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Notes -
Mindy Kaling's brother is apparently one such? Though he wasn't an academic. I do wonder if there are some cases which we haven't yet heard of, the thing is that if you are going to pretend to be black or Hispanic, if you have some heritage there it's a lot easier. It may be that there is less of an advantage for a male academic to add on minority identity than for a female academic (I think Elizabeth Warren still holds the record there for "most advantage derived from a family story of possible indigenous ancestry").
I think it might also have been more common in previous centuries; in the 19th to mid 20th century, hiding any (say) Italian or Hispanic ancestry and presenting as completely 'white' in the racial context of the time would have benefited male academics more than claiming minority status or heritage. Take the Healy family, a mix of Irish and African-American, where the sons staunchly denied and hid their slave ancestry while becoming prominent in American Catholicism, amongst other fields. If you look at the photographs with the Wikipedia articles, they passed as wholly white. The irony today would be that they would have great difficulty claiming their black heritage because they are so passing.
He may have faked being black, but he certainly wasn't a white male.
True and the whole Kamala Harris thing where Afroindians or other similar borderline groups will try to wildly fluctuate the dial for maximal advantage seems pretty common.
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