In other news, your response to Huntster is correct. If Huntster needs people to tell s/he what s/he is, then it's inane.
ARRGH I don't believe I'm posting to this thread again.
LA, you know I respect you. And saying that you have more experience with race relations than I do couldn't possibly be overstated.
But in reality, it
is other people who decide what ethnicity you are.
First of all, trivially, your parents decide what ethnicity you are by conceiving you in the first place.
Second, in terms of things like Affirmative Action, society determines what ethnicity you are. Hypothetical to show my point: You've seen me. I'm as Irish as the driven snow. Say I wanted to go back to school. I want to get a scholarship or something so wherever I was asked what race I was I put "African-American". Would I get any scholarship? Of course not. The people who determine such things would take one look at me... and either bust out laughing, or get outraged that I would even
dare to consider checking the African-American box.
In a perfect world we would not need Affirmative Action.
We don't live in such a world.
Ethnicity gets in the way of things when it should not.
People who want to be fair sometimes have no other choice but to invent an imperfection to cancel out another imperfection.
Yes, it's suboptimal...
but sometimes the best you can come to a right
really is two wrongs.