I am being dead serious, I start college after I graduate in June. I was actually born in South Africa to a white family living there and I came to the States when i was young. I am of African descent because I am from Africa and my family lived there for years. The minority scholarship doesn’t say at all that you have to be black; just says of African descent.
So if I were to apply to I honestly have a good case because though I am white on paper I can say I am a minority being of African descent?
I don’t have a real answer for you… but that’s an awesome question.
I went to school with a person with the exact same situation. He did apply to the school as an African-American and was accepted. Some schools may view this as misrepresenting yourself. You should contact a few scholarships and ask the question. Each one may view the issue differently. Good luck.
If it doesn’t say you’re excluded because of you are white in the small print, and can prove your heratige with your birth certificate and family records or somthing then go for it!
No. The key is “descent”, meaning that you came from peoples originally from Africa. If your White family lived in Africa for a few generations, they were originally of European descent. Where you lived has little to do with it. If my family had spent some time living in China and I was born there, that doesn’t make me of Asian descent either.
The word “minority” is often currently replaced with “people of color”, since the term assumes some degree of measurement against a “majority”. With the exception of Native Americans, all of us are originally descended from immigrants; there is no shortage of descendants of immigrants in colleges in this country. The point of these identifications is to recognize that such designations have often mean negative discrimination in the past, leading to a lack of opportunity.
Your question does bring up the oft-discussed question of what are we looking at when we look at diversity. Race (and if so, what, really, is that?), ethnicity?