I think the "by law" is mistaken, but there is at least a U.S. government opinion on the subject. From https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html:

>White – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.

>as a non-american I have a hard understanding why law in US should distinquish your race? >May be I am missing something?

You're missing the fact that the US was founded on the principle of racial hierarchy which led to centuries of oppression and stratification of class along racial lines. Numerous laws were passed in the US which explicitly granted or denied rights by race, the most obvious being slavery, through which people of African descent were legally classified as property in slaveholding states, and "separate but equal" laws post Reconstruction.

As a result of this history of racial discrimination, American culture and law are inextricably linked to racial segregation and classification, as must be any attempts to correct the injustices of the past.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_aspects_of_race_in_th...

[1]https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-questio...

[2]https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/why-census-is-right-to-as...

And I think you're missing the fact that you're not actually breaking any laws by telling people you're one race or another. Saying, "by law in the US she is considered white" implies there is some legal repercussion, which was likely cause for jumasheff's confusion. I could only imagine that happening if there was some sort of fraud involved.

I also found the following sentence strange:

> That belief is partly why many Irish, Italian and Polish immigrants who came to America in the early 20th century whitened their children's names to avoid persecution and increase their chances of social mobility.

> Tim Machuga is a software engineer who also knows what it's like to be black for a minute. He is a white man with an African name.

A typical Eastern European last name to me.

I wonder what does my first name (Oleksii) sound like to folks in the US?

As far as immigrants "whitening" their names in the early 20th century, it's pretty common, for whatever it's worth... My wife's last name is Gage, but her grandfather changed it from Gadzeki after he lost a local city council race for what he felt was his "damned Polish last name" (his words). This was in Detroit, and he worked for Ford, which at the time, had a fairly strong culture of "Americanizing" recent immigrants. There was a massive wave of anti immigrant sentiment in the 20's and 30's targeted at Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants, and it lingered for many decades afterwards.

Also, the first name bias is quite real. I dated a lady for most of my late teens - mid 20's named Ticia (pronounced Teecha, rather than Tisha). She's Ojibwe Chippewa, but this was rural TN and SC, so race is treated as a very binary black/white checkbox, and she falls into the "white" category. However, Ticia is a "black" name, for the most part. I lost count of the number of times I saw blatantly rude reactions when she introduced herself.

People turned a lot of Z's into S's and things like that.

That's a big reason why there are so many similar spelled surnames. They'd write it down 'wrong' at Ellis Island, and that's what you were stuck with. Oleksii, Oleksy, etc.

I agree with you that Machuga doesn't sound black at all. Maybe Hispanic if you're pronouncing it 'Mah-choo-gah'

As an American with an Italian last name I've experienced some of this personally. It is ridiculous. Oleksii is a cool name and I imagine how it is perceived here depends a lot on how you pronounce it when introducing yourself. My family has always pronounced our last name with an emphasis on phonics to make the name sounds "less weird" or easier to pronounce for Americans.

Interesting that this submission got flagged. I wonder why?

That one struck me as strange as well - "Machuga" doesn't sound like a stereotypically African name at all. And an image search for it brings up a sea of pasty white faces. Maybe Tim met somebody from an area of Africa where it's a common name and he mentioned it or something.

I feel like the reporter asked around the office for people who'd had these experiences, and Tim mentioned his, so he put him in the article.

As an American, I found most of this article strange and difficult to believe.

Sounds Russian or Slavic to me.

Does Oleksii sound like Alexy?

yeah, similar, but with 'O'-sound instead 'A'

Russian

Census, university admissions (which is controversial and repeatedly in a legal grey area), and maybe a few other things I'm missing. It's always optional to choose one, obviously.

It would be difficult to measure racial discrimination without the law defining race. And since the US federal and state governments stacked the deck against non-whites for more than a century, we can't just declare that we're color-blind and assume racial discrimination is now over.

Then let me ask you this,if a person has ancestors that were never victims of the "stacked deck" such as immigrants and they happen to be of a race as defined by the government which had been victimized,should they benefit from these reparations?

How about european immigrants that just arrived in the US within the last decade,should native minorities have better opportunities than them?

And what exactly is race? Ancestry? National origin? Consider this list: north african arab,turk,spanish, white skinned mexican,brown skinned egyptian,light skinned indian,albanian and south african with european ancestry. Lets say these people and their families immigrated to the US in the late 80's and had children immediately,their children will be treated very differently from each other. Which race are they? The south african is white but the mexican is not so white?

The law has no business defining race or using this social construct for systemic inequalities. This breeds so much strife,resentment and division and is not sustainable.

When you benefit one group, if you in the process benefit and harm other groups unfairly you're only shuffling around inequality. I believe the end result is even more unfairness and injustice to even more groups of people.

Who HR gets to count in various categories for EEOC reporting, for instance.

It’s just a terrible article.

It’s incoherent at times (that was the most egregious example) and seems to reflect the author’s bizarre misconceptions about the world (e.g. claiming “Jace” is a non traditional name).

A local school system is dealing with this issue. Who is what?

Nobody wants to make a call and change anything that is wrong...let alone questions of what happens to progress reports of someone was X and now Y....

That kind of reporting is done for quota purposes mostly.

Dunno, but I guess there needs to be a formal definition that's used for official population statistics and the like.