<p>In the earlier FAQ thread, someone asked me why I even care about this issue, and I replied with a description of the life experiences that got me thinking about race relations in the United States in a post now updated here. I'm a baby boomer, which is another way of saying that I'm a good bit older than most people who post on College Confidential. I distinctly remember the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated--the most memorable day of early childhood for many people in my generation--and I remember the "long hot summer" and other events of the 1960s civil rights movement. </p>
<p>One early memory I have is of a second grade classmate (I still remember his name, which alas is just common enough that it is hard to Google him up) who moved back to Minnesota with his northern "white" parents after spending his early years in Alabama. He told me frightening stories about Ku Klux Klan violence to black people (the polite term in those days was "Negroes"), including killing babies, and I was very upset to hear about that kind of terrorism happening in the United States. He made me aware of a society in which people didn't all treat one another with decency and human compassion, unlike the only kind of society I was initially aware of from growing up where I did. So I followed subsequent news about the civil rights movement, including the activities of Martin Luther King, Jr. up to his assassination, with great interest. </p>
<p>It happens that I had a fifth-grade teacher, a typically pale, tall, and blonde Norwegian-American, who was a civil rights activist and who spent her summers in the south as a freedom rider. She used to tell our class about how she had to modify her car (by removing the dome light and adding a locking gas cap) so that Klan snipers couldn't shoot her as she opened her car door at night or put foreign substances into her gas tank. She has been a civil rights activist all her life, and when I Googled her a few years ago and regained acquaintance with her, I was not at all surprised to find that she is a member of the civil rights commission of the town where I grew up. </p>
<p>One day in fifth grade we had a guest speaker in our class, a young man who was then studying at St. Olaf College through the A Better Chance (ABC) affirmative action program. (To me, the term "affirmative action" still means active recruitment of underrepresented minority students, as it did in those days, and I have always thought that such programs are a very good idea, as some people have family connections to selective colleges, but many other people don't.) During that school year (1968-1969), there was a current controversy in the United States about whether the term "Negro" or "Afro-American" or "black" was most polite. So a girl in my class asked our visitor, "What do you want to be called, 'black' or 'Afro-American'?" His answer was, "I'd rather be called Henry." Henry's answer to my classmate's innocent question really got me thinking. </p>
<p>I think one of the most effective tactics during the toughest years of the civil rights movement was when a black person would stand in a public place with a sign saying "I am a man." Really, it's that simple. To buy into the idea that "racial" categories make other people a different kind of people is to buy into the worldview of the segregationists. I am a human being, and you are a human being, and everyone else applying to your favorite college is a human being, and every member of the college admission committee is a human being, and we all have a lot more in common than we have in distinction. It's a radical idea, but it's a correct idea. Alas, I don't remember our visitor Henry's family name, or I would Google him up and thank him for getting me to think in the most concrete way possible about whether I acknowledge the humanity and individuality of all my fellow human beings. It is from this perspective that I am glad that there are many college applicants who decline the opportunity to self-report an ethnic affiliation and many colleges that admit many such students. </p>
<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1060810896-post4.html%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1060810896-post4.html</a> </p>
<p>More than thirty-nine years ago, when my fifth-grade class received that class visitor, I would never have imagined that people would still take "race" so seriously in the twenty-first century. (Indeed, that same fifth grade class I was in prepared a time capsule with predictions of the year 2001, which was opened that year, and in the time capsule can be found my prediction that "interracial" marriages would increase--I am part of one--and that people would learn to get over racial classifications. I guess we are still working on that, more slowly and less surely than I had thought we would.) Better late than never. </p>
<p>I refer to international comparisons in some of my online posts about this contentious subject. There is no reason for people in the United States to be unaware of the rest of the world when discussing public policy. Not all countries of the world classify ethnic groups the same way, which is another way of saying that the classifications of ethnic groups used in the United States are essentially fictional, and don't match any facts of biology. But it is a cultural and historical universal that wherever general government policies become ethnic-conscious, the citizenry becomes more ethnic-conscious, and ultimately inter-ethnic violence becomes much worse. The long civil war in Sri Lanka (among "Asian" ethnic groups that most Americans would be unable to distinguish), the former civil war in Lebanon (among "white" people by the United States Census classifications), the genocide in Rwanda (among "black" people), the disintegration of and genocide in Yugoslavia ("the land of the south Slavs," who all look alike even to other white people), and other troubling examples are why I don't think it is good public policy to attempt to classify people officially by ethnic categories. Maybe you think it is personally important to respond to ethnic questions on college forms or other government forms, but please don't impugn the motives of people who remind their neighbors and fellow citizens that responding to such questions is optional under United States law. </p>
<p>Let's move forward. Let's start calling Henry Henry, and calling our neighbors and fellow citizens our neighbors and fellow citizens. Let's not reify (regard as having existence in external reality) categories that are arbitrary and made up. I'd be happy to meet any of you in person and treat you as my fellow human being--it's as simple as that.</p>