Eli Steele
Newsweek, Dec. 11, 2023
“By checking the “black” box, I was being asked to mask the actual problems and inequities that undermine the efforts of lower-class blacks—all so university administrations could claim the pretense of racial redemption through higher enrollment numbers.”
I have known people like Claudine Gay my entire life and they are the reason why I never checked the black box on college and employment applications. If I had, I would not be a free individual today.
As a child, I was fascinated by the story of my paternal grandparents’s interracial marriage in 1944 in segregated Chicago. The 1967 interracial marriage of my black father to the daughter of Holocaust survivors in the same city wasn’t much easier; at the time, America burned with race riots. My grandparents and parents had every reason not to marry across the color line. But they chose love over their racial order.
I believed then and now that they were better Americans than the white supremacists opposing their marriages, and, from a young age, I’ve seen it as my birthright to defend the principles of freedom, equality, love, and a greater humanity beyond racial orders of any kind.
But I would be faced with another kind of racial order than my parents and grandparents. When I hit my teens, I encountered tremendous pressure to conform to a single race on school applications and in personal encounters. And with this pressure, it felt like my identity, which I thought was defined by the choices I made and the responsibilities I accepted, had become a currency in someone else’s political power game.
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