Yahoo Headline

Multiracial people become fastest-growing US group

This ties into some experiences I had with my daughter. When registering for kindergarten in the United States, I made sure I checked the Asian ethnicity. From the story it says you can now check more than one box, but I think I would have chosen only the Asian option, because I think the US will end up with entitlement quotas based on "how ethnic you are", much as in bad old days of quadroons and octoroons, and such. See this quote from the story:

Liebler noted a potential dilemma where a white student who is one-eighth Cherokee applies to college and seeks an admissions preference based on race and disadvantaged status. Should the college give the multiracial student the boost, if one-eighth of his family suffered a past racial harm but seven-eighths of his family were the perpetrators?

Notice the complete bullshit assumption that the 7/8's white must be guilty of causing racial harm. What if they were Shakers or abolitionists or Russian peasants who only moved to America in 1900?

Or the most torturous impossibility, Russian peasants who had been enslaved by the Turks/Tartars/Mongolians who share the same Asiatic genes as the Cherokees, and in fact, had harmed the Russian peasants before the white man ever made it to the New World...

I guess you'd have to prove that with documentation.

How about the whole Hispanic ethnicity, which essentially is some mix of white and American Indian. Should they be forced to break out the fractions, too? "Hmmmm, according to the spectrograph, looks like you're 70% conquistador and only 30% Indig." Or could they figure out by your genes that you were mainly Aztec, who had conquered many other local peoples, and thus would be ineligibile since getting smacked down by the Spanish was really just Karma?

Okay, back to reality now. In the Yahoo story's hypotherical case, the student would be an octoroon of ethnic goodness and probably would lose out to a full Asian (though that may change, too.) 

Maybe I should have claimed Pacific-Islander, after all Taiwan is an island in the Pacific.

Note: I am not sure if am for or against affirmative action. I just think its gets silly when we get down to fractions of ethnicities. 

Final crazy thought: So, the kid who is 1/8 Noble Savage and 7/8 White Oppressor....what if he exists today only because some scumbag drunken Irish soldier raped a peaceful basket-weaving Cherokee woman several generations back? I mean, sure, objectively that is a horrible thing, but subjectivley, for that person, they have to be happy it happened...otherwise they wouldn't exist.

p.s. 1/8 Cherokee means someone made it with a Cherokee like 80-100 years ago, which would be 1909-1929, so in this instance we are not even dealing with actual perpetrators of the Trail of Tears.