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.

But it was not until I applied to college in the early 1990s that I
encountered people like Claudine Gay and truly saw behind the curtain of
identity politics. That was when, with grades and SATs that were were
borderline acceptable for top-tier colleges, my high-school counselor
along with most university officials urged me to boost my chances of being
admitted by checking the "black" box on applications. And when they saw my
reluctance, they would routinely dismiss my misgiving with the same line:
"Oh, its nothing, just check the box and you'll get the upper hand."

They weren't wrong: I was once offered a $25,000 Martin Luther King
scholarship, a lot of money in 1993. Checking the black box was tempting,
to say the least.

But it was a sham. At that time, the percentage of all blacks on college
campuses who were from lower economic backgrounds had fallen to the single
digits. These students had been replaced by middle- to upper-class blacks,
Africans, Caribbeans, and multiracials like me.

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.

And we wonder why there are permanent black underclasses in nearly every
major city today?

But for me, on a personal level, this was not the worse part of these
life-altering encounters. I knew that if I checked the black box,
administrators and corporate executives would feel like they owned me.
They had opened the doors to their esteemed institutions and, in return, I
would be expected to show fealty to their racial politics and ideologies.

Checking the "black" box on college applications would have forced me to
enter what I call the Minority State of Mind, divorcing myself from my
larger American identity to embrace a far narrower identity based on the
politics of race. In my case, that meant embracing a racialized and
victimized mindset in which everything is defined by slavery, segregation,
disparities, and racism.

People have mocked me, saying that I give far too much importance to the
black box, but they have no idea what awaits a black student who puts that
checkmark next to "black." If I had indicated "black" on my college
applications, it would have opened the door to black scholarships, black-
only orientations, black fraternities, black housing, black-oriented
majors, black student associations, black this and that. How could I have
gone through these experiences without becoming beholden to the politics
of blackness?

Even at that young age, I knew that to check that black box was to move
off the merit track and onto the race track, where people like Claudine
Gay excel. She is perhaps the most successful black to walk this path, but
she is not a free individual.

Throughout her career, Gay has placed emphasis on her skin color and the
politics of the black identity, which we are now learning involved a brew
of incompetence, racial essentialism, and plagiarism, all emerging now.

As bad as this all is, the worse thing that the Claudine Gays of America
did was lead so many people of their race down this dead-end path of
racial essentialism.

Today, the focus has been on how Gay hurt Asians and Jews, but it can
never be forgotten that people like her hurt blacks far more and for such
a sustained period of time, affecting multiple generations.

My refusal to check the race box meant that no one could hold a claim over
me. I'm a free individual, and the only thing I owe is gratitude to the
many people who helped me as I pursued the path of merit.

But if one really wants to know why I never checked the "black" box, the
true answer lies in my black grandfather's life. Born to formerly enslaved
parents on a dirt floor in Camp Nelson, Kentucky, his parents died when he
was just a teen. On his own, he traveled to Detroit and then to Chicago,
where he worked odd jobs to fuel his playboy lifestyle. Then one day, he
realized his current life would lead to no good. He straightened up and
became a founding member of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) where he
met my grandmother. He got a job as a truck driver, became a family man,
and educated himself by reading every book he could find. In doing so, he
lifted his family from poverty to a solid lower-middle class life despite
living under segregation.

Why then would I betray this admirable progress for the empty promise of
skin color?

https://www.newsweek.com/claudine-gay-why-i-never-checked-black-box-
opinion-1851411