Thread by @Hebro_Steele

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.

🧵:

People often told, "Oh, it’s nothing, just check the box and you’ll get an upper hand." Indeed, I was once offered a $25,000 MLK scholarship, a lot of money in 1993. So checking the black box was tempting, yes.

When I would ask why I should betray my merit or reduce my multiple races to one race box, people like Claudine would often respond with an argument that could be summed up by one word: “diversity.”

However, this was a sham. From the 1960s to the 1990s, the percentage of all blacks on campuses who were from lower economic backgrounds had fallen to the single digits. These students had been replaced by middle to upperclass blacks, Africans, Caribbeans, & multiracials like me.

By checking the “black” box, I was being asking to mask over the very problems and inequities that undermined 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?

But this was not the worse part about these encounters, which I should mention were life-altering since they affected my life-directions in education and employment

I knew that if I checked the black box, administrators like Claudine Gay would feel like they owned me. They had opened the door 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.

The word “minority” is often used generically along with the word “majority” to refer to population numbers. But the minority is also a social construct used by some on the left to enforce loyalty to the politics of a given oppressed racial group.

To enter the minority state of mind therefore meant that I would divorce myself from my larger American identity in order to embrace a far narrower identity based on the politics of race.

In my case, that meant embracing a racialized victim 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 that black box, but they have no idea what awaits a black student who checks that black box.

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.

How could I have gone through these experiences without becoming beholden to the politics of blackness?

So for me to check that black box was to move off the merit track and onto the race track where people like Claudine excelled. She is perhaps the most successful black to walk this path, but she is not a free individual.

She put her emphasis on her skin and it is no wonder why all this evidence of incompetence, racial essentialism, and plagiarism are coming out now.

As bad as that is, the worse thing she did was lead so many people of her race down this dead-end of racial essentialism. People talk about how Claudine hurt Asians and Jews -- people like her hurt blacks far more and that can never be forgotten.

By contrast, my refusal to check the race box meant that nobody could hold a claim over me like they do with every black like Clarence Thomas. 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.

***When I wrote the below thread quickly this morning I was not expecting it to get this much attention or be published by @Newsweek. A huge thank you to @bungarsargon for this opportunity. Here's the link to a more detailed version of the original thread: newsweek.com/claudine-gay-w…