The New York Times has a long piece about how, because the Department of Education has now required colleges to wring more racial information from their applicants, and?because those colleges' application forms now include many more race-description options, it's become difficult for admissions committees to make their affirmative-action decisions. Is an applicant whose father is black and mother is white more ?diverse? than one whose father is Asian and mother is black? Or what if an applicant checks boxes for ?Native Hawaiian,? ?African-American,? and two or three American Indian tribes? Is this applicant the quintessence of diversity?
Or is he merely lying? Applicants to competitive schools know that being just white, just Asian?this will not help and will surely hurt them. So they reach back. Great-granddad was actually born in the Canary Islands! Grandmom's half-sister's father was Puerto Rican! Or maybe I'll just make up stuff?after all, nobody's checking on this, and it's basically self-determined information, so let me see just how multiracial I can be.
It's not sustainable, this obsession with race. Race: in 2011, when Americans' families are such a muddle, such a m?lange of countries and cultures, what does the word, what can the word possibly, mean?
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow ?