Evolution of the Standard "Checkbox" Diversity

Last weekend I finally started filling out graduate school applications; identification, educational background, future educational goals, grades, grades, grades, essays, essays, essays … it’s all pretty standard stuff.  But then I got to the race/ethnicity checkbox on one school’s application and I was floored.  The  standard “Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, and Other” format was replaced with “Hispanic, Alaskan Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, White, Arab/Middle Eastern/North African, Other”.  Granted this isn’t perfectly inclusive, but as a second generation “Arab/Middle Eastern/North African” who in the past has checked off “Other” or, in one instant, checked off something like “White/Caucasian: including Middle Eastern/ North African”, my surprise was a little bias. 

Every ten years the U.S. Census Bureau conducts a survey of the population to allocate seats in the House of Representatives to states.  Along with other federal censuses, this decennial census has seen a lot of changes in its ethnicity/race section.  In 2000, the Census Bureau allowed people of mixed race to select more than one box to describe their makeup.  The last decennial census conducted a “2010 Census Race and Hispanic Origin Alternative Questionnaire Experiment” testing different questionnaire design strategies.  The standard is the one drawn out by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget which separates the race/ethnicity question into two parts; the first part asks you if you’re Hispanic or Latino (an ‘ethnicity’ section) and the second asks you to specify one or more races from the options provided. Colleges can have their own form, which is why some are more detailed than others, but they must ask the ethnicity question. In 2009 the U.S. Department of Education also made responding to these questions on applications optional for students applying for higher education.

Census data have been integrated in many areas of government, education, healthcare, etc. which have attempted to reduce racial and ethnical disparities.  But aside from inclusion/exclusion, self-reporting discrepancies (a half, a quarter, an eighth race X?), and the non-identifiers-ambiguity, standard checkbox diversity in higher education are “arbitrary and unworkable—especially in light of the narrow tailoring requirements of equal protection”, as critiqued by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Scalia during the Fisher versus University of Texas case, reported by St. Johns University’s Philip Lee in his 2014 article “On Checkbox Diversity”.  Lee goes on to say, “This truncated conception of diversity, however, does not capture the educational benefits of diversity that prior cases have recognized [including Grutter versus Bollinger, Gratz versus Bollinger, and Regent of the University of California versus Bakke].”  He offers that “evaluation should not be the checkbox itself, but how the applicant describes the importance of the checkbox to his or her identity.”  So it was interesting to see the application mentioned in the first paragraph ask (again optional) how the applicants diversity, racial or experiential, would contribute to the school, allowing for an applicant to express the personal significance of where they fall within the boxes.  It’s another essay, which isn’t ideal, but in previous applications I remember thinking ‘now you kind of know my race, so what’, what’s the school going to do with that information to promote “’cross-racial understanding’ [to help] break down racial stereotypes, and ‘[enable students] to better understand persons of different races’.” 

There are three suggested ways to define race: externally (how others see you), internally (how you see yourself), and expressively (how we present ourselves).  Lee suggests that checkbox diversity “focuses on the applicant’s internal definition of race, while downplaying the expressive dimension,” and I think the diversity essay portion does the later, “contextual diversity analysis”.  Additionally, in narrow selections, the checkbox can sometimes be an external definition - how the administration sees you, and maybe it’s like “Other”. 

The changes in race subsections on applications from when I was applying to high school, undergraduate, and now graduate schools show shift in racial demographic but more importantly in how ethnicity and race is perceived and weighed. It’s only going to get more complicated; there’ll always be a need for the “Other” box for those who can’t fit in anywhere else and eventually more and more individuals will be checking off multiple, and at some point, almost every box. 

Sources:

“On Checkbox Diversity”, Philip Lee.  St. Johns University. Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/news_room/ana_Changes_to_10_25_2007_169.asp

http://www.education.ne.gov/ADED/pdfs/Race%20and%20Ethnicity.pdf