> I learned by chance that putting certain provocative information on a security clearance form can greatly speed up the clearance process. But that is another story.
Tremendous essay. As someone else pointed out, this was back when Virginia was still an apartheid state, in the process of getting desegregation imposed on it; racial categorization was an important weapon of the state against some of its citizens, and not one they were going to give up easily in the face of some guy (correctly) declaring it nonsensical.
There's so much Seeing Like A State in the punchcard incident as well. Having invented the categories, you must be made to fit them. These days plenty of people will say "well, of course he's right, you can't jam everyone into racial/ethnicity categories, and you shouldn't" then turn around and code gender as an immutable M/F binary in their database.
My former boss has similar experience with TSA and customs. His father in law runs a farm back in his home country, and he usually goes once to visit whenever he is there. So, technically, he visited a farm which is one of the questions on most immigration forms. As a resident alien without a green card, he usually gets the 9th degree from TSA and customs. He has found, however, that if he checks this box they immediately start grilling him about the "farm" he says he stayed at. Once he explains "Oh no, it's a farmhouse. I visited my father in law for dinner one night. I didn't do any farm work or walk in the fields." they stamp his form and let him go. They never ask (or even check, as far as he can tell) anything else.
Moral: give the agent an easy problem to find, but one with a simple solution in your favor. They will never look for a 2nd problem.
On the declaration when entering Canada there’s the same question, along with this similar one: “ Meat, fish, seafood, eggs, dairy products, fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, plants, flowers, wood, animals, birds, insects, and any parts, products or by-products of any of the foregoing.”
I check yes because I have a half eaten chocolate bar in my backpack.
They ask what I have and I tell them, and immediately send me on my way, it’s great.
> He also remarked that they had asked him if he knew me socially and that he had answered "Yes, we just celebrated Guy Fawkes Day together". When the investigator wanted to know "What is Guy Fawkes Day?" he started to explain the gunpowder plot but thought better of it. He settled for the explanation that "It's a British holiday".
(but note also that these "race" questions were all over US forms well into the 1980s. By my time, however, it appears that "mongrel" answers were being routinely coded as "Decline To State")
Virginia still required you to answer a race question to get a marriage license until 2019[1]. "Decline to Answer" wasn't an option, though in some counties "Octoroon" (meaning 7/8 white, 1/8 black), "Mulato" and "Aryan" were options[2].
Large areas of the US were, in a very literal sense, built out of racism. While the most overt racism has mostly been pushed out of the public, legal and media spheres, large quantities remain as a sort of Superfund site just below the surface.
Plenty of people from that era are still alive, like Elizabeth Eckford against whom the Arkansas National Guard was deployed to prevent her from going to school.
Hatred against miscegenation was so high that there was an entire legal structure to prevent ""mongrels"" from existing, so somebody writing that on their form is going to cause conniptions.
This is an interesting point. I once had to fill out a security clearance form for a job at NASA detailing every individual I had had contact with outside of the US in the last 10 years. Since I've traveled extensively internationally, and couldn't even begin to mention all the people I've been in contact with, I just wrote an essay explaining my lifestyle. I expected to get denied, but I got security clearance faster than anyone else in the department had ever heard of.
I’ve always wondered, as an immigrant, how they would expect someone like me to answer that question.
My entire family are outside the US. A big chunk of the people I interact with are friends who also moved down to the states and are not citizens yet. I probably interact with non-citizens daily more than citizens. It would be practically impossible for me to detail everyone I ever interacted with 10 years ago while I was at a Canadian school getting my degree.
The whole thing is so absurd for anyone who has ever been outside of the US even once.
> After about three months it stopped and a month later I was suddenly informed that the clearance had been granted. The other two people whose investigations were begun at the same time did not receive their clearances until several months later.
Mongrels are mixed race dogs, I guess? So just put the concept of "race" under scrutiny, and have your mental health debated. E voilà, your background check takes off fast and intense, and is suddenly about being sane of mind.
https://yarchive.net/risks/mongrel.html
Greetings from germany, where we have ethnicity or, officially, mostly nothing in this place. (Police will kinda inofficially still racial-profile you, since "north-african looking" seems to be easier than to say "tanned, slim and curly hair")
Well, we do have "Nafri" (North AFRIcans), "Ausländer" (foreigners, but only used for "problematic" foreigners somehow), "Migrationshintergrund" (migration background, meaning everyone who is an immigrant, and anyone related to them for two generations, regardless of nationality), "Südländer" (initially people from the south, such as Italians, Greeks, Jugoslavians, but nowadays "people coming from the middle east"), and - now that the latter has become a charged term - "West-Asians", officially sanctioned by the Berlin police HQ as a non-racially-loaded term, but meaning the same.
The euphenism treadmill is strong over here as well.
... which translates to "refugee for healthcare/unemployment benefits/social benefits reasons", implying that they never paid a dime in, but happily take out of the pot nontheless.
fransje26 meant this as a joke, but the term has been used unironically to refer to East-Europeans (and the situation in the States regarding the non-existance of a functional social safety net would render them relatively similar in this case).
These stories date from the 40s and 50s, and the author notes in one of them that the American forms now use ethnicity too. I suspect that at some point in the 40s Germany would have had a very extensive racial classification system.
reminds me of an old story where the development team was convinced they had a good product, but feared about management intermingling, so they intentionally put a not so good feature front and center for the manager to "remove", so that the rest of the program could pass the demo unchanged.
Did he ever write about what that trick is?