To be completely fair, there are issues with this happening in Australia. It has become something of a joke to look at the recipients of aboriginal scholarships or even seats at Universities designated for aboriginal scholars and you wind up seeing visibly white people. This is to not doubt the veracity of their claims or even to necessarily “demote” them as aboriginals, but it becomes potentially harmful to the aboriginals themselves who consistently see visibly white, minimally aboriginal people beating them out for these rewards or obtaining them because there’s so little competition.
It would be like making a list of the top 10 Latino scholars in Latin studies and 9 out of 10 of them are light-skinned castizos… Particularly for people from places like Mexico, where discrimination based on coloring thrives, it is unhelpful…
So, I am not saying that the people who remove them are absolutely right… In some cases they are denying people where such a problem may not exist, but I understand some degree of vigilance and gatekeeping.
To be completely fair, there are issues with this happening in Australia. It has become something of a joke to look at the recipients of aboriginal scholarships or even seats at Universities designated for aboriginal scholars and you wind up seeing visibly white people. This is to not doubt the veracity of their claims or even to necessarily “demote” them as aboriginals, but it becomes potentially harmful to the aboriginals themselves who consistently see visibly white, minimally aboriginal people beating them out for these rewards or obtaining them because there’s so little competition.
It would be like making a list of the top 10 Latino scholars in Latin studies and 9 out of 10 of them are light-skinned castizos… Particularly for people from places like Mexico, where discrimination based on coloring thrives, it is unhelpful…
So, I am not saying that the people who remove them are absolutely right… In some cases they are denying people where such a problem may not exist, but I understand some degree of vigilance and gatekeeping.