I have a similar example. A guy in our office with the last name of Liftshietz who is Jewish to the hilt, happens to have been born and raised in South America, (Spanish is his first language) but the HR people count him as Hispanic. He laughs about it.
It's nuts.
BTW, since they started asking the idiotic ethnic questions I have always checked Native American. Hell, I was born here, so I figure I'm a native.
Maybe someday, I can get a casino. ;~))
I know someone who got a minority scholarship to a state university because her last name ended in -ez though she couldn’t speak a word of Spanish and you wouldn’t have been able to pick her out of a line-up as the sole Latina. In the lab I worked as a post-doc there was a grad student who was there on a minority scholarship. His last named ended with an -o. I wasn’t sure, though, whether it (the minority scholarship)was because someone in his ancestry was Hispanic/Latin or because he was gay. In that same lab, the PI (principal investigator) had an African post-doc coming in from England classed as a minority so he could get minority funding (meaning that he would have to spend less for the guy out of his own funds). It was all a total freaking scam.