Is it because of Desire for Social or Cultural Belonging
They perceive some benefit or advantage (real or imagined) from doing so.
Interesting question
in what way do they misquote or misrepresent? and who determines what their ethnicity is?
I am white, my wife is asian. We list our son as "asian" when required on a form although he looks much more southern european than anything else.
Feelings of guilt.
My grandmother, who lived her entire life in the US, wouldn't say she was German after WW2. She was horrified and ashamed. My mother lied to my father about her ethnicity because he was extremely prejudiced and never would have dated her. They were married 34 YEARS before her father, who had Alzheimers, outed her lie. When my father referred to his own children with a derogatory term at a dinner party, my ex looked him dead in the eye and said quietly, "you will NEVER use that word again about my wife or daughter or in my presence. Do you understand?" And my father didn't.
What you view as 'misrepresentation' could easily be that you just can't perceive the persons' ethnicity easily. I can identify several distinct ethnicities in my background. While I don't normally put "Jewish" on any official documents, I do sometimes let folks know that is part of my ethnicity. For example, there was a recent university social function where I felt obliged to point out to a couple of boorish people that I would have been "too Jewish" in 1943 and sent to the death camps.
Likewise, I can think of friends, colleagues, neighbors, etc who are mixed race and it's not obvious what the persons ethnicity is.
I’m white and even I know that aIf you put black male in your profile, good luck with the response time from white women or sometimes even black women - if this triggered you, you might be the unintentional racist woman this is directed towards 😂😂😂😂
@jubal Good point. I took the question to mean some of the high profile cases over the past couple of years where someone claimed to be Black, Native American, or Jewish even though they were not.
Well, technically one high profile case involved a person who really was 1/1024th Native American 🤦♂️
Impossible to respond without knowing what prompted the question in the first place.
Maybe the same reason some people misrepresent their age, location, body type, height, weight, drug use, alcohol use, bathroom habits, marital status and some more stuff. The reason is usually only known by the individual. Anything else would be pure conjecture.
Edit: my comment is really based on race, my bad. I guess from my perspective it seems to affect me the same.
Could the largest part of your ethnicity be based on what others perceive you to be? No matter how I feel or identify in my travels through my life is going to be greatly influenced by how others see me. I know that's easy for some people to do and others just can't fathom that idea, but depending on where your standing it will be evident. Misrepresentation could be confused with misunderstanding.
But trust me as a Black man, i am acutely aware of that in every aspect of my life outside of my home because of how the world treats me. I am not saying that it's always negative treatment at all, it's just treatment.
@JohnR1972 Exactly. I remember that one high profile case of Rachel Dolezal.
That aside, now it seems anyone can claim to be anything they want, and everyone else must accept it, if not actively advocate for it.
Would this spell the end of "cultural appropriation"?
@JohnR1972 wasn't one of them a highly placed elected official?
I really don't think those high profile cases apply here, there misrepresentations didn't matter much in the grand scheme of things.
There are also many generations of people who don't even know their ethnicity. You will find many many people who have believed them to Caucasian for generations find that someone has just been passing. Not this 50 yo person finds out their parent was most definitely something other than what they lived, how does that person see themselves.
This is an easy answer. People do it for self-serving reasons. People that are passing do it to evade discrimination, while people who do have power do it to reap the rewards of programs intended for less fortunate groups. Others do it for attention which is kind of the same reason those perpetrate acts of stolen valor.
The reason is always self-serving. This is why other animals hate chameleons—chameleons are posers.
@ReltvlyCanshes Actually two of them were. A member of the House lied about being Jewish and a member of the Senate lied about being Native American. I’ll leave it at that before this thread turns political.
The question posed by the OP was vague and I interpreted it through the lens of well known instances of people lying.
Fair. I forgot about the other one.
@ReltvlyCanshes 💯
There's a great podcast about the insidious ways in which claiming a false identity can harm communities in the case of pretendians. It's a Canadian perspective but a really good listen. It's how I found out one of my professors did this🫠🫠🫠
https://open.spotify.com/show/4sP8KCbNx8vHat3nICpHpa?si=nCU23iQkScuLXkWp473YQQ