Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani, Huffington Post, September 19, 2019

One night at a watering hole outside of Seattle, Ralph Taylor overheard a man a few beers in bragging about how easy it was to get certified as a minority business owner, thus gaining access to potentially millions of dollars’ worth of state contracts.

Taylor’s ears perked up. He asked the man exactly how this all went down, and the man told him the Office of Minority and Women’s Business Enterprises (OMWBE)―the Washington state office that certifies small businesses for these government contracts―had a relatively lax application process. All Taylor had to do to get a Minority Business Enterprise (MBE) certificate, the man said, was provide a sworn affidavit that he belonged to a specific minority class and submit a photo ID. {snip}

There was a potentially huge payoff: Washington state agencies have a budget of almost $3 billion per year to contract with businesses. Right now, small businesses with white owners get more than six times as much money as small businesses with black owners. But as part of an initiative by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D), the state is attempting to level the playing field and award more money to women and people of color. Last year, minority- and women-owned businesses were awarded around $154 million, with nearly $90 million spent on contracts with certified MBEs.

A few years after that bar conversation, Taylor, who works in the risk management industry, applied to have his own business, Orion Insurance, certified as minority-owned. And in 2014, Washington state awarded him an MBE certificate. It was a remarkable turn of events because, for most of his life, Taylor has been treated as a white man.

That hasn’t stopped Taylor from launching a crusade to be legally recognized as Black, based on his own sense of identity and the results of a genealogy test that revealed that he has 4% African DNA.

When Taylor applied to the very same office for a similar federal certificate (a Disadvantaged Business Enterprise, or DBE), his application was rejected on the grounds that he didn’t meet their criteria of someone belonging to a minority group.

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{snip} He asked the OMWBE to clarify why they excluded him from the program―even after, he says, he provided additional evidence of his proposed blackness, including his DNA test results.

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So, he sued the OMWBE. Beyond his own racial status, Taylor claims to be fighting for a greater good, exposing flaws with affirmative action programs.

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More recently, these kits entered our politics when Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren revealed the results of a genetic ancestry test to back up earlier claims of indigenous heritage. Warren was criticized by some tribal leaders for implying a relation between DNA and tribal citizenship, and she subsequently apologized.

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Despite all this, Roth says these tests are not particularly accurate as a means of determining racial ancestry. “Race is not something that is just genetic. Genetics play a part, but only a part,” Roth explains. “The way that sociologists define race is something that is socially determined, that refers to aspects of your biology or your ancestry. But it’s only referring to them.”

Black cultural theorist and author Mychal Denzel Smith agrees. DNA “is not telling you your race, because race is not a biological fact,” he says. “Race is a social and political construct. It is something that is lived.”

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Roth says that understanding race as a social construct can sometimes lead people to think that they can pick and choose their race as they like, without consequence. In a qualitative study she conducted in 2018, Roth found that white respondents were most eager, of all respondents, to change their ethnic or racial identity. They wanted to discover ancestry that made them distinctive or exotic, or they wanted a more specific tradition to distinguish themselves. Roth called this phenomenon “symbolic race.”

People “want to be able to enjoy the privileges or the benefits of a racial group without any of the costs,” she says, adding that she’s working on quantitative studies to further explore these patterns. “They don’t experience any discrimination, and because they don’t have to tell anyone that they have this ancestry or this identity, they can just use it when it’s advantageous for them and hide it when it’s not.”

Could DNA impact affirmative action laws?

All 50 states have an OMWBE or equivalent. The amount that each state allocates to minority contractors varies, as does the impact of each program. {snip}

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So how might DNA tests impact who’s eligible for affirmative action programs? The truth is, the issue has not yet been legally tested.

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What Taylor’s case and these college-based lawsuits have in common are the questions they raise about the gatekeepers of these programs―who gets to decide whether someone is a deserving applicant or not. And more often than not, the first barrier to entry is phenotype (what we look like) rather than genotype (what our genes reveal).

When it comes to race, how we see ourselves isn’t always how others see us.

Despite attempts to codify race, it is not as static an idea as many would like. In her book “The Limits of Whiteness,” sociologist Neda Maghbouleh explores how Iranians and other Middle Eastern Americans moved across the color line and documents how the U.S. Supreme Court used Iranians as a racial litmus test to determine the classification of other Middle Eastern or Arab people. Drawing on work by Middle East historian Nina Farnia, Maghbouleh shows how between 1909 and 1939, Iranians’ skin color was classified and reclassified as white and nonwhite by claimants in eight separate Supreme Court cases.

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Taylor’s case somewhat oddly and uncomfortably evokes Plessy. A small amount of centiMorgans (the unit of measure of DNA) reveals some distant African ancestry, allowing him to claim access to an affirmative action program.

Smith cautions against this protocol. “That’s just getting us into another position in which we are trying to scientifically determine something that does not exist scientifically,” he says.

Roth further notes that the sheer volume of African-informed DNA has no bearing on how race is constructed socially. Should Taylor’s 4% be enough for society to accept him as Black? What if his results came back with 44%, or 64%?

“I think what makes the difference is how the person is seen by others within their community. If the person is seen by others within their community as a white person, then the percentage doesn’t matter,” Roth argues. “In the case of somebody who has a very small percent, like 4%, it’s very unlikely that that is going to be visible enough that it’s going to influence people’s interactions with them.”

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There are many more recent instances where how we are viewed by other people has been instructional as to how we’re viewed in the eyes of the law. A recent Los Angeles Times investigation revealed businesses in at least 18 states won certification as minority contractors by claiming Native American status, even though birth, census and other government records identified the firms’ owners or their ancestors as white. In response, two House committees are investigating.

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{snip} Taylor claims that his own research into states’ minority business owner programs shows that 65% of enrollees were white, based on his perception of their photos. The spreadsheet was ultimately disallowed by the 9th Circuit court as evidence.

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Is being Black about more than DNA?

Taylor is tall and surprisingly soft-spoken. He rarely raises his voice, even for emphasis. Nonetheless, he has loudly advertised his identity with contemporary stereotypes. To flex his Black culture bonafides, Taylor argued that he was a member of the NAACP, subscribes to Ebony Magazine and takes “a great interest in black social causes.” In 2017, he changed his birth certificate to reflect what he says is his multiracial status of “Black, Native American and Caucasian.”

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When he talks to me about this in the bar, the conversation turns, inescapably, for a moment to Rachel Dolezal. Dolezal, who now goes by Nkechi Diallo, was the woman who sparked outrage in 2015 when it was revealed that she had been posing as a Black woman for most of her adult life, despite being born white. Taylor says he feels “sorry” for Dolezal, and “wished he could have told her that all she had to do was identify.” But this kind of physical code-switching is typically only a one-way street.

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Smith also takes exception to Dolezal and Taylor’s claims to Blackness. He roots Black culture in a community of people with shared experiences.

“There’s the common experience that all of our ancestors had of slavery. They formed culture out of that. You have the common experience of segregation. They formed culture out of that,” he says. “If you cannot point to your life as a shared experience with those people, then how can you claim that status?”

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In December 2018, the 9th Circuit judges unanimously ruled against Taylor, and in favor of the OMWBE, which the court argued “did not act in an arbitrary and capricious manner when it determined it had a ‘well founded reason’ to question Taylor’s membership claims.”

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In a June 2019 email to the director of the Washington state OMWBE, which he shared with HuffPost, Taylor inquired about resubmitting the paperwork to get his DBE certification and be recognized federally as a minority business owner. In the note, he states that he’s sending in his newly amended birth certificate, but asks “should I have the certificate amended to state that I am black without any other ethnicities” and adds “I can also have the certificate amended to state female if that will help.”

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