I see via Todd Zywicki at the Volokh Conspiracy that a new study has been released by the Campus Diversity Initiative at the James Irvine Foundation. It addresses the rapid increase in students self reporting as "race/ethnicity unknown" (which I assume also includes "declines-to-state" and "other"). It indicates that colleges may be over-estimating their minority population from the dramatic increase in this self-reporting. The new study's "findings suggest that a sizeable portion of students in this category are white, in addition to multiracial students who may have selected white as one of their categories." The study continues to note that this is perhaps unsurprising, given the "impression among white and AAPI [Asian-American/Pacific Islander] students that their race/ethnicity would work against them in the admissions process." I must admit that I don't quite know how to respond. I find its data completely plausible, and "the impression" to which the study refers is not only often explicitly correct within Ivy League admissions (as far as AAPI and Jewish students are concerned), but also one which I've personally felt. And yet, the study's suggestion that my decision to report my race as "Other" was motivated out of self-interest (or some desire to hide my possible selection of "white") strikes me as incorrect, if not borderline offensive.

I suppose I'll out myself on Crescat. I'm ethnically half-Asian-American (Japanese) and half-white (New York Jews of Eastern European descent). Yes. I am the most over-represented minority group in our challenged meritocracy. Call me a half-Asian Jew, Jewpanese, Jewpanda (as my younger brother prefers), or the invariably funny slurs that concatenate (if you think of a new one, email me, but trust me, the good ones are taken). But I don't identify as white at all. Nor do I identify as wholly Asian. In fact, I always recoiled with a bit of horror when asked in high-school to pick a bubble to shade in with the ubiquitous #2 pencil. This was not out of some mis-apprehension that I would suffer an admissions penalty (I was lucky enough to be able to avoid the soft discrimination of others' hard choices), nor was it out of some social embarassment or rejection of either ethnicity. Of the twenty-two kids in my geek immersion class in high-school, fifteen were Jewish and/or Asian.

Rather, it was an intense dislike of the reduction that choosing a fixed ethnic identity required. For one thing, it wasn't fair to describe myself as AAPI. To a certain extent, claiming that exclusive identity would dishonor my mother's parents, who were interned during WWII (contrast this with a Judaism both actively practiced and outwardly politically enforced). More locally, I was exempt from many of the commonplace stereotypes made about Asian students at my high-pressure public school. Sure - I played piano (poorly), but while I was good at math or science, the genetic ascription of my success from some teachers (still annoying) was softened by the relative rarity of my genetics. I was not a type, or a breed, but rather a mutt. One of the small joys of growing up mixed race in America.

This also granted a certain social fluidity, both in high-school and at Harvard. I wasn't obligated to represent any ethnic group, nor subject to outgroup stereotyping. Call it a sort of self-aware Passing, but the lack of identification as any specific non-white identity, along with the trump card of still "not being white," has allowed me a freedom to comment on race and from race which is largely unavailable in contemporary American society.

It's not like the schools that I applied to didn't know my ethnicity. I informed them all, even as I marked down "decline-to-state," but I did find it more than a little bit absurd that I would be asked to choose. This is a somewhat hasty response, and I expect I'll have more to say when I've fully read the study, but I did want to make clear that the idea that my decision to self-report my race as "other" was a strong preference, not a soft omission.

If they have been importunate (as ghosts will be), they have also been (as ghosts must be) patient. [Leithauser]

Some Crescateers will notice a recurrent theme. It is true: we are emotional plagiarists.