Your Parents Are Iranian; Or One Is White, One Is Asian: What Is Your Race?

A court ruled today that Harvard did not discriminate by using an admissions method that used diversity factors to hold down its Asian students population. If the school based admissions solely on test scores and GPA, upwards of 50% of admissions would have gone to Asian applicants.

On the one hand, that seems unfair and also evokes memories of racial exclusion of Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans from American schools a century ago.

On the other hand, Harvard didn’t have prejudicial intent: The university wanted use other factors to create opportunities for a racially and ethnically diverse group of students.

Our class on immigration, race, and labor discussed the current meaning of “race” and “affirmative action” and came up with more questions than answers.

A student whose mother and father immigrated from Iran said he checks the box for Caucasian, even though his complexion is not “white” and his name is Persian.

The Census Bureau defines whites as Europeans, Arabs, Moroccans, or Caucasians.

The class agreed that “white” is not typically used to include Iranians.

Another student has an American father and Chinese mother. Is she white or Asian? 
She didn’t say, just noted that no racial descriptor fits her situation well. 
If she wanted to get into Harvard, she would do better by answering “white.”

I suggested an alternate definition of race: Anyone, including immediate descendants whose parent(s) or grandparent(s) were put in a concentration camp or internment center because of their race, actual or perceived. This would include children/grandchildren Japanese-Americans put in internment camps, Holocaust survivors, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Myanmar, Russia, and others.
In other words: What about a "perceived as" definition of race?

My students objected: That’s not race, they said. 

I agreed, mostly. 
But I asked: What if a person was rounded up with others like him because of his faith (Uighers in China today, Jews in Poland in the early 1940s), or nationality (Japanese in the U.S. in WW II)—in other words, what if their freedom was taken away en masse not because of who they were but because how their oppressors viewed their innate identity? Would that count as a definition of race?

The answer my students left me with was, “No.” 
As for me, I’m still mulling this over. Race is, after all, a social construct. We are more genetically diverse across individuals than racial groups. Race is not black and white. 
Maybe race is how others define us especially when they enslave, imprison, or segregate us en masse-- or kill us as part of a genocide.