Reverse Racial Passing: The Minority Advantage by Aden Mandel

At an almost all-white boarding school, there's a certain clout that comes with being Black. Pop culture today is obsessed with a glorified version of the Black experience and the gangster lifestyle, and rap, the unofficial "coolest" genre, is dominated by people of color. At an almost all-white boarding school, there's an admiration of durags, there's a power that comes with being able to say the "n" word, and there's a certain privilege, in this bubble so separate from the outside world, that is attributed to being Black. 

At an almost all-white boarding school, there is no clout that comes with being white, let alone Jewish. Let's be real here. We jews are known not for our bars or style, but instead our supposed wealth and big noses. According to society, we are the world's Morts from Family Guy or the Shylocks from Shakespear's The Merchant of Venice. Even Lil Dicky, our one, semi-popular representative in the rap genre, makes light of the stark dissimilarities between him and the typical rapper, often referencing his sheltered childhood and other comically uncool traits. 

So if I, a half Black, half Jewish teenager, am trying to survive the dog eat dog world of highschool, dealing with my inescapable awkwardness on top of my weird biracial identity, why not just forget I'm Jewish? I'll talk "hood" all day and pretend I didn't grow up in the safest neighborhood in West Hollywood. I'll get waves and wear my durag to school. And, inevitably, of course, I'll be the coolest person ever. 

This act of hiding a side of one's race is called racial passing, and is a practice that has been ongoing since the beginning of racially diverse society. Throughout history, almost all instances of racial passing have been to assimilate to the ruling race, most often whites. During the Nazi rule of Germany, Jews often changed their last names or used other means to hide their Jewish identity from the Government in order to escape going to a concentration camp. During the Jim Crow era, racial passing was when mixed-race African Americans who had the ability to pass as white did so to change their legal, class, or social standing. It was an extremely rare occurrence for a mixed-race African American to pass as white, and when attempting to do so they lived in constant fear of their true race being discovered. However, as seen above, today's version of racial passing is much different.

There seems to be an emerging trend of almost "reverse" racial passing, where mixed-race people choose to pass as a minority seen by society as more oppressed. This stands in great contrast to the Jim Crow idea of racial passing, where, in many cases of today's racial passing, the Blacker you are, the better.

Aside from the gaining of high school clout, probably the most widespread use of racial passing occurs during the college application process. At a time where the college process is more competitive than ever, where an applicant will do anything for the slightest edge over another, being a minority is, for perhaps the first concrete time in history, an advantage. Schools need the data, they need the pie charts and the graphs and whatnot that shows they have diversity. So when a Black or other historically uneducated minority scores decently on the SAT, to the university, they are gold in human form. But what if they were Black and Asian? Or Black and Indian? Or Black and White? 

Now, while it's unclear whether or not colleges truly value an applicant less if they are mixed with a less oppressed race, it is making students feel like, in order to get that slight advantage, they should just check the Black box. 

Although the acceptance of a seemingly under-qualified minority applicant over a qualified majority applicant would strike many as unfair, it is still a testament to how far we have advanced in terms of racial equality. Where this country would at first scoff in the face of a black man attempting to gain admission to a university, the fact that a university would go out of their way to admit a black man shows that this country’s mindset has at least somewhat changed. Simply the existence of this weird phenomenon "reverse" racial passing, where a man purposefully identifies as a minority, shows that, in some small, isolated bubbles of society, we've progressed. Nevertheless, the college system that seemingly benefits minorities is only in place because of the centuries of discrimination and oppression minorities have faced. Despite this one advantage, from graduation rates to average income, minorities still have much to go on this long, treacherous road towards equality.