Thermal
Penultimate Amazing
Dunno. At one bald faced lie, I'd toss it. Especially of that nature. How could you believe anything the person says?
Race Fraud
- Thread starter d4m10n
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Dunno. At one bald faced lie, I'd toss it. Especially of that nature. How could you believe anything the person says?
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
They're not going to be interrogating applicants about this checkbox. They're going to look at the claim, look at the provenance, conclude that data point may be true but isn't reliable, and look for other more reliable criteria of interest in the application.
How would you know it was a lie?
Why would they not give any weight to the bullet point, if there is indeed some sort of racial quota system in place. There's no formal interview before or along with submitting an application so the only people who would see it are the paper pushers in the back office. We're still waiting to hear if claimed indigenous ancestry is something that would appear on his high school transcript. The school doesn't know the answer to this question yet.
That's the way I thought it worked around here too. This self-ID just came in out of the blue. This might just be worthless outside public school.
Mostly it seems to be about GPA. Short of registering an account and going through the application process myself I can't see any references to things other than GPA. Nothing on the surface about past work history, community involvement, student clubs, sports etc.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
We're bouncing around between a few different hypotheticals here.
Yes I know. I/we don't have anything concrete. Point is, of course, a government agency has opened the door to allowing race fraud.
Will race go down the same road as gender? Will people be able to identify as non-race if they so choose and put their racial pronouns in their bios? Time will tell.
A grandparent of mine was born in Ireland. Apparently that is enough to qualify for an Irish passport. I’ve never been to Ireland. My grandparent was only born there because great grand parents were home visiting family. My great grandparents had already moved to Amerika (I think the k is required when referring to The California Region).
My wife’s grandmother moved to a town with strong German roots in Texas. Her second husband didn’t speak any English until he was sent to school. When I met him he was in his seventies and would weave German words and phrases into conversation without thinking about it. Everyone he grew up with was bilingual. He was third or fourth generation Texan, but the German families kept their language and heritage alive in their families.
He was far more German than I am Irish. Both just Texans, though. Which is a much cooler flag to sew onto your backpack while traveling.
I feel like people are already able to do so. What is stopping them?
In the meantime, I look forward to a day when the phrase “racial pronouns” has a coherent meaning beyond “my butt hurts”. Oh to dream.
Rolfe
Adult human female
Ireland seems to have made a decision to encourage as many people as possible to come back, following on from the diaspora which I think was even worse than the clearances in Scotland (though of course as an independent country they have control over citizenship, which Scotland does not). It's noticeable that Ireland's population has recovered significantly over the past century and a bit while Scotland's, depleted by the clearances, has remained static.
Lots and lots of people living in Britain have been able to get Irish (EU) passports post Brexit that way. They also offer an Irish passport to anyone living in Northern Ireland, pretty much no questions asked. I've sometimes wondered whether, if I moved to Northern Ireland, I could get an Irish passport that way.
So in a way, having Irish citizenship and an Irish passport and actually being Irish aren't quite the same thing. The Irish government would like you to come and be Irish, and offers incentives, but not everyone takes it the whole way.
The wife in the family that lived next door to me in England was American. But she was born in Germany - the family emigrated to America when she was about five. She said she'd more or less lost her German, and she had become an American citizen. She was also obviously coloured, part African heritage I think, but I don't know where that came in. She met her English husband while he was doing a stint working in a children's summer camp in America. She said she only agreed to come to England if it was temporary and they'd go back to America in due course.
Well, 35 years later I'm still sending them Christmas cards to an address in Sussex. But she took her two daughters to the American embassy when they were quite small to get them American citizenship, just in case it might come in handy. So they got that on the basis of their mother simply having lived there as a child and young woman.
One of my classmates at school had American citizenship because she'd been born there accidentally - a premature birth on holiday I think. She's completely Scottish. She said at one point (this was in the 1960s) that if she'd been a boy her parents would have taken steps to have the citizenship revoked because otherwise she'd have been in danger of being called up to fight in Vietnam. But as she was a girl they just let it stand.
So it's all quite complicated. I don't think Ireland is going to give me an Irish passport on the basis of an Ancestry test that varies between 7% and 1% Irish depending on how their algorithms are running that month. All my grandparents and great grandparents were born in Scotland. Dammit.
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theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
I can't really get worked up about "fraud" if no substantial benefit is realized by the claimant. If there's no scarce or valuable resource being reserved for people who tick the box, what fraud of any consequence can there be?
Also, it's hard for me to take "fraud" seriously, when the person or agency soliciting the claim makes no meaningful provision for vetting it. If you ask me if I'm Spider-Man, I say yes, and you accept that at face value, have I really defrauded you? Only if you're a colossal idiot.
There may be no real. tangible benefits however should some hapless White person be overcome with their share of collective guilt declaring oneself on "the race spectrum" might help with their mental health and escaping that overwhelming, crushing guilt. Dunno, just spitballing here.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Yeah, that's a little too much baggage for me to carry. You'll need to find a bellhop to help you with this conversation.
HansMustermann
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I'm still not sure how it works, though. I mean, I though the rule was that if you identify as X, you are X, genetics be damned? Pretty sure that the genetic differences between races are FAR more minor than *ahem* other stuff where they're to be glossed over.
I mean, seriously, the human species as a whole actually has far lesser genetic diversity than some breeds of other animals. In fact, pretty much the only ones who have less are some of the fancy cat or dog breeds which are all inbred from the descendants of the same two or three individuals. (Like, literally, all Ragdoll cats can trace their Adam and Eve, so to speak, to as recently as the 60's.)
So, really, by how many percent of the genetic code would a black guy be off if he identified as an Irish redhead?
I mean, seriously, the human species as a whole actually has far lesser genetic diversity than some breeds of other animals. In fact, pretty much the only ones who have less are some of the fancy cat or dog breeds which are all inbred from the descendants of the same two or three individuals. (Like, literally, all Ragdoll cats can trace their Adam and Eve, so to speak, to as recently as the 60's.)
So, really, by how many percent of the genetic code would a black guy be off if he identified as an Irish redhead?
Agreed, it is pretty heavy. Let's leave it at we'll meet back here in 10 years and see if this ever became "a thing". In the meantime, I'm going to fire up my Tumblr and start designing some not-identifying-as-any-race flags, just in case.
d4m10n
Penultimate Amazing
I think Thomas Chatterton Williams and Kmele Foster may've beaten you to the punch.
The short answer is some social cachet. Its just cooler to be say, black than white. There's no easily quantifiable metric for that but there is clearly a perceived benefit. Its also not unique to the US or even the modern era. There was a long standing tendency of Romans to claim ancestry that was odd. Folks would proudly claim to be descended from the defeated enemies of Roman. Except Carthagianian or Gauls. But lots of prominent Romans would claim they were descended from Samnites, Etruscans, other Latins and later Germans.
That's especially true of Native American ancestry, it was a not uncommon claim when I was a kid for people to say something to the effect of "I'm 1/8th ????? tribe on my mom's side." It was always a famous tribe by the way, never the local tribe that you never say in a move. It was never I'm 1/8th Maidu, it was always Cherokee or Apache or what not.
This is largely true except that most words for ethnicity also have an alternative definition that is also a....genetic thing. You can be Scottish culturally and/or Scottish genetically.
I am moderately amused by this as He's the first president that I can't remember taking the trip to his ancestral homeland in Ireland.
Basques fished far and wide, its common for the Irish to have some Basque ancestry and I wouldn't be surprised if it it was sow with the Scots aswell.
d4m10n
Penultimate Amazing
Another Career Pretendian
Came across someone I'd not heard of until today: Jimmie Durham
Came across someone I'd not heard of until today: Jimmie Durham
(Internal citations omitted)
Venom
Philosopher
Human genetic variation accounts for less than one percent of the billions of base pairs of the genome, so I'm sure nobody's hung up on the possibility of any of us being 20 percent orangutan or something extreme.
I don't think the Look! we're 99.9% similar! line is all that reassuring or relevant.
d4m10n
Penultimate Amazing
Holy Hopi Hoax, Batman
One more, and it's a doozy:
https://twitter.com/elissawashuta/status/1293189622525300736
ETA: More coverage at NYT.
One more, and it's a doozy:
https://twitter.com/elissawashuta/status/1293189622525300736
The time lapse from tragedy to farce is much shorter than usual here.
ETA: More coverage at NYT.
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lomiller
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Only in a vague hand-wavy sort of way. There are no uniquely Scottish genetic traits. What there is, is a cluster of mostly insignificant market traits that tend to occur together more often in people who identify culturally as Scottish. None of the personality or cultural traits we tend to associate with Scots (if these even exist) have any basis in their genetics.
I'm going to quibble a bit. Most of Europe and the old world in general gives you citizenship based on heritage. Its not just Ireland. Ireland is perhaps unique in that there are literally more people born outsize of Ireland than inside that qualify though. 200 years of a **** economy will do that.
Most of the America's count citizen ship by virtue of being born there rather than just ancestry.
Of course most countries have a mix of both but generally in the old world is mostly blood and in the new world its mostly birth. The latin/legal phrases are jus sanguinus and jus soli. Law of blood or law of soil.
I have no quibbles with that. Perhaps I should have said descent rather than genetics.
I will rephrase, most nationalities/ethnicities have both a shared culture and shared ancestry. Ethnonyms can be applied to either or both of those things.
lomiller
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Very little.
In fact Western Hunter Gatherers who populated NW Europe, including Ireland frequently had dark or black skin and are nonetheless one of the major contributors to the genetics of modern Europeans. the other 2(?) groups that contributed to modern European ancestry had lighter skin than the Western Hunter Gatherers, but they still had darker skin than today's NW European populations.
All in all, current skin tones in NW Europe are probably a very recent innovation probably not much more than ~4000 years old. There would have been very little vitamin D in the diet of early farmers in the region so the adoption of agriculture would have created a very strong selective pressure for lighter skin tones.
lomiller
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It certainly is relevant. It means the differences between individuals of various population groups are much larger than the differences between the groups themselves. The result is that any alleles that impact behavior or capability vary much more within any group than they do between groups.
IOW humans ethno-culture is very different than something like a dog breed where genetics can have a meaningful difference on personality and behavior from one breed to another. In humans all ethno-cultural groups are identical in terms of the range behaviors individuals within that can learn and adopt. If Germans act different than Koreans the differences are entirely learned behaviors and don't depend on any difference in genetic predisposition between the groups.
Venom
Philosopher
Pigmentation is one thing. What about skeletal proportions and configuration, particularly of the face?
You can make the African in this example as lightskinned as an Englishman, but the differences will be noticeable from a distance. On the other hand there are Middle Easterners and even Indians who, with a quick change of clothing, could reasonably pass as a local, or at least a European tourist.
I mention this in the context of "race fraud". HansMustermann says the genetic variation isn't that great. True but I'm afraid that only tells us we are all human.
arthwollipot
Observer of Phenomena, Pronouns: he/him
Is there any evidence that this so-called "race fraud" is occurring in more than a handful of edge cases?
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
I wouldn't call any of the documented frauds mentioned here "edge cases". They all seem to be playing right down the middle of the fairway and straight onto the green.
A lot of these seem to involve institutions that have established a system with a perverse incentive to commit race fraud, and also not made any serious effort to safeguard that system against the abuse thus incentivized. So while I doubt anyone has done any serious, peer-reviewed research into just how many academics (for example) are misrepresenting their race to gain professional advantages, the structure of the abuses that have been documented strongly suggests to me that there are likely many more that have not.
arthwollipot
Observer of Phenomena, Pronouns: he/him
Of course they're edge cases. Until someone can demonstrate that "race fraud" is as widespread as, say, transgender identity, the entire phenomenon can be attributed to a small number of isolated cases.
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d4m10n
Penultimate Amazing
I doubt it, but then it's widely considered taboo.
kookbreaker
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Adjacent to that is that when I visited Germany they had no idea how the melting pot works. They honestly thought that immigrants to the US just married within their own ethnicity forever. That might have been true for a hundred years or so, actually.
This came up because the Germans in question were stunned I had a Germanic last name (I’m 1/2 PA Dutch) but do not look German at all. I had to explain to them that my Mother was of Scottish ancestry.
Probably depends, the cases that make the news are likely extraordinary but that's true of pretty much all news coverage.
The cases like I knew as a kid, are likely wide spread. The number of folks out there that occasionally tell the story of their ancestry that is slightly cooler than WASP but has no real impact on anything, probably countless.
Ziggurat
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When you provide an incentive to fraud, and you simultaneously provide an incentive to not uncover fraud (because none of these institutions actually want to police any of these policies they implement, and it makes them look bad when cases are discovered), then the default expectation should be that it occurs far more frequently than you hear of.
lomiller
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Skin pigmentation is (or was until ~100 years ago) subject to such strong selective pressure that it only takes a few hundred years for significant changes to occur. It's almost entirely driven by UV levels where that population group lived in preindustrial times.
It's irrelevant for pretty much anything else and certainly has no relevance to behavior.
Founder effects readily create noticeable but irrelevant differences in facial features. So what? Go back 1000 years in Europe and people could generally tell just by looking at you if you were local or had traveled there from as little as a few hundred miles away. In many cases you can still do that today.
Also, why compare an African and Englishman when two Africans are often just as distantly Two African populations are frequently more distantly related to each other than an Englishman is to a Malaysian.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Sorry. I take edge cases to be cases of unusual circumstance, around the edges of likelihood. None of the cases we've seen in this thread seem to be of that nature. The scenarios all seem to arise from commonplace circumstances: as I said, institutions that create an incentive to commit fraud, and don't make an effort to hedge against people choosing fraud. That's not an "edge" scenario. That's a right-in-the-bullseye scenario.
Because of that, I think there's no reason to assume a priori that they're isolated cases at all. Fraud isn't the kind of thing that only exists when it is discovered. There's lots of undiscovered fraud. All the cases we've seen so far went for some time without being discovered. Given the non-edginess of the nature of the fraud, it's likely there are more out there that have yet to be discovered, including some that will never be discovered.
And of course this puts the lie to your trans-identity analogy. People are increasingly encouraged to admit to trans-identity. But people are very much discouraged from admitting to fraud. Therefore we would never expect race fraud to appear as widespread as trans identity, even if it is actually as widespread, or even wider.
So no, I don't think you can assume ahead of time that these are isolated cases. Everything we know about fraud and about human nature says we should expect the opposite.
What reason do you have to believe they are isolated, other than the relatively small number of reports that have reached you? Are you looking at these reports and seriously telling yourself, "gee, that looks like a very unlikely and rare combination of circumstances, to lead to such a result!"?
Thermal
Penultimate Amazing
Or you could say that in the new age of unreality we live in, a new form of deception and delusion is brewing on the horizon, and maybe it would be a good idea to call attention to it and make provisions, even if it's not widespread this minute? Kind of like we do with vaccines and the flu.
d4m10n
Penultimate Amazing
Another approach would be to simply affirm their personal sense of identity, whatever its source might be.
Not all that new really, passing has been a thing for a long time. The only thing sorta of new is that some folks of the majority group are trying to pass for being members of the minority group.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Colonizers gonna colonize.