Saturday, September 12, 2020

One drop rule

Grad student apologized and resigned as TA "after falsely claiming to be a person of color."
“I have let guesses about my ancestry become answers I wanted but couldn’t prove,” Vitolo-Haddad wrote in an apology posted Sunday on the blogging platform Medium. “I have let people make assumptions when I should have corrected them.”

In a second apology posted Tuesday, Vitolo-Haddad wrote that when asked if they identify as Black on three separate occasions, they did not say no.

She says she really identifies as Southern Italian/Sicilian. But "I repeated things I heard growing up from my family that I now know to be lies. I am so sorry. I take full responsibility for spreading these lies and am deeply sorry."

Clearly being black in the USA is such a burden that people have been falling over themselves to be labeled black so that they can accrue the social or job opportunities that g o with that. (Jessica Krug...Rachel Dolezal...a whole town

The Teaching Assistant's Association has announce that it will "allow people to provide more feedback about candidates, both in public forums and through anonymous mechanisms." So if someone claims to be black or hispanic (or white), some anonymous poison-pen letter can derail their position (she was co-president). This sounds familiar--a rumor that X had a black ancestor, however remote, might ruin a white man's chances a century ago.

You might argue that turn-about's fair play, or that the idea was stupid then and it is stupid now.

But about those "benefits" from being considered black (or hispanic, or whatever): I notice that the three people who got caught are all women. Granted, the statistics are low, so add in the Guardian story about the town in Ohio, and notice that the only men cited currently "identify as white."

Maybe there are social benefits to being a young black woman that aren't available to a young black man. Or maybe women are more willing to reshape their identities. (Fair or not, women have had to adjust more than men--moving to her husband's tribe; winding up war captive; whatever.) Or perhaps those benefits are only present in certain environments (she is in "Journalism and Mass Communication"). Or maybe it's just poor statistics.

1 comment:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I have wondered as well whether my impression that this is more often females was accidental or real. All your guesses are reasonable possibilities, but I think we are unlikely to have enough data to have confidence in our explanations. There are also likely to be confounding factors if this continues, though I don't know which way those will point. If young women notice that other women try this, will they think it is more possible and be more likely to try it or will they notice the social embarrassment and be put off?