ColSpanker said:
I keep waiting for the transracial students. THAT will be the game changer.
There are plenty already.
Many people have no clear idea what the difference between culture/nationality/race/religion is. So some people with mixed backgrounds have the advantage of being able to shift their "identity" however/whenever they want. Usually no one gets questioned on this unless it's something as silly as an Irish-German person saying they are "black".
I had an African American friend try to convince an Arab Egyptian friend that, by dint of Egypt being in Africa, that he should identify as African American/black and not hang out with more black people and fewer white people. My Egyptian friend didn't buy it, but if he did and wanted to be called "black" or "African American" no one would really think twice about it.
Every once in a while you hear a joke about white South African immigrants being called "African American". It sounds funny because obviously everyone just means "black" when they say "African American" but of course, a white South African is just as African as a white Argentinian is Latino.
I had a German-Jewish friend whose family moved from Germany back in the day to Argentina and then to the U.S. a few years later. No one in his family was a native Spanish-speaker. He claimed to be "Hispanic" on his college application. We gave him shit for that, because his family never really stayed there to develop roots there, it was just a stopover. But if his family had stayed there for a few generations no one would have a problem calling him Hispanic and letting him into college easier. As it is we felt like he "cheated" the system, but no one in the school would dare call him out and question his admission.
So it seems like the rules are already in place to accept trans-racial students.
I guess the issue would be if people started just filling out the wrong race to get easier access to good colleges en masse. However I believe it's illegal for colleges to require a photo or anything like that, so there seems to be little they could do to stop this. The "Hispanic" label is particularly rife for abuse since people of any racial background can theoretically be "Hispanic". Peru has a big Japanese population, but if white, indigenous and black Peruvians are Hispanic, then so must be Japanese Peruvians. And the Chinese are everywhere now, so a kid born to a Chinese person in Mexico may just as easily claim to be Hispanic as my German-Jewish friend did.