How Many White Men Qualify for Black Affirmative Action?
Or is quota fraud only practiced by female academics?
Here’s the single most famous story from the last 57 years about conservative white men cheating to get affirmative action as blacks: the Malone twins. From Time magazine in 1988:
October 31, 1988 12:00 AM EST
After the Boston fire department rejected them because of poor exam scores in 1975, identical twins Philip and Paul Malone did not think of giving up. Back they went in 1977 with new applications and a new strategy: they declared that they were black. As such, the Malones were hired by the department, which was under pressure to take on more minority firemen. Under a court-ordered affirmative action plan, it no longer mattered that the brothers, with exam scores of 57% and 69%, fell far short of the passing grade of 82% required for whites.
For ten years no one officially questioned the Malones’ self-proclaimed blackness. Then in February the twins were put on a list of blacks among firemen proposed for promotion to lieutenant. The list went to fire commissioner Leo Stapleton. He knew the Malones were the department’s only identical twins, and if they weren’t white, it was news to him. Stapleton asked the state’s department of personnel administration to check out the twins’ status. The emerging issue was pointedly expressed by black city councilman Bruce Bolling: “How could twins with Irish names, Caucasian features and no black identification from any perspective get onto the force and stay on without collusion?”
Good question, especially since the fair-haired, fair-skinned Malones had identified themselves as white on their first applications. Eventually the twins, now 33, claimed that they did not learn they were black until 1976, when, they say, their mother discovered a sepia photograph of a pale-looking woman she said was their black great-grandmother.
Is being one-eighth black enough?
The federal bureaucratic answer in the few times this question has come up is that you need to establish a chain over the generations of at least one ancestor who identified as black and was recognized as such by the black community. E.g., the Pope is a little bit black by ancestry but he and his brothers don’t identify as black and weren’t recognized as part of the black community. So if Pope Leo had a child with a white woman … Well, that would be a big deal for a lot of reasons, but for my purpose, the Pope’s child would not be recognized as black for affirmative action because his or her parents didn’t consider themselves black and weren’t recognized as black by blacks.
That leaves open the question of whether the child of a part-black who was raised black but then chose to pass as white can reclaim black identity. But that comes up in rarely in this century, since passing as white, which was never common, has declined even more after the introduction of affirmative action privileges in 1969.
This came up during the Racial Reckoning when actress Rebecca Hall, whose part-black maternal grandfather passed for white and Indian, made a film of the 1920s African-American novel Passing. But this being 2021, Hall couldn’t cast herself and had to cast two obviously black actresses who couldn’t have passed.
But, anyway, there’s no evidence that the Malones’ great-grandmother was considered black. She is listed as white in Censuses.
Last month, after an investigation of their claim, they were fired.
The dismissal, which the Malones have appealed to the State Supreme Judicial Court, has Boston churning. Amid rumors that there have been other phony claims of minority status, mayor Ray Flynn ordered a review of the hiring practices in the fire and school departments. Two weeks ago, Flynn disclosed that at least five other fire fighters will be asked to prove they are not white.
So there was then a big frenzy in Boston to root out all the other white men passing as black. But no other hilariously clear cases like the Malones emerged. Instead, the investigators dug up a bunch of marginal cases.
I don’t know the exact details of the ensuing Boston cases, but apparently they were the usual braintwisters that fire departments dealt with in the 1970s-1980s: e.g., If three of your grandparents are from Ulster by way of West Virginia, but one of your grandparents is from Portugal, are you Hispanic? If your Portuguese grandparent was born in Macao across the Pearl river from Hong Kong, are you Asian?
As I’ve mentioned, affirmative action for blacks works good enough for government work because the great majority of white men are remarkably honorable about not pretending to be black.
On the other hand, a striking fraction of progressive women academics tend to be self-interested fantasists about being either Hispanic (if they are into salsa dancing) or, especially, Cherokee princesses.
And now, from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the umpteenth case …
Paywall here.
