Posted on 07/08/2025 11:56:56 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
The New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani said that his background doesn’t fit neatly into simple categories. Others say they’ve struggled with the same issue.
Natalie Bishop was a little girl in Texas the first time she was asked to specify her race and ethnicity on an application. The daughter of a South Korean-born nurse and a white military veteran, she asked her mother what box to check on a form from school.
“My mom said check the ‘white’ box — it’ll give you more opportunities,” Ms. Bishop, a 38-year-old manufacturing engineer who now lives in Los Angeles, said with a laugh. But as she grew up, omitting the Asian half of herself felt wrong, she said, and even now, queries about her race still feel a little like trick questions.
“When the time comes for me to check a box,” she said, “I still ask: ‘What am I? What am I today?’”
Such questions have become more common as attempts by governments and institutions to capture the nation’s demographics have fallen out of sync with a population whose makeup increasingly defies longstanding labels.
Last week, racial identity and box-checking came up in New York, after Zohran Mamdani — the Democratic nominee for mayor, who is of Indian heritage and was born in Uganda — confirmed to The Times that, as a high school senior, he had identified himself on a Columbia University college application as “Asian” and “Black or African American” and also wrote in “Ugandan” on the form.
Some opponents sought to make political grist out of Mr. Mamdani’s choice on the form, pointing out that he is not Black and questioning whether he had tried to gain an unfair advantage in the university’s admissions process.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Here’s a thought.
Do away with all the boxes completely.
Problem solved.
“Do away with all the boxes completely.”
Agree. My wife is 100% Apache and always checks “other”, except in the Army when they made her pick.
We always get a follow up from the census for refusing to answer and we just make sure never to answer the door during that time.
There is no one in the world that is like you.
When they ask what you "identify" as say, human.
It covers everything and hopefully will shame the prying betty into retreating.
I sometimes work with CRA/FFIEC data. There are LOTS of categories. Not only the obvious ones like Black, White, AIAN (American Indian/Alaskan Native), HIPI (Hawaiian/Pacific Islander), but also categories that include “Equal” (as in Equal Parts of). On top of that, Hispanics are treated as an ethnicity, not a race, so there are various combinations where those are included.
It is a mess.
My mother's father was English and born around 1880 in the Cape Colony, but raised in Pretoria of the Orange Free State. The Boers did not like the English so he grew up hanging around the Colored (not black) kids and learned their dances, which my mother tried to teach me.
He left the Orange Free State when the Boer War started and began a booming business importing horses from Argentina to sell to the British for the Boer War. He had to cut expenses when the war ended so he stopped buying horses and instead stole spavined old British cavalry horses and sold them to the Germans in their then South-West Africa colony.
Those of course broke down in the Kalahari Desert and the poor Germans had to walk out. At that point my maternal grandpa had the Germans after him because he lied about the quality of the horses he sold them, the British were after him because he stole their horses, and the Boers were after him because they disapproved of horse-thieves on principal.
So he moved to America for his health.
We each of us are our own, unique individual.
This obsession about fitting everyone into predefined categories is one we should refuse to play.
“A place for everyone and everyone in his place” is a collectivist ideal I’ll have nothing to do with.
How Do You Self-Identify?
I don’t.
There is no checkbox anywhere for “His Royal Highness”.
I plan to stomp my fight and protest until they fix this!
Lol.
I agree. An archaic practice that has long outlived any legitimate purpose. Especially for government.
Medical records perhaps as genetic/racial background can be important for detection, prevention and timely treatment of some diseases and inheritable genetic problems.
Race: White
Sex: Male
Perversion: None
Brainwashing: None
Never mind race or nationality. He’s a believing Muslim, and his religion says you must be killed. The only variable is maybe he’s not in a big hurry about it.
Hispanic is another one. Does it mean someone from a nation that speaks Spanish, or someone who is a descendant of someone from a Spanish-speaking nation. (In that case, as a descendant of an immigrant from Spain, I may be considered Hispanic.) Would an immigrant from Brazil be considered Hispanic, even though they speak Portuguese?
And don't get me started on Native American. As a descendant of one with more fractional Indian blood than Senator Warren, I could claim that too.
She lies. It's been well known much longer than 38 years that checking any box other than "white" gave you more opportunities and free stuff - paid for by white people.
For fifty years the only people it was legal to discriminate against were straight, white males, and discrimination against them was required by law.
Please attach an essay to describe your identity.
“You stole my wife, you horse thief!”
Written in cursive ...
LOL. The NYT has gone into full defense mode for the new liberal darling, Comrade Mamdani. You have to understand that self-identification is "complicated." So its really not bad that he called himself black on applications.
For a race question, there should be a box that says, “mutt”. I bet it would be one of the most checked boxes for that question.
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