Does Silence Give Consent?

I’m not much of a comment-poster; I feel much freer to spout my shit in my own domain.

Following that same thread, George wrote an entry yesterday that has me thinking. Go read it, if you haven’t already, as I don’t feel like quoting.

Okay, I’ll quote, but I’ll have to quote damn near the whole thing… (sub quotes come from College-Bound Students Often Skip Race Question)

[…] Will Frankenstein, 17, a graduating senior from a New York City public school, said he believes his multiracial background — he’s half Asian, half Caucasian — would have appealed to diversity-seeking colleges. But he decided not to tell them about it.

“I don’t want to be defined by my ethnicity,” said Frankenstein, who is headed to Stanford University. “I have friends who are from all over the world that don’t judge me by my ethnicity. Why should someone else judge me by my ethnicity?”

He also couldn’t be sure which box to check. “If you fill in ‘other,’ is that degrading?” he wondered. “I just didn’t fill it in at all.” […]

Your friends can’t give you a degree. Stanford can give you a degree, and will discriminate as to your abilities to fulfill their academic requirements. Why cite friends’ attitudes as grounds for academic credentials? Stanford is not your friend.

[…] Tao Tan, a high school senior from Plainsboro, N.J., said he supports affirmative action “in theory.” But when it comes to college admissions, he was convinced that too many of his competitors were “gouging the system” by highlighting tenuous family connections that might allow them to portray themselves as black or Hispanic.

Tan, 17, was convinced that admissions officers would hold him “to a higher standard” if he indicated he was Asian. So he didn’t. “My name is not as Chinese as Chang or Lee,” said Tan, who will attend Cornell University. “I picture them sitting in their offices scratching their heads: ‘Is he African? Is he Asian?’ ” […]

Tao, I’ve the luxury of a not-so-black name. Not everyone does.

[…] Julia Edmunds, 17, of New Durham, N.H., was reluctant to come across as just another white girl from tweedy New England. Still, for the colleges that seemed to really want to get to know her — whose applications would allow her to explain how she was home-schooled and low income, that her family was deeply religious — she gladly indicated her race. For the others, she left it blank.

“It seemed like they were treating [race] the wrong way, with the wrong emphasis,” said Edmunds, who will attend Wellesley College in the fall. “Race affects how other people view me, but it doesn’t affect how I view myself.” […]

Like George and Tao, my name isn’t one associated with a particular race. Nor was it even anything I had considered until my buddy LaJuina, who is not particularly black, Asian, or Hispanic, told me of how she filled out two applications for… a large, well-known retail store that sells different types of media, one with the name LaJuina (and her Hispanic-sounding last name), the other with the name Mary Something. Mary got the call-back. This fits the pattern of the workers in said store: there are blacks, but they are guys with names like John, David, whatever. Ethnically-general names. Actually, they aren’t really “ethnically-general” names, are they? They are Western European names, also known in these parts as White Names. This isn’t such a big deal to me except in how I may very well end up depriving someone of a job or position they need more than I do just because my name is something no one will ever have any trouble pronouncing (that would be my full name, Melissa, not my nickname “Lissa”, which is often pronounced “Lisa”… Sorry, that’s a wee bit off topic.).

“Stanford can give you a degree, and will discriminate as to your abilities to fulfill their academic requirements. Why cite friends’ attitudes as grounds for academic credentials?” I think I’m misunderstanding this; since when is race an indicator of academic credentials? And isn’t it the fact that race is considered part of the “academic requirements” (emphasis mine) that is causing this attitude among people my age?

One commentor (commentator?) on George’s page says:

amazing, these quotes of kids hiding their racial identities as though their race is some how not who they are. actually, it’s not so amazing, but a tragedy, nonetheless. if i self-identified as multi-racial i’d check every box that applied. what is there to fear? that folks might find out that people of different races conceive children? the secret is out.

perhaps when we learn that no racial identity exists at the expense of another we won’t be in such a hurry to shed our skins for the myth of colorblindness, or hide our children behind names that look nothing like them.

This really bothered me, as I’ve done the “don’t answer the race question” bit occasionally, and I always frown at the question. My problem is that, here in America, at least, race is supposed to define culture. To accuse us “kids” of feeling that “race is some how not who [we] are” baffles me. Why is the tone of my skin and my hair type part of who I am? And even if it is a part of who I am in a physical sense, why does that have anything to do with where I go to school for post-secondary education? Why don’t they ask me how much I weigh, or if I wear glasses? They can apply an equal number of cultural generalizations and quotas to that as they can the color of my skin. It’s not a matter of “hiding [our] racial identities”; it’s a matter of having hard work during 13 years of schooling being reduced to whether I’m a minority. It’s also running from cultural baggage associated with said identity; I’m black and keep a 5.62 GPA (about a 3.85 on a 4.0 scale), so I must have worked harder to overcome… what? My “disadvantages”? Do you want to go there? Really.

I’ll never forget the girl here in Charlotte, North Carolina, who wasn’t able to get into a good magnet school because the quota for whites had been filled–although there were still a few slots open for blacks. I would fucking hate to be the blacks that filled those slots. And that’s not the only example I can think of, but I won’t belabor a point. So does one racial identity exist at the expense of another? I would rather ask: Does playing up one’s race occur at the expense of another? I wouldn’t automatically say yes or no to either question, but the commentor makes it sound so simple: be Black, be proud. And what? Milk the system for all it’s worth? Even if she takes such a view (I don’t know), I can’t bring myself for follow such a… pragmatic view. Knowing that such a thing may occur as a result of your decision to write “I’m black” all over your applications, are you not, in some way, responsible for the consequences of said action? Maybe I’m just a complete oddball… I dunno.

It’s an interesting topic, nonetheless. I hadn’t realized the “older generation” wasn’t sympathetic (a generalization, of course) to our general disgust (or frustration) with the issue of race in this country, and at college application time in particular.

Update: I just discovered that Trackback apparently doesn’t like me. Well… well… I didn’t care anyway.