<p>Yeah, I’m going to have to call ■■■■■ on this one…</p>
<p>I don’t agree wth you xrCalico23. The OP isn’t African American. True. But the OP could choose to try to pass for African American, and could get away with it since many people of black ancestry don’t have brown skin, kinky/curly hair or the kind of facial features that to many people “look” black.</p>
<p>A friend of mine is biracial: Japanese and black, and considers herself to be black. She looks like she’s Japanese with a fake afro (It’s her real hair). She’s even in a black sorority. I didn’t know she was black until she told me.</p>
<p>^All right, all right, I concede. African American it is then.</p>
<p>I have also wondered about how scholarships are handled. There are so many for minorities. Do the applicants have to show “proof” of their race?</p>
<p>Wasn’t there a movie about this?</p>
<p>Why go through the hassle of letting nobody see you? Just insist that you’re black and whenever people act puzzled be like “What? Just because of the color of my skin? You racist pig.”</p>
<p>I knew someone from South Africa (white as a bottle of milk) who filled out African American on his PSATs–technically true. (I guess their fault for not being straight up and saying “black skin.” Anyway, he got a scholarship for being black. I’m not sure, but I think he felt bad about a joke going a bit too far and turned it down.</p>
<p>Haha I love this and have wondered this many a time… I vote that some one tries it out for the sake of CC scientific research.</p>
<p>The only thing is…well…say one day you became a doctor/politician/lawyer/scientist etc., I can see this haunting you for long time but maybe if you DID claim a documental error… Haha idk</p>
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<p>Explicitly false under the federal definitions used in the United States. If a person is regarded as “white” in South Africa, that person is not “African American” here in the United States, because the terms “African American” and “black” are synonyms in the federal regulations. Now that I’ve merged the threads together, see the FAQ posts at the beginning of this FAQ and Discussion thread. </p>
<p>Northstarmom is of course correct that people can be socially regarded as black in the United States without looking dark-skinned or African-featured. I had a classmate in professional school who had as much African ancestry as I have Irish ancestry–one great-grandparent’s ancestry–and he checked both “white” and “black” on his application to that school. He was admitted, and invited to join the Black Student Association. Some other members of the association were upset with him, as he was pale and blond (although brown-eyed, as I recall). I met his dad (who would be described by many Midwestern Americans as “black”) and his mom (who could pass for my mom, just as he could pass for my brother) at the parents day at our school. It seemed fair to me that he could make a case that he was part of the black community of our state, as he surely must gone to public places with his dad while growing, and his dad surely would have been conspicuous in many parts of the state where black people were then very scarce. If I can feel Irish on St. Patrick’s Day (and I do), why can’t a person who has one black great-grandparent feel black?</p>
<p>A question was raised in the thread that was just merged here. </p>
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<p>Only for onlookers will I respond to this ■■■■■■■■ question. They would expel you, and the federal or state governments might prosecute you (and, if you are convicted, fine you and imprison you) if you receive financial aid based on a fraudulent application. Even if you graduate without this being discovered (not at all likely), you could have your degree rescinded, and then the criminal prosecution would be about a larger dollar amount, for more prison time. </p>
<p>Don’t you read the newspaper? </p>
<p>[Ex-Harvard</a> student accused of living a lie - The Boston Globe](<a href=“http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2010/05/18/ex_harvard_student_accused_of_living_a_lie/]Ex-Harvard”>http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2010/05/18/ex_harvard_student_accused_of_living_a_lie/)</p>
<p>That why this whole race thing is more and more bogus.</p>
<p>Back in the day, the “one drop” rule (as if there was such a thing as “black” blood but anyway) made it important to know if you had mixed ancestry. You would legally be “Negro” in some states.</p>
<p>But now…it’s just silly. Crazy. I hope and predict that as intermarriage becomes more common, the government will just do away with the classification system. I doubt any country on earth is so obsessed with categorizing people based on a made-up system of races.</p>
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<p>I think South Africa is still more so, although with different consequences from when there was still apartheid there, but your point is well taken that the categories used in any country, any time, are ultimately arbitrary. Here in the United States, the categories are not mandatory for most purposes. In particular, with regard to the topic of this forum, race and ethnicity categories [are</a> not mandatory](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064853364-post3.html]are”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064853364-post3.html) for [college</a> admission](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064853385-post4.html]college”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064853385-post4.html).</p>
<p>Wow… I didn’t know they still had these threads…</p>
<p>But, I do want to point out that for anybody who has studied race in America, it’s incredibly ironic that it’s usually white students/parents who go as far as to say “race isn’t real”, “based on a made-up classification of race”, “we’re all just people”. I bet a lot of minority students WISH (at times at least) they had the privilege to say something like that and believe it in their own little world. </p>
<p>The funny thing is, if you’re from a minority group, you don’t have the option to genuinely pretend race isn’t real. If you tried, what happens to you in the present and what happened to your family in the past wouldn’t make any sense. </p>
<p>I think that refuting affirmative action with the concept that race biologically isn’t real is naive and anti-intellectual. That’s my only comment as someone who was around for the original ‘“Race” in College Admissions FAQ & Discussion’.</p>
<p>^ Agreed, wholeheartedly.</p>
<p>Of course, there are people of all colors who reflexively hate people of a different color.
We’re not postracial yet…but we are closer than we were 50 years ago.</p>
<p>I just feel the government feeds into it by classifying people.</p>
<p>Asian American does not count as a minority with consideration for Affirmative action, correct?</p>
<p>Affirmative Action hurts most Asian Americans.</p>
<p>URM stands for under-represented minority. Asian Americans are hugely over-represented, so no.</p>
<p>At schools with low Asian polulations, such as many in the South, there would be a boost for being Asian. At top schools and big name schools, Asians are an overrepresented minority (more Asians than in the US population as a whole), making it the most competitive pool of applicants.</p>