Playing the race card… for cash at We’ve moved to www.racialicious.com

Playing the race card… for cash

CVK
dna tests race (Thanks to Takara for this!) OMG this article is pissing me off so much. We’ve talked a lot in the past on MMW and Addicted to Race about these fancy new DNA tests that supposedly reveal your racial heritage. Today, The New York Times reveals the kind of havoc these tests are wreaking.

Basically, people are taking these DNA tests to figure out how they can pimp their supposed ancestry to lay claim to financial aid, inheritance rights, citizenship–basically, they want to trade in their race for CASH.

I haven’t really gathered my thoughts on this yet so I apologize if this is more of a rant than a considered commentary. All I know right now is that this makes me really, really mad. There’s something completely unethical about all the cases discussed in the article. These “privileges” (affirmative action, casinos) are not really privileges. They are programs created to right historic wrongs. You know, stuff like the genocide of an entire people or the enslavement of an entire people as property and free labor to build generations of wealth.

That said, I am equally disgusted by the woman who found that she has 10% British Isles ancestry, and now wants her Scottish cousin to give her a castle since their family profited from her Jamaica slave ancestors. She claims that she’s mostly being “playful,” but I find it hard to believe that “playfulness” is behind what undoubtedly has been months and months if not years of research to locate these relatives.

I guess blatant greed always grosses me out. But when you couple it with race, the way these people are doing, I really just can’t deal. And honestly, (at the risk of sounding too Chinese) do you really think their ancestors would approve of this kind of wheeling and dealing? I almost feel like it’s an insult to the lives and legacies of their ancestors.

Trackbacks & Pings

TheThink on 13 Apr 2006 at 6:19 pm

[…] As I have gotten older, I’ve found myself often wondering where I come from (I mean where I really come from) and if my heritage is similar to anybody else’s. For some reason, I find DNA tests a bit troublesome, for a number of reasons, not least of which is idiots hijacking affirmative action (via MMW). But at least I’ve got MyHeritage.com now, a ridiculous (yet admittedly entertaining) website that takes a photo and uses “face recognition” to produce other faces that are similar. Because I have only tested out the service with the currently existing database of celebrity photos, I find it a tad worthless all in all, but apparently there are benefits to MyHeritage: MyHeritage.com has sophisticated algorithms that facilitate the use of face recognition for genealogy: it recognizes faces in different stages of peoples’ lives and uses additional photo meta-data such as dates and places to improve the accuracy of face recognition. — MyHeritage […]
Mixed Media Watch - tracking media representations of mixed people on 16 Apr 2006 at 12:34 pm

[…] This author clearly doesn’t get it. Claiming a mixed identity isn’t about trying to get something out of it. It’s about identifying completely — recognizing all that you are. Although, perhaps the DNA opportunists are ruining it for the rest of us. […]
TheThink on 18 May 2006 at 2:15 am

[…] I can see it now; White families, probably with the last name Gratz, start naming their children Acirema or Bocaj or Elbib to get a jump on the “cultural diversity” wagon that universities love so much, and rightly so. Without realizing it, universities in turn fill up their non-White/Unknown quotas with a bunch of White people and end up reversing the benefits that have come out of affirmative action for people whose ancestors were, you know, dehumanized via slavery and international conflict and what not. Additionally, White people, along with their DNA tests, ‘prove’ that they, Bocaj and Elbib, do in fact have some sort of darkness in their genes so that their ’struggle’ becomes validated. Ultimately, minority enrollment falls, and Bill Cosby blames it all on Black men. […]

Comments

K-Pow wrote:

I’m really not surprised by this. Some people don’t even need a DNA test to pimp their new found ethic background. In college there was a girl in my class who identified herself an East Indian. Her name was East Indain, her culture, her friends. However when it came time for her to apply for medical school she suddenly revealed to me that her mother is Columbian. She told me she planned to check off the Hispanic box on her med school applications in the hopes of getting some scholarships. It really pissed me off b/c she never identified as or with hispanics before. Granted her mother is Columbian but I knew her for three years before she revealed this, everyone was a bit shocked by her revelation. So for her to suddenly claim an hispanic identity solely for the purpose of getting financial aid was pretty upsetting to me and a lot of other people. We lost contact after graduation so I don’t know if she was successful in her plans. I hope she wasn’t.

Posted 12 Apr 2006 at 11:07 am ¶
eric wrote:

I can co-sign with another story.

Back when Foxwoods was in talks of getting built out in CT, there were many african-americans I know who had very distant native-american ancestry who were scrambling around trying to figure out which tribe they were in hopes of cashing in

Posted 12 Apr 2006 at 11:43 am ¶
Ben wrote:

This sheds much-needed light on the fact that ancestry alone does not determine race, and that race is really just a deep-rooted and self-perpetuating social construct.

Hopefully people will actually think about this long enough to figure it out, because the article never quite gets there.

Posted 12 Apr 2006 at 12:50 pm ¶
gatamala wrote:

The dad says “”Naturally when you’re applying to college you’re looking at how your genetic status might help you,” said Mr. Moldawer, ”

These admissions criteria are not about genetics. They are about the social constructs we call race.

The ignorant misunderstanding of PRIVILEGE (i.e., being on the easy end of overt and institutionalized racial discrimination) is why this fool is attempting to cynically manipulate the admissions game.

As an AfAm/Black (which means I’m a mixture) I embrace all ethnicities and races of which I am comprised. However, my experience, my mentality, the way in which I interact w/ American society (& it with me) is as a member of the Black race. It’s more than DNA.

Frankly, I believe that admissions policies w/re to race must be clarified. How? I think that’s another discussion.

That said, K-Pow, I understand your visceral reaction to that kind of opportunism. I loathe people who want the benefits, but not the burdens. There are many reasons why someone defines his/herself the way that he/she does - this chick is truly a fairweather minority - pathetic

Posted 12 Apr 2006 at 1:29 pm ¶
Lyonside wrote:

“Freedmen fighting for their Native American heritage are in the right.”

Yes, they are. But only if they care about it BEFORE a certain tribe gets casino rights.

I have a friend whom most people would consider AA only - she and her father are both African-American and Native. Both she and her dad are registered active members of a tribe based in New Jersey, attend powwows, have voting rights, etc. No monetary benefits, and it means the world to her.

Posted 12 Apr 2006 at 3:37 pm ¶
Lyonside wrote:

ETA: Meaning based on her phenotype.

Posted 12 Apr 2006 at 3:42 pm ¶
Marsha wrote:

I have another story to share about opportunistic white people who play the minority card when it is convenient for them. When I was in law school, there was this woman in my class who checked the box as Native American and got a Native American scholarship from it. The woman claimed she had a Cherokee grandmother, but what was really pathetic is that the woman was white, never associated with any tribe or their culture, wasn’t registered, etc. but she puts herself down as Native American to get her scholarship.

My friend and classmate in law school who is full blooded Native American and just about as “Native” as they come tried to talk to the admissions office about this type of convenient minority status and said they should ask for some type of proof of someone’s Native American Heritage like a registeration number or letters from their tribe. But, the school just wasn’t having it and claimed someone could sue them if they made them prove their Native American ancestory. However, what was really weird was that they put right on the application that you swear that the information is not misleading or false. Now, if you put info down on your application, but can’t really prove it, isn’t that misleading and false?

Personally, I think schools like it when people misrepresent themselves on their applications because then the school can brag that they have X number of these minority students. Our law school was so bad that they were grouping the African students who were studying for their masters degree in law in with the African American students.

Posted 13 Apr 2006 at 3:59 pm ¶
Tetsuo wrote:

So at what percentage should one qualify for Affirmative Action? Maybe to make things truly fair, the amount of Affirmative Action you get should be based on the percentage of your genetic makeup. So if you are 50% black, then you’d get 50% of the Affirmative Action benefits.

Posted 13 Apr 2006 at 5:34 pm ¶
Ben F. wrote:

Uhh…okay “TheThink” was that a post or a shameless ad?

Posted 13 Apr 2006 at 6:26 pm ¶
site admin wrote:

Just to clarify, Ben F. That post from TheThink is a ping. It’s automatically generated because he linked to us from his blog.

Posted 13 Apr 2006 at 7:25 pm ¶
Tetsuo wrote:

I take it playing the race card for cash is bad. But when is it a good time to play the race card? When pulled over for speeding?

Posted 13 Apr 2006 at 8:18 pm ¶
Damie_Troy wrote:

I see the manipulative and unfair aspect of what readers are complaining about, but I also see a positive aspect.

Since I hate the ideology of “race”. I’m all for undermining and damaging it.

Posted 14 Apr 2006 at 12:56 am ¶
Ben F. wrote:

to site admin and “The Think”:

My bad. Thanks for the clarification.

Posted 22 Apr 2006 at 4:38 pm ¶
Dave wrote:

I see nothing wrong with it, at least not any more wrong than the way affirmative action currently operates.
Currently, affirmative action is based on self-identification. Literally anyone can choose to identify as “latino” or “black” and get affirmative action benefits. Doing it with a DNA test is superfluous.

And I see absolutely nothing wrong with the multiracial woman from the Caribbean lobbying for a Scottish castle of her own. I think that’s awesome!

Posted 24 Apr 2006 at 7:02 am ¶
Anonymous wrote:

Why is this young man refered to as white, if his ancestry is mixed? Just because he can “pass” as white doesn’t mean he is not mixed. Just because you “act white” doesn’t mean you are white. To me the problem is not DNA testing. Don’t blame science. This speaks to the problems of how we define race (as social construct, culture, or genes) our need to place people in narrow racial categories (whatever they mean) and affermative action policies.

Posted 13 Jun 2006 at 1:32 pm ¶
Samatha wrote:

Damie_Troy, I hear you. I hate the idealogy of race too. But how we go about trying to eliminate it plays a significant role in wether we’re able to evenually eliminate it or ultimately make it worst. I like to see it complete elimnated but pretending to be something you’re not is definately not the way to do it.

Posted 24 Aug 2006 at 1:06 pm ¶