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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