I believe that the Post originally published this as a straightforward obituary without realising the deception but then family members revealed the truth and they had to scramble to edit the story.

This would be a non-issue if they had been born to a Mexican dad and a Korean mom thus having a Latino last name, even though their ethnicity would have remained exactly the same. In that case, would you expect them to change their name to their Korean mother’s, or specify on theri college applications that they’re…

I’ve never read any of his writing, so I have no idea whether it was compelling or not. The reference to samurai and ninja makes it sound like a collection of cliches.

All good, no one is telling them how to recognize their own heritage.  I do agree that it takes a spot away from someone who may have been actually disadvantaged, but this is how the highly competitive college admissions game is played.

That’s fine, but they did this because a Hispanic applicant is going to get a bump while an Asian will get dinged. They own this fully, and I don’t blame them at all for gaming the system because they don’t set the rules.

That’s legit, she is both of their child, and has both of their genetic make-up. I’m super-white, but my kid’s last name is hispanic, because they are half-hispanic. I’m not trying to get over, but if they get benefits because of their (legit) heritage I’m not going to deny them. 

that for your moral or even literary concerns to have merit, your experiences need to have the stamp of authenticity too.

We have a friend couple who are of Korean (him) and Mexican (her) descent. Both US-born, both doctors. They changed their children’s last names to hers when it came time for their oldest to start applying for college.

This reminds me in a way of the “touring slum” shit that took off after the publication of Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt. While the memoir is not fake, it did inadvertently touch off a craze for touring the slum it was set in. Blithely ignoring the actual story about the brutality and crushing weight of…

Can people who are not black but minorities fall into this category too? I work w someone who is trying to make BLM all about them and another coworker who is black has to remind them it is not. 

She is not credible. After inventing such a lie about her personal history, why should anything she says about her traumatic history be taken at face value? She is entirely unreliable as part of her grift is setting up grand stories of hardship about herself. Excuse me if I am not inclined to believe her claims of…

I’m not an urban planner (I’m a traffic engineer/ road safety professional, specifically), but about half or more of our research staff are planners. And I would absolutely argue that you should be including BIPOC and immigrant voices in your planning processes, but that’s unfortunately not how it often plays out in…

They are taking up the limited space Black academics can hope to to be considered worthy of occupying. African American studies is the only area of academics where you can reliably find black academics. Even then the top positions are filled with white people (like the white male professor who was brought all the way…

It has to be.

Yeah these are classic examples of having your cake and eating it too - in their professional lives there was a benefit to being known as POC because of their fields, but they could walk around the street without being hassled by police because they obviously don’t look like POC.

I once knew a white girl who, despite her given Scotch-Irish surname, used (and probably still continues to use) her grandmother’s Latin maiden name on all her artist grant applications in order to give herself a perceived leg up as well as to qualify for POC-centered programs for which she’d be otherwise ineligible.…

I wonder if this is more common in the Humanities? I can’t think of any examples of racial mimicry or deceit in my field (Engineering/Planning). We just have problems with plan ol’ white supremacy, as far as I can tell.

Rachels, white female racial appropriators e.g., girl, Adele just pulled some Rachel bullshit with those bantu knots.

As someone that is mixed race and just considers myself Black this pisses me off so much. I hate that people can look at me as I am and tell me what ethnicity I am, but these white people can just put on makeup and bad wig and they are suddenly something else. Because I wasn’t really raised knowing about the other…

“What unites these stories of “ethnic fraud” is their conservative belief that being non-white rewards a person with material benefits, at least if you’re a writer or scholar who believes there is profit to be made off of identity politics. But that belief is largely false—the few opportunities that exist for…