Tuesday, June 2, 2015

With a long history of racial bigotry, this country doesn't need to import more of it



With the recent lawsuit against Harvard University and it admissions policy meant to create a “holistic” environment of many races, cultures and experiences, it appears that historically under-represented minorities have a new self-obsessed whiner to contend with: Asians, who are represented at four times their percentage of population at Harvard, but who just want, more—and still more.  Isn’t it fascinating how people who participate in and contribute the least in the political, cultural and social life of this country—yet benefit the most economically—have the audacity to claim they are “discriminated” against? 

Not only that, these same people seem to be not lacking in selfishness and insensitivity to anyone regarded as “inferior,” which is usually expressed  in terms that one would call racial, or racist, in nature. Even white Americans who fought against affirmative action on the basis of “merit” now find themselves in the “inferior” position, slowly losing control of their own educational institutions to Asians and international students who pay huge sums without  student aid from U.S. sources. 

Unfortunately for Asians, I’m not going to ignore their racism and their insular cultural mindset. Principally this is about the Japanese, Chinese and Indians. Now, I’m sure that each of these nationalities will claim that it is “discrimination” that they feel in the underlying resentment of white Americans, who see their own “merit” based arguments against affirmative action being turned around against them. But how do Asians respond to it? By trying to convince whites they are really “like them,” by attempting to turn this resentment back toward blacks and Hispanics.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Each of these groups come to this country with their own peculiar social, cultural, class, racial and ethnic idiosyncrasies, some of them ugly and repugnant to a country where equal opportunity regardless of demographic variance is the law, even if it is only intermittently practiced (even by so-called “liberals”). African students in Japanese and Chinese universities are frequent targets of abuse from locals and police, and even those who have engineering degrees can only find work in menial jobs; the media in both countries typically portray them in negative terms. Both countries are notorious for their insular, exclusionary social system, based on prejudice and racial and “ethnic” stereotyping. Thus many Chinese were shocked at the election of Barack Obama in 2008, seeing that the prevailing belief is that blacks and Hispanics are too stupid for anything but the bottom rail of occupations.

In India, the caste system has often been blamed on the British, but they only “codified” what was already in place; even with anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action, the vast majority of Dalits (the “untouchables”) still exist in abject poverty. The caste system in India is defined by the level of “impurity” of each group—another way of saying that the people doing manual labor are less “valued” than someone who does nothing but look pretty for a living; coming into contact with a member of the lower castes implies being “polluted” with their “impurities.” Not surprisingly, such attitudes are often carried with the recipient into this country, like an invasive weed. 

Of course there are some exceptions, although mainly those from India, who learn that “assimilation” into the wider culture requires more than just the will to; this may explain an avowed “socialist” on the Seattle city council, Kshama Sawant. However, the prevailing view is more in line with two Republican governors in the South—Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana—both of whose extreme right-wing views is easily worthy of patronage by white voters not by a notion of self-congratulatory “equality,” but by a sense of  shared racial (or racist) politics—or just out-bigoting the bigots. 

Thus it cannot be expected that Asians and homogeneous self-identity would be sensitive to this country’s long battle with discrimination and fight for civil rights. They have no right to talk about being “discriminated” against, since it is their wish to re-incorporate into this country the same institutional immoral and unethical definitions their home countries have. They have no sensitivity to the affronts caused by freely expressed racial stereotypes, and the harm it causes. When confronted by the hard fought for ideal of equal opportunity, they see themselves as its “victims.”

And so it is that a group representing Asian-American students is claiming that Harvard is “discriminating” against them by “adjusting” SAT scores to limit the already vastly over-represented numbers of Asian students enrolled, to allow a more representative number of black and Hispanics to be admitted; it is a wash for white student admittance, since they are also typically hurt by the tyranny of numbers that many believe should be the sole criteria of “merit.” Asians are apparently more adept at rote memory than other demographics, and this of course is the only consideration that the people who are suing Harvard believe has “merit.”

One of the typical complaints about blacks and Hispanics in this country is that they don’t “value” education, or don’t seem to “strive” to achieve. On wonders how it is supposed to help by putting up roadblocks and telling people that do that they can’t because they are not as “qualified” as others. The real problem, however, is that there always seems to be people who want to stop those who do for their own selfish reasons. This was behind the anti-affirmative push at the University of Washington, where a handful of black students (a large number who are athletes) were to “blame” for the thousands of white applicants not getting admitted.

 The reality is that because of the state’s poor education funding, UW actively “recruits” higher tuition-paying foreign students, who make-up a huge chunk of its enrollment; they are part of the real “problem”—the other that Asian-Americans are vastly over-represented. The Asian-Americans who are screaming “discrimination” are of course not complaining of the large number of international students, most of whom are Asian and most who are not required to meet the same standards of American students— just expected to bring with them their shiploads of cash. 

When affirmative action benefitted white women more than underrepresented minorities, they were more than happy to support it; white men were the principle source of angst opposed to equal opportunity. But as white women became the majority in colleges and universities, their sense of “entitlement” and “privilege” gravitated back toward their own racial identity; one shouldn’t forget that nearly 60 percent of white female voters in 2012 cast their lot with the Republican Mitt Romney. White women became the new face of the anti-affirmative action “cause”; self-obsession made mock of supposed moral and ethical “superiority,” which is just another gender myth.

And now Asians have become new enemy of equal opportunity in this country.  The 2018 Harvard freshman class profile included 34,296 applicants, 2,048 admitted, of which 1,662 matriculated. Obviously a tough standard for enrollment. 47 percent of those admitted are minority. Of those, 44 percent are Asian, although it likely much closer to  two-thirds, because the “ethnicity” of many of the Hispanics admitted is Caucasian and the majority of the 11 percent International students are from Asia. In comparison, the 2011 undergraduate enrollment at Princeton was 6.5 percent Latino, 5.1 percent black, 11.8 percent Asian (not including foreign students).

There is claim that “merit” is the sole criteria to have the opportunity to advance oneself. But it is more than rote memory and arrogance. One may note that that Asians—unlike, say, Hispanics—have almost no presence (outside the ubiquitous Teriyaki restaurants) in the political, social and cultural life of the country; their presence is almost solely insularly economic. They to a large extent have isolated themselves from the larger concerns of the country, keeping to themselves or to whatever advances their own self-satisfaction. Because Asians are so insular, their ideas toward the established minority groups in the country tend to be one of contempt—not hard when the white majority patronizingly refers to them as the “model” minority, although they are far from it either morally or ethically. “Merit” also means having an ethical and moral duty to all citizens.  

Harvard claims to have a moral and ethical obligation to the nation as a whole, not just to vastly overrepresented Asian students, many who are not citizens. “The College considers each applicant through an individualized, holistic review having the goal of creating a vibrant academic community that exposes students to a wide-range of differences: background, ideas, experiences, talents and aspirations,” according to Harvard attorney Robert Iuliano. Some, it would seem, do not think this is a laudable goal; only their own cupidity is. 

The bottom line is that these latest “victims” of “discrimination” are those who choose to take advantage of all the rights and none of responsibilities of being an American. This country has fought a long, hard battle against racial discrimination; it doesn’t need to import more of it.

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