<p>However, I feel for the OP’s D. She is a teenager. She was adopted. She is not comfortable with looking Chinese without being Chinese. She would get stronger in time.</p>

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<p>And you know this, how?</p>

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<p>Yes, that does make me extremely sad. Thankfully, she has a loving mom who is supportive and sensitive to her daughter’s circumstances. She sounds like a great kid and she should not have to suffer and be subjected to such intolerance and ignorance. I hope that she is able to find a nurturing environment where open-mindedness and acceptance is the norm. Best wishes to your family.</p>

<p>btw, who cares about the bonsai/banzai distinction. I think we all got the gist of the message.</p>

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<p>The administration can lead the way by showing that racist remarks and actions by students are absolutely unacceptable and that elimination of a hostile environment for racial minorities is part of the mission of the school. That, for example, is what the president of UA did in response to the sorority scandal.</p>

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<p>really, ucb and cobrat? Do you have to show off your knowledge of banzai vs. bonsai, in this situation? because this is all about being superior, not about extending understanding. </p>

<p>The internet: where you go to impress others with your awesome knowledge of the truly trivial. Because they care.</p>

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<p>^Thank you. </p>

<p>OP - it was very helpful to hear the kind of thoughtless remarks she has already endured. She should leave this place. </p>

<p>If she would consider Smith, I would be happy to put her in touch with recent graduates. I met several interesting women at a NYC alumnae get together. They were vibrant, intellectually curious, kind women, and ethnically diverse.</p>

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<p>Questions and comments don’t necessarily imply racism.</p>

<p>Someone who gets to know your daughter may eventually notice that she’s not very familiar with the culture of the people she looks like. They might say something like, “Oh, you don’t speak Chinese (or whatever language it is)?” And she would say, “No, I didn’t grow up in a family that speaks Chinese. I’m adopted. My parents are white.” And that would be the end of that. </p>

<p>There’s no racism in a question like that. It’s just people trying to figure each other out. </p>

<p>I assumed until recently that a woman I work with, who has a common Hispanic last name, was Hispanic. It turns out that she’s not Hispanic; she’s Filipina. She and her family probably have to explain this over and over. But so what? There’s nothing wrong with being from the Philippines, just like there’s nothing wrong with being adopted.</p>

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<p>"She is a teenager. She was adopted. She is not comfortable with looking Chinese without being Chinese.<br>
And you know this, how? "</p>

<p>I think this information is in the thread.</p>

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<p>I am truly touched by all the support and interest my question generated here, and especially want to thank those who took the time and had the good hearts to send me private messages. I tried to respond to all of you but darn it! CC won’t let me until I have been around these parts longer. :frowning: But know you are appreciated.</p>

<p>Smith sounds amazing. I am definitely going to talk to my daughter about it. </p>

<p>argybargy, about the foreign accents and the fact that some college teachers certainly do come from other countries and do have accents. That’s true, though my reply often is “Well, their English is a helluva lot better than my Chinese, Hindi, Farsi or other language.” But a lot of this can be perception, too. Example: in high school, my daughter ended up dating a guy who, when he first met and talked to her, thought she had a heavy Chinese accent. He realized on their third time talking (at school) that she didn’t have any accent at all! (For the record, she was born in China and joined our family before the age of six months. So trust me: she doesn’t have a Chinese accent!)</p>

<p>Pennylane: Yes, the elderly man in the nursing home DID have dementia. The point of the story was that my daughter took what he said in good humor/in stride. She understood that he was an elderly man who had fought in the Pacific theater in WWII. I mentioned it because someone said she better get used to racism and not be so sensitive. I told the story to point out that she had encountered enough to be able to distinguish between people who may be ignorant, unexposed or just don’t know, and people who have malicious and or casual real racism in them (as in, not liking groups of people of a different race just because they perceive that race as inferior in some way to their own race.)</p>

<p>I personally think my kid has been pretty darned patient with the stupid things that many white people have said to her over time. She’s been asked over and over “How do you like it here in America?” even after she tells people she came her at six months in an adoption. She’s endured the comments, when saying she has to do her homework, about “Oh, all you Asians only care about grades.” She has routinely tolerated this stuff with good humor and an attempt to put herself in other people’s shoes. For several summers, she has been a counselor at a program for trans racially adopted kids and teens, and has been invited to speak in front of groups of adoptive parents. A big international adoption agency paid her to talk to prospective adoptive parents in an online webinar. So she is pretty darned good at articulating the issues, and is very comfortable with being adopted. </p>

<p>Maybe attending a very diverse high school (racially, socioeconomically and even sexual orientation-wise) was a disadvantage in this circumstance, because she has come to expect that kind of openness and tolerance, and it’s unfortunately not present everywhere. I will say that some people did warn us that it might not be the best idea to send her to a school in the south, but Positive Polly that I am, I refused to believe it. And our visits to this school were so pleasant: people couldn’t have been nicer.</p>

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<p>Not only do I think Smith would offer your daughter all kinds of wonderful opportunities and friendships and an open-minded, vibrant campus experience, but I am pretty sure Smith would be darn lucky to have BlueRoses Daughter there for 3+ years!</p>

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“even”? why “even”, op?</p>

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<p>Not all places in the south, or non-south, are the same in this respect. Obviously, your daughter found this particular school to have this kind of problem, but not every place in the south would have this kind of problem, nor would every place in the non-south not have this kind of problem. I have gotten odd looks and a question* in non-south places as a member of a visible minority that was not present in significant numbers in those places. Although not a problem to the scale your daughter describes at the school, it does indicate that ignorance is not limited to the south.</p>

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<li>“Where are you from?” “[well known major city in the US]” – oddly from a waiter in a restaurant who was probably of a different ethnicity but similar appearing visible minority.</li>
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<p>We get a lot of ignorant questions too, and some are easier to shrug off than others. Sometimes D just wants to be around people who don’t need to ask them. She likes that at her current school she can ask where to get affordable braids or twists and people don’t ask if they make her head bleed uh, what?). Sometimes she wants to enroll in an EC or program where the primarily white kids won’t ask what the ghetto is like (she wouldn’t know…). </p>

<p>OP, your D sounds pretty amazing. Is she aware of the Mavin Foundation? Although they focus on mixed race kids and families they do some work around transracial adoptions. It’s primarily a clearing house for information, but when D was younger I know they ran events and workshops.</p>

<p>I hope you’ll be able to respond to PM’s soon.</p>

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<p>It isn’t to show off knowledge so much as to illustrate how such an episode could reasonably be taken as an illustration of possible racism due to pre-war/wartime hatred by someone who is from the racial/ethnic group which were/looked like “the enemy”. Especially considering this issue isn’t only commonly discussed in among some Asian-American groups, but even among war veterans themselves. </p>

<p>Some among the latter include some I knew growing up who did call out fellow veterans or other Americans for using racist epithets towards me and other Asian-Americans while visiting veteran/senior centers because a few weren’t able to let go of wartime hatreds. </p>

<p>Especially considering at the time, the ending of the Vietnam War was barely a decade before.</p>

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You don’t think the waiter was simply asking where you were from because he might be from the same place and want to relate?<br></li>
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<p>I’ve had people ask where I was from because I have an “accent” different from the locals here. A sensitive ear picks up my Pennsylvanian tilt and might comment on it. Personally I’ve never considered that to be ignorant or rude behavior. Just trying to find the line here.</p>

<p>^I for one appreciated the history funfacts, cobrat.</p>

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<p>My daughters look ethnic (and being mixed, one looks Eurasian and the other European with enough ethnic to make both of them pass for nearly any ethnicity… We speak English only at home. We were at the supermarket checkout once chatting about something and the cashier asked “what is this language you’re speaking?”. The girls both answered “English”…</p>

<p>My older one gets asked all the time in college “which country did you come from”?</p>

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<p>xaniamom, the “even” in my post was just a rhetorical device to mean, wow, look at how diverse my kid’s school was. It embraces (and it truly does) a whole spectrum of diversity, from racial and socioeconomic to gender identity/sexual orientation. Nothing in particular was meant by it: I write for a living and often just try to vary my sentence structure and cadence, and clearly made a poor choice there. :)</p>

<p>cobrat, my daughter works right now as a volunteer at a senior center in her college town and spends a lot of time with dementia patients there. She basically sits and talks with them, plays games, sings to them, brings “their” music to them (Sinatra, Nat King Cole, etc.) and, with one lady who can no longer speak, just sits with her, holds her hand and strokes her back. The first time she went there, she sort of expected that perhaps some of the people might mention her race, or say something to her about it. She has been going there since early September, and not a single one has. She found that interesting, especially as all residents except one are white, and the only people of color they see are the one resident and housekeeping/aides. </p>

<p>sylvan, forgive me for being blunt, but are you Caucasian? I would wager you don’t get asked “Where are you from?” in the same way that Asians routinely are. My daughter has been asked that many times, and when she answers with the name of our city, they say “No, I mean REALLY from? Where are your people from?” It’s fine a few times, but over and over – even when it’s asked nicely – it can make a person feel as if that person doesn’t really belong. I have made the point to my daughter that, to be fair, she WAS born in China and then brought here, but I still find it rude for people who don’t know her to ask about it so insistently. Last weekend in her college town, she walked with a friend into a diner and an older gentleman said, loudly “NI HAO!” She replied “Hello.” The man said “ARE YOU FROM CHINA? CAN YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I AM SAYING?” (He said it loudly and slowly, as if speaking to someone who cannot undertand English easily.) She quietly said “I was born in China but was adopted into my American family as a tiny baby.” He retorted “So your family immigrated here from China?” ;)</p>