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I applied to university as African American/Black because I'm 1/4 Egyptian. I am very white. Some people may guess I'm Jewish (I'm not) but no one guesses Afric
by LargeTomato 3y ago
I applied to university as African American/Black because I'm 1/4 Egyptian. I am very white. Some people may guess I'm Jewish (I'm not) but no one guesses African American.
I got into a nice school and I was enrolled in the "minority engineering excellence program". The program was like 25% white kids with "1/16 native American" or "1/8 Spanish". We got free tutoring and we all took an exclusive class just for the program and 100% of us got an A. It was definitely unfair.
Half of the minority engineers just left the program. They were clearly capable of passing engineering school and the minority program was culty and a bit weird. The kids who stayed were dragged through the system with copious free tutoring and paid staff helping them stay on top of their course work. These kids dropped out at Juniors when they would have probably otherwise dropped out as Freshman.
- az226 3y agoIn America middle eastern counts as white, not black. But nobody is enforcing these things and now they won’t matter because racially discriminating on admissions is illegal.
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoAs today's ruling "proves" (both concurring and dissenting opinions brought this up): these racial background questions are "self-identified" / self-selected.
- freeAgent 3y agoEgypt is in Africa, though. It’s literally African.
- az226 3y agoElon Musk is African American.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoAnd he would qualify for reparations under a number of proposals in California. This highlights the confusion between treating Africans as a uniform group suffering discrimination and treating people as individuals who may have drastically different backgrounds
- yieldcrv 3y agothe California program is for US slave descendants, so, no, he wouldn’t qualify. only a portion of like 1 and a half generations of slave descendants identify as African American because there are too many other kinds of “black people in America” for “African American” to have made sense for very long or be a useful term
- astura 3y agoReminds me of a really funny standup bit I heard a few decades ago about how Dave Matthews is the whitest man on earth but he's African.
- 13of40 3y agoThe US government's definition of "white" basically says anyone descended from people in the middle east, europe, or northern africa is white.
- selimthegrim 3y agoThey just broke it out on the census (protip: that was a relic from the time Middle Eastern immigration was mostly Christian)