4 ms·

What stops any random person from self-identifying as Black in order to claim this?

• ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  This is covered in the article: > To qualify for the payments, residents must be 18 at the time the committee’s proposal is enacted, and have identified as Black or African American on public documents for at least 10 years.
  • Overtonwindow 4y ago
    So it's possible to identify as black even if one is not actually black?
    • ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      Yes, lots of people have grown up unaware of their true parentage for various reasons and there's no commonly accepted definition of 'actually black' anyway, and the commonly accepted definitions vary by country, amongst other things, since they're mostly social categories. In the US there used to be the 'one-drop' rule so 'passing' as white was a thing with genuine legal consequences, no matter how slight the genetics support for your categorization as something else, nowadays people lean towards self-identification but can still disagree on corner cases.
• sp332 4y ago
  The category of Black people was invented by bigots for the purpose of discrimination. Sometimes they invented rules to codify the discrimination, but they were never founded on any rational difference between people. Trying to undo the harm of bigotry along similar lines will be similarly arbitrary. Not saying we shouldn't try, but don't expect an airtight logical specification.
  • logicalmonster 4y ago
    > don't expect an airtight logical specification Don't worry, I'm not.
  • ashwagary 4y ago
    Proving your lineage back to the 1865 census and still identifying as black on current government documents means you were exposed to massive amounts of labor theft and a lot of the race based discrimination that took place in between then and now. Doesn't seem like an easy hurdle to jump over for non-FBA (Foundational Black Americans) people trying to cheat the system.