Kenneth Rapoza

BOSTON, Dec 18 2000 (IPS) — Ana Vaz is not Latino. But she said she was in order to get a scholarship to help her pay for a 16,455 dollar a year Boston College education.

Vaz is a first generation American. Her parents are from Portugal.

And she is not the only student who has claimed or will embrace a minority identity in order to get help to pay for a college education. There will be many such claims over the next two months, as thousands of US students start applying to colleges and for the scholarships that will help them pay for it.

Some students will stretch the truth. Others will challenge the definition of ethnicity altogether.

At Montclair High School in New Jersey, a white student from South Africa is making certain she defines herself as African-American on college entrance applications and scholarships created for black minorities, a counsellor at the school said.

Michael Rey, a senior at the school is on the National Honour Society, a club for some of the country’s brightest students. His mother, a local stage actress, is from Ireland; his father, a professor at New York University Medical School, is from Cuba.

“I’m Cuban,” he said. “We don’t really associate with Ireland.”

Rey says he considers himself a minority and told colleges and scholarships to which he applied that he was a Latino.

“I know it gives me an advantage to say I’m Cuban,” said Rey. “I wonder if I should write down that I am. I’ve had a lot of opportunities in life. But at the same time, saying that I am Cuban is not a lie.”

Marianna Brown received 3,000 dollars a year from the privately- owned Sachs Foundation of Colorado for her four years at Antioch College in Ohio for being African-American.

When asked if she considered herself African-American, she said. “Not at all. I don’t identify myself as black. But I know that people in the US would consider me mixed because according to the US if you have one drop of black blood in you, you’re black.”

After slavery, the US legal juggernaut kept segregation alive by saying that a person was not white if they had “one drop of black blood”.

Brown was born in Brazil. By Brazilian standards she would be considered a ‘morena’, a polite term for lighter skinned ‘mulattas’. Her father is white.

In the United States, college applications require students to check off a series of boxes that identify their race and ethnicity. Moreover, college scholarships for undergraduate students tend to favour minority students in a benign effort to counter discrimination.

But, say student counsellors, the students taking advantage of their skin colour are not the ones for whom such programmes were intended. Educated bi-racial and multi-ethnic students are the ones taking advantage of affirmative action policies.

“These college policies are not getting kids out of the barrios,” said Scott White, a college counsellor at Montclair High School. “Most of these kids identify themselves as white Americans.”

“My mom is Puerto Rican, my dad is non-Hispanic, but I put Puerto Rican when identifying myself on college applications,” said Natalie Serock, a student at Montclair.

“The system is terribly flawed,” said Ward Connelly, chairman of the American

Civil Rights Institute, a public policy research group in California. “If you’re Anglo and you are married to a Garcia you automatically become a Latino.”

“The middle and upper classes, people like me, are exploiting the misfortune of the underclass … to get the benefits for … for themselves. The people these programmes were intended to serve aren’t going to step onto campuses this way. They need programmes based on income, based on how much education their parents have,” Connelly said.

Critics blame colleges for students’ obsession with claiming minority status.

“If colleges said they wanted kids with strong forearms you’d see kids walking down the corridors with weights in their hands,” said White.

“They say they want diversity. They are happy to get a few kids on campus with Spanish sounding surnames, especially the ones who can pay full price for the school.”

“In some situations there’s an advantage to favouring their minority side,” said Eugene Volokh, law professor University of California at Los Angeles. “Most private schools have race preferences. And ethnicity can make a huge difference in getting scholarships.

“If students are told they can benefit from claiming minority status then they’re entitled to it, though it might not be the most honourable thing to do.”

Volokh was instrumental in getting California to pass a law that eliminated race-based affirmative action policies in California public schools.

Frank Sousa, professor of Portuguese Studies at the University of Massachusetts, said this type of affirmative action hurts his Portuguese students.

In South Massachusetts, Portuguese make up 45 percent of the population, while only 10 to 12 percent of University of Massachusetts students in the region are ethnic Portuguese, according to the Centre for Portuguese Studies at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth.

“When I was in graduate school in California I was considered a Latino.” Sousa said people thought he was Mexican. “I could have played the race card. I qualified for scholarships for Latinos. I wouldn’t disagree if Portuguese kids took advantage of affirmative action policies.”

“Portuguese can be considered Hispanic,” said Connelly. “Because the definition is all in the eye of the beholder. Different agencies will have different criteria.”

According to the Census Bureau in Boston, race is self-identified. Census 2000 allowed US residents and citizens to choose from 63 possible combinations of six basic racial categories, including six categories for those who report only one race and 57 categories for those who report two or more races.

Whether or not the US population ceases to define itself in black, brown and white will be revealed in March. But if the Latino population increases, “it might not be because there are more Latinos being born or moving to the US. It could be that people are just defining themselves that way,” the Boston Census Bureau said.

In the University of California system this year, 4,000 students refused to check of boxes marking their race, up from 1,400 a few years ago, according to the American Civil Rights Institute.

The US Department of Education does not consider race or ethnicity in any of its applications for Federal student loans and grants. Pressures to diversify campuses come from local legislative bodies, corporate backed scholarships, and minority advocacy groups like the NAACP.

Claire Friedlander, a college counsellor, said parents push the ethnic issue hardest because they think it will help their children get accepted to colleges and win scholarship money.

But it does not always work. One multi-ethnic US family with the surname Gonzalez insisted their daughter use it to get into prestigious colleges like Princeton. “She was extremely uncomfortable with the idea,” Friedlander said.

She did it. But she did not get accepted to the top schools she applied to.

“One of my students was a quarter Latino and I told him he qualified for Latino scholarships. He was a National Hispanic Scholar,” Friedlander said. “But he rejected the money because he didn’t want to play one ethnicity off the other.”

Marianna Brown said she felt sorry for low and middle income white students, those who classify themselves as Caucasian, or simply ‘white’. For them, “there’re no options for undergraduate scholarships”, she said.

But scholarships for minorities appear plentiful. USA Group Loan Services, a large, national firm that manages student loan payments, recently created a scholarship for Latino students. It is based on income. The award is 2,000 dollars. Microsoft’s Bill Gates created the Gates Millennium Scholarship, a 1-billion-dollar scholarship fund for minorities.

So what’s a middle-class white American to do about 16,000 dollar a year colleges? Two friends in New Jersey think they have found the answer. Chris Barrett and Luke McCabe are soliciting corporations to sponsor their college education through their website www.chrisandluke.com.

“Wherever we go, your logo goes,” Barrett and McCabe said. They will even host Drink Pepsi parties, or wear website addresses on a T-Shirt, they said.