White or Not? Think Again…

“100% Americanization.” I am growing up in America. My parents grew up here too. I am white. I am patriotic. There is not much that makes my appearance stand out from the typical ideal white Anglo Saxon except for maybe the size of my Jew nose. As lucky as I may seem to be as a “white” American, actually with today’s emphasis on diversity, I almost feel like I conform too well with American ideal standards of racial superiority.
In today’s time, it is encouraged and admirable for people and professionals to diversify their resumes and employees. The more varied your resume, the more open-minded and experienced you are accredited to be. The more racially accepting you are in hiring employees, the more well-rounded you appear in your career. “Anglo-Saxon” conformity, as Gordon in Assimilation in American Life describes as the way to prosper in this nationalistic and racially exclusive New World, is actually having the reverse effect on me.
When I applied to colleges, the immediate headline that caught my attention was how culturally diverse the school is. A university prides itself on having students from all over the globe, representing hundreds of different ethnic groups and religions. A certain percentage of students have to be Hispanic, Black, Latino, Chinese, Korean, etc. in order to accredit the school for its cultural distinctiveness. This also means that only a certain amount of students could be white.
While there is a lot of validity to the white dominant race in the United States, there is also a lot of legitimacy in the white decline over the past 100 years. It used to be that if you were white, you’d get accepted, hired, and paid almost always before a person of different color. You didn’t have to have the brains or skills to be accepted, because being white was prevalent criteria. Ironically, I now feel my chances are minimized today because I a part of the ‘white’ Eurocentric community. It was harder for me to get into college because schools insisted they have a diverse student body. Being white is only part of the collective race parties, and, now, it too only can only represent a fraction of the selected students. While I admire the efforts to expand cultural initiatives and embrace differences, I found it increasingly difficult to get in because I was just another white student applying to college. It is a fact, that colleges will more likely accept an applicant of a foreign ethnicity to their school over a white American, even though the white American may be more qualified. For some time, I wished there was some secret heritage I didn’t know my family belonged to. Maybe if I had a black or Hispanic grandparent, my chances of getting into school would slightly increase. While being white in the past was the only way to succeed, today it has leveled out with many other races, and can now work to your detriment. Although there may be more ‘whites’ in America than other races, any decrease in percentage of white demanded because of America’s new “all culture-accepting” philosophy in schools, will hurt more and more qualified whites each year. While becoming a more culturally diverse and ethnically accepting country is positive and commendable, my 100% Americanization has still, ironically, turned its back on me.