Not Enough Race Boxes On UCLA Application (Where It Is Illegal To Take Race Into Account)

[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]

Roger Clegg discusses what he aptly calls “an odd article” in the Los Angeles Times today “about the tragic shortage of racial boxes on the UCLA admissions form, and in particular the lack of any ‘Middle Eastern’ boxes.” This concern is odd, of course, since “UCLA is not supposed to be considering race or ethnicity at all.”

Raja Abdulhahim’s article begins with the surprise and dismay of 19 year old freshman, Nicole Salame, whose mother was born in Lebanon.

[She] was filling out an application to UCLA last year when she got to the question about race and ethnicity. She thought a mistake had been made.

“I read it five times and was like, where is Middle Eastern?” the freshman recently recalled. “Is it on the other page, did it get cut off? I thought they forgot.”

Her Lebanese-born mother told her Arabs are considered white, but Salame didn’t believe her. Her high school counselor told her the same thing.

“It did not make sense to me, it’s so far-fetched,” said Salame, who ended up checking “Other.”

Apparently she’s not alone.

Now several UCLA student groups — including Arabs, Iranians, Afghanis and Armenians — have launched a campaign to add a Middle Eastern category, with various subgroups, to the University of California admissions application. They hope to emulate the Asian Pacific Coalition’s “Count Me In” campaign, which a few years ago successfully lobbied for the inclusion of 23 ethnic categories on the UC application, including Hmong, Pakistani, Native Hawaiian and Samoan.

So, what’s the big deal? Why is micromanaging ethnic identity on an application so important when it is illegal to use that information in the admissions process? One answer the article give is almost insultingly weak and unpersuasive; the other is persuasive, and obnoxious. See if you can tell which is which.

Here’s one:

The UCLA students said having their own ethnic designation goes beyond self-identity and has real implications for the larger Arab and Middle Eastern communities….

[Not collecting the data on admissions forms] can result in the gathering of little or no statistical data on important issues, such as health trends in the community. Voter-approved Proposition 209 bars California’s public colleges from considering race in admissions….

It’s easy to see how not knowing how many applicants identify themselves as Afghani or Iranian can have a devastating on California’s health data. Yeah, right.

Here’s the other:

For years the federal government has classified Arab Americans and Middle Easterners as white….

That classification was cemented in the late 1970s when the Office of Management and Budget, a federal agency, listed all Middle Easterners as white.

But in the last few decades there has been a push to establish a separate category as the general population has grown more diverse and because of the possible benefits it could bring.

“Back then, to get rights you needed to be white,” said Yasi Chehroudi, president of the Iranian Student Group, which is helping spearhead the University of California campaign. “Now it helps to be yourself.”

So, “back then,” in the old days, “to get rights you needed to be white,” but now white is the last thing anyone who can pass for a “minority” wants to be. Might lose out on some “diversity” benefit [even though that would be illegal in California, thanks to Prop. 209], since all the “diversity” benefit providers know whites are not, and by definition cannot be, “diverse.”

UCLA junior Shawn Gabrill certainly knows.

“I feel like when I put down ‘white’ on an application, they assume my parents finished high school, went to college and that English was my first language,” the 20-year-old English major said. “And none of these things describe me.”

Of course “these things” also do not describe millions of whites, but who cares? It’s not real characteristics we’re talking about here, but “diversity.”

UPDATE [1 April]

Roger Clegg has written More on ‘More Boxes’, which I link not because (O.K., not only because) he includes a link to my post but rather because he makes a good point that neither of us made in our first posts.

It is “irksome,” he writes, that defenders of racial preferences usually claim that eliminating them will reduce the number of admitted “minority” students “when in fact there are plenty of racial and ethnic minority groups that are on the wrong end of this discrimination.” Asians are the obvious example, but they are far from the only one. Even many Hispanics, Clegg notes, are victims and not beneficiaries of racial preference discrimination.

For example, the evidence in the Grutter case showed that the University of Michigan law school treated Mexican Americans like African Americans (that is, preferentially), but treated all other Hispanics — from Central and South America and the Caribbean — like whites (that is, they were discriminated against). Except Puerto Rico: If you were actually born in Puerto Rico, you were discriminated against, while if you were of Puerto Rican background but born on the mainland, you were given a preference.

I made similar points several years ago (actually, more than several years ago) in writing about Black Latinos, discussing an article that had appeared in the New York Times.

“Hispanic,” for example can be sliced and diced into white Hispanic and black Hispanic, and that’s before you even get to the cultures/subcultures that distinguish the various national groups. Even within national “cultures” there can be sharp divisions. Thus the article quotes Maria Perez-Brown, identified as a “Puerto Rican television producer and entertainment lawyer in New York,” whose mother is “a dark-skinned Puerto Rican” and whose father is “a white Puerto Rican.” She marked “Hispanic” and “black” on her census form.

Ms. Perez-Brown, who grew up in the East New York section of Brooklyn, said that when she attended Yale University there was a division between the Puerto Ricans from the island — “rich and blonde,” she said — and “mainlanders” like her, dark-skinned, urban and more in tune with African-Americans from the same background.

“I wonder,” I continued,

whether Hispanic applicants to the Michigan law school who are neither Mexican-American nor mainland Puerto Rican, and hence receive no preferences, have grounds to file a complaint based on national origin discrimination. If not granting preferences to African Americans or Mexican Americans or Native Americans is discriminatory, as the defenders of such preferences claim, then it certainly seems like discrimination not to offer preferences to other Hispanics because of their country of origin. But then, Italian Americans and Lebanese Americans don’t get preferences, either. Perhaps the system of ethnic doles will collapse not because it is unfair, which it is, but because it is unmanageable, which it also is.

Another problem is that 42% of those identifying themselves as “Hispanic,” “Spanish,” or “Latino” on the 2000 census “also identified themselves as a member of ‘some other race’ besides black or white,” and an additional 6 per cent said they were members of “two or more races.” In other words, these square pegs refused to fit themselves into the round holes neatly provided for them by their interest groups, leading to the saddest line in the whole article:

This resistance to racial categorization worries some advocates for minority groups.

As well it should. Perhaps eventually those who claim to believe in equality (whom I distinguish from those of us who actually do believe in equality) will come to their senses and realize that a thriving multicultural society such as ours doesn’t need “more boxes” on its application forms. It needs none.