Just because an American is ethnic Asian does not automatically make them a subject matter expert on Asia, especially nat sec stuff. I see this fairly frequently. Imagine assuming every American can comment cogently on transatlantic relations, NATO policy, and the JCPOA.*
The success of Asian Americans is now being categorized as “embracing whiteness” – and this is starting to be applied to other races too. How can you push for antiracism and minority empowerment when as soon as they become successful, you call them whitewashed?
The American left’s response to the Justice Department condemning racial profiling against Asian-Americans and whites at Yale, is the typical check your white privilege and your a racist response:
The Justice Department’s latest accusation that Yale University discriminated against Asian American and white students is an attempt to pit marginalized students against each other, using Asian Americans as the conduit, experts say.
Several Asian American activists and scholars criticized the DOJ’s letter sent to the Ivy League institution on Thursday, in which the feds claimed the school “rejects scores of Asian American and white applicants each year based on their race, whom it otherwise would admit.” Critics say that in lumping white students with those of Asian descent, the administration is using Asian Americans as a pawn to dismantle affirmative action.
“This announcement is pure politics — a signal once again that the Trump administration will take extraordinary steps to protect white privilege and resort to unfounded racial attacks, right on the heels of Kamala Harris, a Black and Asian American woman, joining the top of the Democratic ticket,” Anurima Bhargava, who served as chief of the Educational Opportunities Section of the Civil Rights Division at DOJ during the Obama administration.
You can read more at the link, but is there a more overused word than “racist” right now?
Yet despite all the discrimination Asian-Americans have faced in the past and even now by affirmative action policies in colleges, they have still been able to have by far the highest per capita household income of any race, even higher than whites.
The economic success Asian-Americans have had is why many are upset about being discriminated against at elite colleges because of their race.
Via a reader tip comes news of another example of how Asian-Americans continue to grow in importance in American society:
The growth of the Asian-American community since the turn of the century has been reflected in all professional and social areas of life in the U.S., not least the armed forces.
In recent years, Americans of Asian background have been signing up for the military in growing numbers, and, in 2016, they were 28% more likely to be among the officer ranks than they were 12 years earlier.
The change was more pronounced in certain branches of the military than others. The number of Asian-American officers in the army, for example, grew by 41%. That compares with growth of just 4% for ethnic minorities overall and a 3.1% decline among African Americans. [Nikkei Asian Review]
That sound you hear is the shattering of a cherished Democratic orthodoxy: race-based preferences in education.
Mr. Adams is an African-American who serves as Brooklyn’s borough president and aspires to run for mayor. On almost any issue, he lands where you would expect a big-city black Democrat to land. But when he cheered Mr. de Blasio’s bid to replace the Specialized High School Admissions Test with criteria meant to sneak in a racial rebalancing, he suddenly had a rebellion on his hands.
Asian-American moms and dads made their displeasure known. So after hastily convening a meeting with angry constituents (and, according to the New York Post, threats from Chinese-American donors), Mr. Adams announced that he wasn’t with the mayor after all.
He’s not alone. Every elected Asian-American in New York City politics has now blasted Mr. de Blasio’s plans. At the City Council, Peter Koo and Margaret Chin are against it; in the state Assembly, Ron Kim and Yuh-Line Niou are opposed; and in Congress, Grace Meng —a graduate of Stuyvesant, one of the affected schools—says she’s “disappointed” by the mayor’s proposal and was particularly “insulted” by the way his schools chancellor framed the issue. What makes this drama so unusual is that every last one of these pols is a Democrat, part of a larger community that overwhelmingly votes Democratic.
Whites have traditionally been the losers from affirmative action. Proponents sometimes justify this as the price to be paid for the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Whatever the merits of this argument, the Asian-American experience is hard to squeeze into the box of racial privilege.
In the 19th century, the Chinese Exclusion Act was the first U.S. law to deny immigration and naturalization based on race. In the 20th century, during World War II, Japanese-American citizens were confined in internment camps. To this list the 21st century adds racial discrimination at our most elite universities, which, as they did with Jews a century ago, limit the number of Asian-Americans they admit. (……)
As Ms. Chin points out, even if you are an Asian-American with little education, work as a manual laborer, and have no political connections, you understand that an objective exam represents opportunity and upward mobility. You also understand that if merit is replaced by softer (“holistic”) criteria designed to tilt the racial balance (e.g., Harvard has given Asian-American applicants lower “personality” ratings), it will be your children who pay the price. In other words, Democrats are now dealing with an Asian-American community that doesn’t buy the argument that racial justice requires discriminating against a racial minority. [Wall Street Journal]
You can read more at the link, but yet despite all the discrimination that Asian-Americans have faced in the past and even now by affirmative action policies in colleges, they have still been able to have by far the highest per capita household income of any race, even higher than whites.
A group of prospective Harvard students has filed a lawsuit against the university for discriminating against one minority in favor of another:
The Supreme Court declined to draw a clear line on racial discrimination in university admissions in last year’s Fisher v. University of Texas decision. Now new lawsuits are moving to challenge how far colleges can go in using racial preferences.
A group called Students for Fair Admissions filed lawsuits Monday against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina in federal court. The suits argue that the schools use race preferences to reach a specific racial balance on campus and have failed to abide by the strict scrutiny of racial preferences required by the Supreme Court.
The Harvard challenge concerns what the lawsuit calls a de facto quota on the number of Asian students the school admits. The suit compares its current racial admissions to Harvard’s quotas limiting Jewish students in an earlier era. In both cases, Harvard kept out minorities who would have been admitted based on academic merit.
Over the last eight years Asian students have comprised between 17.6% and 20.7% of students admitted to Harvard. Though the number of Asians applying for admission has increased, the percentage of offers has barely budged. In 1992, 19.1% of Harvard’s admissions offers went to Asian applicants, compared to 25.2% who were admitted to the California Institute of Technology, a school that doesn’t use racial preferences. In 2013 Harvard made 18% of its offers to Asians, while CalTech admitted 42.5% Asian students.
Similar admissions percentages at Harvard have held steady for other racial groups with remarkably little variance. In other words, while schools like Harvard say the goal of racial preferences is to achieve a “critical mass” of minority students, the admissions evidence suggests that the school is reserving pre-rationed pie slices for racial groups. [Wall Street Journal]
You can read more at the link, but people should be able to get ahead based on merit, but as we all know life is not fair and this situation with Harvard admissions is just another example of this.
