From the NYT (by way of The Corner):
Alan Moldawer’s adopted twins, Matt and Andrew, had always thought of themselves as white. But when it came time for them to apply to college last year, Mr. Moldawer thought it might be worth investigating the origins of their slightly tan-tinted skin, with a new DNA kit that he had heard could determine an individual’s genetic ancestry.
The results, designating the boys 9 percent Native American and 11 percent northern African, arrived too late for the admissions process. But Mr. Moldawer, a business executive in Silver Spring, Md., says they could be useful in obtaining financial aid.“Naturally when you’re applying to college you’re looking at how your genetic status might help you,” said Mr. Moldawer, who knows that the twins’ birth parents are white, but has little information about their extended family. “I have three kids going now, and you can bet that any advantage we can take we will.”
Genetic tests, once obscure tools for scientists, have begun to influence everyday lives in many ways. The tests are reshaping people’s sense of themselves  where they came from, why they behave as they do, what disease might be coming their way.
It may be only natural then that ethnic ancestry tests, one of the first commercial products to emerge from the genetic revolution, are spurring a thorough exploration of the question, What is in it for me?
Many scientists criticize the ethnic ancestry tests as promising more than they can deliver. The legacy of an ancestor several generations back may be too diluted to show up. And the tests have a margin of error, so results showing a small amount of ancestry from one continent may not actually mean someone has any.
Given the tests’ speculative nature, it seems unlikely that colleges, governments and other institutions will embrace them. But that has not stopped many test-takers from adopting new DNA-based ethnicities  and a sense of entitlement to the privileges typically reserved for them.
Prospective employees with white skin are using the tests to apply as minority candidates, while some with black skin are citing their European ancestry in claiming inheritance rights.
[My emphasis]
I’ve discussed at great length the new essentialism of race—which grows, ironically (but predictably, I think) out of a social constructivist paradigm that wishes to distance itself from the unsavory implications of “blood-based” social judgment and entitlement—so I won’t revisit those arguments here.
However, I will point out that I believe the NYT article errs when it lumps together colleges, governments, and other institutions when it talks about the likelihood of their skepticism in embracing the new testing. In fact, colleges don’t generally see applicants—so racial categorization for the purposes of admission are done generally through boxes checked on admission applications (or are divined through leading essay questions). And the federal goverment is locked in to accepting the classifications, in certain situations, by their own minority hiring laws. So it would be difficult for them to legally discount someone claiming a particular “racial” heritage simply because they didn’t a) look the part (I’ve discussed the phenomenon of “passing” in the US, which obtains here: social constructivist theorists will tell you that pigmentation is not a sign of, say, blackness, so much as is a belief in tht blackness, which is generally acquired through lineage), or b) hadn’t until recently believed themselves to be of that particular heritage.
In fact, that’s where the power (and social danger) of these new tests lie: in our current social paradigm, one in which identity politics plays such a large and absurd role—even to the point of favoring particular races over others in an ostensible (and to my mind, outdated and ill-conceived) attempt to right past social wrongs—these tests will simply point up the noxious nature of the racial quota / “diversity” game by noting what many of us have known intuitively: we are most of us a “mixture” of a number of ethnic / genetic progenitors.
To some people, seizing on part of that mix is what gives them their identity. To others of us, however, the nature of that admixture, we argue, shouldn’t matter when it comes to who gets a government contracts or who is admitted to Yale—that it is individualism that should be ascendent over group affiliation for the purposes of determining personal identity.
But Americans are nothing if not pragmatic. And so these new tests (which, ironically, will disproportionately favor those who can afford them) will be used to game the system—or rather, to work the system, given that the genetic information is true, and those who have long-believed themselves white, say, are now able to apply for minority business contracts or scholarships, etc., based on a scientific analysis of their blood.
Which should be interesting. And will result, I’d imagine, in a whole lot more non-taxable casino money and claims for reparations.
****
(h/t Jeremy Winer; more here.)
A few years back I had some friends who immigrated from Mexico take advantage of minority contracts. When they immigrated here, he already had a masters in engineering and while here, became a d.d.s. And on top of it, he gets these lucrative contracts.
Jeff: You might check out the column by Peter Kirsanow over at NRO for a discussion of “new” racial/ethnic classifications under consideration by the Census Bureau for the 2010 census for evidence of the institutionalization of these amorphous concepts. See it at:
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/kirsanow200604120718.asp
(Sorry if I screwed up the format.)
I actually know an insulation contractor who put the majority (51%) of his business in his wife’s name. She became a “double” preferred contractor since she had enough blood to be classified as a ‘Native American” and a woman.
His company became basically un beatable in contract bidding in those instances where there were “set aside” contracts.
What’s my race? “Human”.
Ya fuckin’ speciesist!
Unironic.
Affirmative action at colleges leads to an increase in the average wealth of the student body. It can do nothing else.
The policy is to disfavor otherwise-qualified Asian and white men and to give their vacated places to rich women (of all colors). Or at least that’s exactly what it does. The adverse effect falls mostly on poor men because, coincidentally, grades and extracurriculars correlate almost perfectly with parental income, and the men dropped are the men in the lower ranks of otherwise-acceptability. QED.
SAT scores don’t correlate as strongly as grades do with wealthâ€â€and Asian and white (esp. Jewish) men are the highest-scoring not-economically-defined groupsâ€â€so, coincidentally, the tests are being changed to favor women (the recent essay addition), underweighted in admissions (at least until the girly-essay effect kicks in), and, at some schools, have passed entirely out of consideration. Another QED, waitress.
I don’t believe in “unintended consequences.” A thing is what it does. Affirmative action, like all progressive policy, primarily serves to exacerbate and eternalize class divisions (most pointedly and damagingly between black men and women, but that’s another story). Since these tests, partly by their expense, will help make the whole thing more efficient, they’ll be a huge hit.
The irony is that those who claim to favor affirmative action do so under the aegis of favoring economic affirmative action—even though the result of the policies they favor don’t necessarily lead to that end.
This is just another example.
So it is unironic to me, but ironic to the claims of those who favor the race-based policies.
Is what I meant.
The irony is that those who claim to favor affirmative action do so under the aegis of favoring economic affirmative action
A lot of people who don’t like race-based affirmative action would be perfectly cool with economic-based affirmative action. Yet that obvious compromise is rarely mentiones.
Hmmm.
As my parentage is uncertain I’ve always maintained, regardless of any exclaimations of disbelief, that I am an African-American.
What? Are they going to test me? Are they going to test my skin? That’s *racism* to say you have to have black skin to be an African-American.
Really? Is there a test that actually works? How can they tell me different? Can they prove it? And isn’t race about “self-actualization”?
I’m a very light coffee. With extra milk.
Ok. A lot of Half & Half.
I’m still an African-American so give me my propers you European Oppressors!
sw: I grew up in the damn dirty violence-ridden slums of South Central!
Ok. South Central New Hampshire, but you should have seen the number of dead snowmen in January!
To me this is probably the best argument in favor of non-economic affirmative action: it gets people to accept economic affirmative action.
I think Teresa Heinz Kerry, Retief Goosen, Gary Player, Ernie Els, et al would tend to agree with that statement.
I said that wrong – Kerry is the only “African-American” in that group.
Sorry for the run-on question, but I am curious.
Does anyone know of any actual case where someone has used this genetic info to help them get into a university by using the positive discrimination for blacks and hispanics in admission policies and then this person was challenged on it?
Would a university have to prove that you are not african-american or hispanic?
Speaking of Africans, let’s not forget Charlize Theron.
tw: her, obviously.
I’m a Native American, and so are my ancestors. Except for the ones who came over from Europe…
It has always seemed to me that the best way to eliminate institutionalized racial discrimination in the form of affirmative action is to take it to its absurd extreme.
The notion of a person belonging to a particular, single race is absurd. Genetically, we are all mixtures. Denying people preference based on race would ultimately require something functionally equivalent to the Nazi-era Nuremburg laws (giving a legally unambiguous, quasi-scientific definition of a race), the enforcement of which would be quickly turn public opinion (rightly) almost completely against the idea of race-based preferences.
At a minimum, it would force the adoption of race-blind, economic-based affirmative action, which is far less odious, and far more defensible, in my opinion.
We’re all African-Americans if you go back far enough.
Eden-American, you godless liberal.
This pigment-based predjudice is no more appealing now than when people were classified as mulattos, quadroons and octoroons. It is divisive, un-American and the exact opposite of our national motto, E Pluribus Unum–“Out of Many, One”.
It is also an inchoate reason for opposition to immigration; in a straight-line progression, Latinos could become a plurality or even a majority–with racial preferences intact. Then we’re back to a Jim Crow system. You cannot prefer one race without discriminating against the others.
This shit has got to stop.
ps: by “immigration” I mean massive illegal immigration, not legal immigration levels set by our representatives; there has already been way to much conflation of the terms and obsfucation by purposefully imprecise language.
“Eden-American, you godless liberal.”
If I had to guess, I’d say there’s more Godless here than particularly Godly, although I don’t know that I could fairly be said to fall into either category. It’s interesting to me how tenacious your prejudices seem to be, Actus, especially in the face of such a strong headwind of ridicule. Such determination could be quite useful if applied in a more productive direction.
As for liberal, we’re all that, but I guess for now we’d rather fight amongst ourselves to distract us from the decidedly illiberal people trying to kill us.
BTW, our present understanding of God (as opposed to Gods) likely originated in Africa as well:
That would be my guess too. There was a scare one day when It looked like this was another creationist place. But thankfully it wasn’t so.
My father’s family were small farmers in NC, descended from Scotch-Irish-Dutch immigrants from who-knows-when; my mother’s family were immigrants from Slovakia in the eary 1900s who worked at steel mills in PA. There is a rumor that several generations back there was a gypsy on my mother’s side. There is also a suspicion of miscegnation ‘way back’ on my father’s side.
All this could be confirmed by a genetic test. All this is irrelevant if we take seriously the dictum that all citizens should be treated equally by the government.
Genetic testing for tuition aid is exactly the sort of thing that I hope will destroy race-based differentiation among Americans. That we are American citizens is the best common denominator, or at least should be, when we are interacting with our government. Race, that infinitely subjective variable, should fall somewhere below our distant ancestors’ national origins (i.e., have no effect at all) in determining differences among Americans.
TW ‘country’ as in: We are all citizens of this country, why does race matter at all to the government?
Geoff,
My small town had one hs.It also had a large population of upwardly mobile southern black Americans who’d come to work in car related factories poost WWII.(My father thought they were getting the chance to be immigrants for the first time.My generation of boomers had a very easy multi racial group that has remained very close.We did have code wwords,especially when applying for college/professional school.One guy who was anywhere from 1/16 to 1/64th became a POND-for Partially of Negro Descent .But he did list himself as a minority on applications.(His feather was a ‘doc and mother a nurse;both very competent)
Affirmative action at colleges leads to an increase in the average wealth of the student body. It can do nothing else.
Great post, 1600 Baby. I wish I had something to add.
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