It really didn’t take all that long for the Usual Suspects to slam former Harvard University President Claudine Gay’s resignation as the result of a vicious campaign by wicked Far-Right Extremists. Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose claim to fame is the creation of the 1619 Project on the history of slavery in the United States, tweeting about Dr Gay’s resignation: Continue reading
Tag Archives: #AffirmativeAction
In which Corey Jackson tells us that non-white ethnic groups just aren’t equal to white Americans
Assemblyman Corey Jackson, from his official biography page, and is a public document.
California state Assemblyman Corey A Jackson is not someone you would ordinarily think believed that non-white persons simply aren’t equal with whites, but darned if that isn’t exactly what he believed. Elected in 2022 to represent the 60th Assembly District, his main concern seems to be race. He was aghast, appalled, and definitely clutching his pearls when the Supreme Court ruled that yes, discrimination on the basis of race was unconstitutional in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, as well as the 2020 rejection of the Pyrite State’s Proposition 16, by the huge margin of 57.2% to 42.8%, which sought to overturn the 1996 state constitutional amendment which banned discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin and ethnicity as a factor in public university admissions and other state programs.
Think about that: in the ‘bluest’ of our blue states, an attempt to reinstate racial preferences, in which the proponents outspent the opposition by roughly 14-to-1, the attempt was defeated by a landslide margin. Continue reading
What the Social Engineering of the 1960s Got Wrong
My good friend William Teach wrote:
Oh, good grief. There are three races, as called originally: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid, with a small classification of Dravidians through the India region. Is this biology? Some will argue that it is, some will argue that it isn’t. Especially with all the inter-breeding over time.
Naturally, that got me on a rant!
We use race as a kind of shorthand for describing different concentrations of characterizations in the human gene pool, but in a lot of ways, it is misused for many things. The lovely Rachel Dolezal decided that she was black, perhaps as a scam, or perhaps she felt ‘culturally’ black. There really is a ‘black culture’ in the United States, something heavily concentrated in our larger cities, but that culture is not dependent upon the members of it being black; under other circumstances, it could have been adopted by whites or Asians. Just as easily, our American ‘white’ culture could have been generated among black people, had circumstances been different.
But here’s more to it than that. The entire, if never stated, purpose behind integration was to homogenize the American culture among all Americans, white and black alike. The assumption, by the white liberals who pushed it, was that that homogenized culture would have been the white American culture, with either no or very little ‘contamination’ by the black culture. Integration would eventually result in some very dark-skinned white Americans, with race being an insignificant concept socially. The apparently odd notion that homogenization results in all of the parts being combined and mixed together seems not to have occurred to them; they knew what they knew, which was the predominant, adult, white liberal culture of the 1960s.
Brookings published an article entitled “Are Asian Americans people of color or the next in line to become white?“, discussing the term “white adjacent”, and a Google search for “white adjacent” returned roughly 43,800 returns. Americans of Asian descent are ‘white adjacent’ because so many of them have been successful in our American culture and economy, in ways that black Americans have not, and every bit of that can be explained by the greater — not total — adoption of white American culture by Asian immigrants.
It’s actually pretty simple, but it is simple in a way that the left are loathe to accept: certain behaviors and cultural norms are just more economically efficient than others. Working hard and staying in school, trying to get the best grades and win the best collegiate admissions is a way to get ahead, and Asians — as well as American Jews, who are predominantly white — not only do this well, but they have been doing it even better than whites as a whole. Jews were doing this so much better than other white Americans that Harvard actually imposed a ‘Jewish quota‘ in the mid 1920s.
But black Americans, as a group, have not. Obeying the law, to not wind up in jail, and not devastating your neighborhood, is an economically efficient behavior, and black Americans have not adopted this behavior to as large an extent as Americans of Asian or European descent.
The result? A significantly larger percentage of black Americans with felony convictions, and spending time behind bars. And a felony conviction, something far more probable at a young age, late teens or early twenties, is a mostly unrecoverable-from error.
Naturally, several cities, including Philadelphia, have tried to help, not by stressing that people need to obey the law, but by banning police stops for minor traffic violations, which they said was criminalizing “driving while black.” The message was simple: black Philadelphians simply couldn’t be expected to be responsible enough to have their vehicles inspected — Pennsylvania state law requires annual inspections of vehicles at a state-certified garage — their head, tail, and signal lights working, or stop at stop signs.
There has even been active resistance in some predominantly black areas when it comes to assimilating ‘white’ culture, though, quite naturally, some on the left have pushed against the notion that internal culture can have positive or negative impacts on economic and social success. And waiting until full adulthood before realizing these things ignores the fact that getting behind as a child normally results in never catching up as an adult.
There is no particular reason to believe that black Americans can’t be as successful as whites or Asians in the larger economy, if they engage in behavior which is socially and economically useful and productive, and, in fact, many black Americans do just that. But racial statistics take in the aggregate, and a larger percentage of the black community have resisted assimilation, which results in the aggregate numbers showing less black success in the economy.
The integrationists of the 1960s actually had it right: if integration in the public schools, starting from the very beginning, socialized black children into the more successful white economy, black Americans would soon become just as successful as white Americans in the United States. But what they never foresaw was that black and white Americans would simply not have the kind of homogenized culture for which they had hoped, and that Asian and Hispanic immigrants — of which there were far fewer at that time — would wind up demonstrating that as those groups came far closer than black Americans to assimilating into the more successful parts of the economy.
Let’s forget about ‘social engineering’: it just hasn’t worked! White Americans can never somehow fix the problems of the black community. Rather, the social and cultural problems which plague black Americans can only be changed by black Americans, and we ought to recognize that.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.
Theodore Johnson says the quiet part out loud
The scorn heaped on Americans of Asian descent by black Americans since the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, declaring what we all knew, that the equal protection clause in the 14th Amendment prohibited Affirmative Action using racial preferences. Promise Li wrote, in The Nation:
(W)e must be clear about one thing: Asian American anti–affirmative action activists have not been simply “used” by white activists and duped into this white supremacist policy. They are active, militant co-conspirators with white conservatives.
Why? The Supreme Court case was made by Americans of Asian descent, because they were being discriminated against by Harvard University and the University of North Carolina — the parties to the case, but the discrimination has been much, much wider — being held to admissions standards far higher than black applicants, and even white applicants. This was hardly novel at Hahvahd, where a 15% maximum admissions quota was placed on Jews in the 1920s. Jerome Karabel argued, in a Slate article published well before the Court’s decision was announced, that the two were not the same, but made a practical case that they sure weren’t very different:
The comparison is superficially compelling. A longstanding body of scholarship—by Stephen Steinberg, Marcia Graham Synnott, myself, and others—does in fact establish that Harvard, threatened by an influx of high-achieving Jewish students, did impose quotas on Jewish applicants in the 1920s, using elusive nonacademic qualities such as “character” and “personality” to limit their numbers. And in recent years, Harvard and other elite institutions have faced a surge in applications from Asian Americans with outstanding academic records, and they, too, have often been plagued by lower scores on personality assessments. Over the past decade, the portrayal of Asian Americans as the “New Jews” has gained traction, appearing everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, from the Atlantic to the Times of London.
Whatever distinctions Mr Karabel took, they were distinctions without a difference!
So now we come The Washington Post:
Opinion: How the myth of a ‘model minority’ works to divide Americans
by Theodore R Johnson, Contributing Columnist | Tuesday, July 11, 2023 | 6:30 AM EDTTheodore R. Johnson, from his Twitter profile.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Bobby and Annie, two of my high school classmates from 30 years ago. They used these American names instead of their given names. Bobby, whose given name I never knew, is of Japanese descent. Annie, whose given name I always knew, is the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants. By any names, they are both Americans, born and bred.
It was the early 1990s, and I wondered why so many Asian American students picked new names. We grew up in North Carolina at a time when elementary school teachers wheeled out big TVs on steel media carts so we could watch college basketball in our classrooms. We could pronounce the name of Duke University’s former coach — Mike Krzyzewski — before we could tie our shoes. If we could say all those consonants, then we could say Annie’s given name. Meanwhile, Black Americans were becoming more creative with their names, and, let me tell you, Ka’Taydreeyah wasn’t changing her name to Kate for anyone.
“If we could say all those consonants,” huh? LOL! If you can tell me how you get shih-ZHEF-skee out of Krzyzewski, I’d be glad to read it.
Had Mr Johnson thought about it a bit, he might have realized that ‘Americanizing’ names was hardly something started by Asian-Americans; American Jews have been doing so for over a century because, yes, anti-Semitism has existed; the Harvard Jewish quota certainly proved that.
They’ve been on my mind after the Supreme Court’s ruling last week that effectively ended race- and ethnicity-based affirmative action in college admissions. The suit was filed on behalf of Asian American students who claimed such programs discriminated against them. The term “model minority” does not show up in the court’s opinion — but the myth helps in understanding why affirmative action was destined to pit Asian and Black Americans against one another. It was always going to end this way.
The model minority myth is the idea that Asian Americans, relative to other people of color in the United States, have a stronger commitment to hard work and determination that has resulted in economic and academic success. It says they acculturate better and with more intention. The myth suggests that Bobby and Annie felt compelled to choose familiar American names to ease their acculturation into White American society. But what of the taunting and beating? If this is how the nation treats its model minorities, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Mr Johnson wants us to believe that ‘hate crimes’ against Asian-Americans somehow make their “economic and academic success” irrelevant, but the admissions people at Harvard and UNC aren’t out on the streets, assaulting Asians for no discernable reason other than thuggery; they are educated people, in decently compensated positions, in our hoitiest and toitiest universities.
“The way to stop dis-crimination on the basis of race is to stop discrim-inating on the basis of race.” — Chief Justice John Roberts, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1
This myth is a recent invention. Asian Americans — admittedly an inaccurate catchall group name — were long subjected to discriminatory policies in the United States. Historian Ellen Wu describes the characterization of Asian Americans and immigrants — specifically from Japan and China — through the 1940s and 1950s as definitively not-White. But as the geopolitical interests of the nation evolved after World War II and the civil rights movement domestically took center stage, she says, a narrative emerged that painted Asian Americans as “the model minority — a racial group distinct from the white majority, but lauded as well assimilated, upwardly mobile, politically nonthreatening, and definitively not-Black.”
Here Mr Johnson essentially complains that Asian-Americans have done exactly what we have said immigrants should do: assimilate into the larger American culture, and work hard to make themselves successful. That, after all, was what was expected of other waves of immigrants, mostly from Europe: Germans, Irish, Slavs, and, Heaven forfend!, those so successful that Harvard had to quota-restrict them Jooooos.
Perceptions of Asian Americans changed just as the concept of colorblindness was redefined in American discourse. When Asian people were “definitively not-White,” the idea of a colorblind society was the antithesis of the hierarchical society structured with White people at the top. As the civil rights movement began racking up policy wins, Asian Americans were redefined as model minorities and “colorblind” came to mean race is no longer a factor; as such, race-conscious remedies are the new racism.
By the late 1960s, many White politicians were using the model-minority concept in two primary ways. The first was as proof that the government had sufficiently addressed racism in our laws and that the playing field was now level. What else could explain how Asian Americans, after decades of overt discrimination and oppression, achieved such success? The second was an explicit counterargument to civil rights leaders who insisted tailored, race-conscious policies were necessary to address the lingering effects of slavery and Jim Crow. It made Black people the polar opposite of the model minority, shifting the onus for racial disparities almost completely onto Black people and their supposed lack of initiative and ingenuity.
And here we come back to Mr Johnson’s opening. “Bobby” and “Annie”, he said, picked very Americanized names, as they were trying, almost certainly encouraged by their parents, to fit in, to assimilate, while “Ka’Taydreeyah” certainly would not. “Black Americans were becoming more creative with their names,” Mr Johnson wrote, but has that not worked out to be a separation of black Americans from the rest of American culture?
Oh, wait, I’m not supposed to say something like that, am I?
Following this thinking through to its logical conclusion, the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling is not surprising. Its portrayal of Asian Americans as model assimilators is not a compliment, nor is it proof that structural racism is an artifact of the past. This portrayal serves only to exploit one minority group, to condemn others and to argue against accounting for a people’s history.
Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Math = White Supremacy
The legal arguments for and against affirmative action in higher education will continue. Universities will try new ways of diversifying their populations, and begrudged people will sue. The model-minority myth is sure to be a weapon in these battles.
Mr Johnson has just told us that those who have suffered actual discrimination in the pursuit of Affirmative Action haven’t really suffered anything, but are simply “begrudged,” as though someone cut ahead of them in the check-out line at Kroger, rather than someone not being allowed to shop at that store.
But policy aside, the myth cannot escape the particularly ugly set of assumptions that results when American exceptionalism meets racial hierarchy: If you are Black in America, you can become an exceptional person; if you are Asian in America, you are an exceptional people; and if you are White in America, you are the prototype. We’ve been working ourselves away from that America for some time, but we risk returning to it if we trade one set of racialized myths for another.
Mr Johnson concludes by telling us that we are all different, yet somehow, some way, he cannot conceive, or at least will not recognize, that different actions can and will produce different results, and that if those actions tend to be internally consistent among racial or ethnic groups, those groups will, in the aggregate, see disparate results.
It’s a very simple reality that people do not want to recognize: the social, economic, and political culture which developed under European people has produced stronger and more prosperous social and economic results. The “model minorities” in the United States which had been previously discriminated against, Jews in the early twentieth century, and Asians somewhat later, assimilated and adopted much of that Western civilization culture, and they have prospered in the United States, and there is no particular reason of which I can think why black Americans could not do the same.
The Supreme Court destroys all chances of race-based ‘reparations’
It was 2003 when the Supreme Court released its decision in Grutter v Bollinger, 539 U. S. ____ (2003), in which a bare majority allowed the University of Michigan Law School to continue to consider race in its admissions decisions. Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor concluded, in something we have cited previously:
We take the Law School at its word that it would like nothing better than to find a race-neutral admissions formula and will terminate its race-conscious admissions program as soon as practicable. See Brief for Respondents Bollinger et al. 34; Bakke, supra, at 317ñ318 (opinion of Powell, J.) (presuming good faith of university officials in the absence of a showing to the contrary). It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity in the context of public higher education. Since that time, the number of minority applicants with high grades and test scores has indeed increased. We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.[1]Grutter v Bollinger, Decision of the Court, page 31 of the .pdf file.
I have long said that it was internally both significant and stupid that the Supreme Court allowed something it said would be unconstitutional come June 23, 2028 to be allowable up until that time. Well, it has taken 20 of those 25 years, but the Supreme Court has finally righted that wrong. The Supreme Court finally released its decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.
To hear the principal dissent tell it, Grutter blessed such programs indefinitely, until “racial inequality will end.” Post, at 54 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.). But Grutter did no such thing. It emphasized—not once or twice, but at least six separate times—that race-based admissions programs “must have reasonable durational limits” and that their “deviation from the norm of equal treatment” must be “a temporary matter.” 539 U. S., at 342. The Court also disclaimed “[e]nshrining a permanent justification for racial preferences.” Ibid. Yet the justification for race-based admissions that the dissent latches on to is just that—unceasing.[2]Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Decision of the Court, page 36-37 of the decision, and pages 44-45 of the .pdf file.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, emphasized what we have known all along: the racially biased admissions structure being used by colleges and universities was not moving steadily, or in any way at all, to a terminal date in 2028, and that the schools which were party to this case, Harvard University and the University of North Carolina made no claims that they were proceeding toward that end.
In what may be an underappreciated footnote number 9, the Chief Justice noted:
The principal dissent rebukes the Court for not considering adequately the reliance interests respondents and other universities had in Grutter. But as we have explained, Grutter itself limited the reliance that could be placed upon it by insisting, over and over again, that race-based admissions programs be limited in time. See supra, at 20. Grutter indeed went so far as to suggest a specific period of reliance — 25 years — precluding the indefinite reliance interests that the dissent articulates. Cf. post, at 2–4 (KAVANAUGH, J., concurring). Those interests are, moreover, vastly overstated on their own terms. Three out of every five American universities do not consider race in their admissions decisions. See Brief for Respondent in No. 20–1199, p. 40. And several States — including some of the most populous (California, Florida, and Michigan) — have prohibited race-based admissions outright. See Brief for Oklahoma et al. as Amici Curiae 9, n. 6.[3]Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Decision of the Court, page 38 of the decision, and page 46 of the .pdf file.
If roughly 60% of American colleges and universities do not consider race at all in their admissions decisions, then it becomes clear that the consideration of race is unnecessary.
Court decisions are difficult to read, in large part due to all of the internal citations, but also because lawyers are, let’s face it, not usually all that great with prose. Nevertheless, I’d invite all of my readers — both of them! — to follow the link and read the decision.
There will be thousands of articles about this decision, and at least in our nation’s professional media, most will be negative. Solomon Jones in The Philadelphia Inquirer has a column entitled “Affirmative action is racial justice. The Supreme Court ruling is a step backwards. To be blunt, right-wing activists aren’t fighting to abolish racial preferences. They’re fighting to maintain them.” Mr Jones went through many of the reasons he believes we need Affirmative Action, but his column is noteworthy in one major way: he made no argument at all that the Court’s decision was based on a faulty reading of the Constitution.[4]Actually, Mr Jones’ column reads very much as though it was written before the Court’s decision was released, and that he had not been able to read the decision before he wrote his piece.
In a mostly straight news article, Susan Snyder reported on how some Pennsylvania universities will deal with the decision, noting the sole exception the Chief Justice allowed, that in individual admission essays, the way racial discrimination impacted an individual applicant, and how he overcame them, could be considered. Count on admissions departments to start advising applicants to write about that!
The Editorial Board also weighed in on the subject.
But there was one brief point in the decision that seemed very important to me, and which I haven’t seen mentioned by anyone else:
The Court soon adopted Justice Powell’s analysis as its own. In the years after Bakke, the Court repeatedly held that ameliorating societal discrimination does not constitute a compelling interest that justifies race-based state action. “[A]n effort to alleviate the effects of societal discrimination is not a compelling interest,” we said plainly in Hunt, a 1996 case about the Voting Rights Act. 517 U. S., at 909–910. We reached the same conclusion in Croson, a case that concerned a preferential government contracting program. Permitting “past societal discrimination” to “serve as the basis for rigid racial preferences would be to open the door to competing claims for ‘remedial relief ’ for every disadvantaged group.” 488 U. S., at 505. Opening that door would shutter another—“[t]he dream of a Nation of equal citizens . . . would be lost,” we observed, “in a mosaic of shifting preferences based on inherently unmeasurable claims of past wrongs.” Id., at 505–506. “[S]uch a result would be contrary to both the letter and spirit of a constitutional provision whose central command is equality.”[5]Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Decision of the Court, page 35-36 of the decision, and pages 43-44 of the .pdf file.
The Chief Justice spent a significant amount of time, earlier in the decision, noting how the Fourteenth Amendment specified equal protection of the law, and that many subsequent decisions, as well as statements by elected officials and others, meant that equal protection of the law meant that all were equal under the law, regardless of race. With the paragraph above, the Court said that neither “ameliorating societal discrimination” nor allowing “past societal discrimination” to “serve as the basis for rigid racial preferences would be to open the door to competing claims for ‘remedial relief ’ for every disadvantaged group” was constitutionally allowable, and that must certainly mean that payments or advantages given to black Americans, from the taxes of white Americans, for the enslavement of their distant ancestors, can be legal.
Robert Stacy McCain noted, amusingly enough, that only Donald Trump, among all living Presidents, is not the descendant of slave owners, as Mr Trump’s family did not arrive on these shores until after slavery had been ended. Since only direct injury, caused by a specifiable person or institution, is the basis for restorative payments, and there are no living Americans who were enslaved, it is impossible, under the Court’s standard to allow all black Americans, none of whom were directly injured by slavery, to be paid by white Americans, none of whom owned slaves and most of whom cannot be traced back to a slaveowner.
Naturally, the Usual Suspects are aghast that the Court said that racial preferences violate the Fourteenth Amendment, but the Court has, for at least 45 years since Regents of the University of California v Bakke tried to massage the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to mean something other than what it actually says. Now, at last, the Court has decided that yes, equal protection of the laws actually means equal protection of the laws.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.
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References
| ↑1 | Grutter v Bollinger, Decision of the Court, page 31 of the .pdf file. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Decision of the Court, page 36-37 of the decision, and pages 44-45 of the .pdf file. |
| ↑3 | Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Decision of the Court, page 38 of the decision, and page 46 of the .pdf file. |
| ↑4 | Actually, Mr Jones’ column reads very much as though it was written before the Court’s decision was released, and that he had not been able to read the decision before he wrote his piece. |
| ↑5 | Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Decision of the Court, page 35-36 of the decision, and pages 43-44 of the .pdf file. |
More discrimination against Asians by the left
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” — Chief Justice John Roberts, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1
From The Wall Street Journal:
The Revolt of the Unwoke
Three progressive San Francisco school board members are targeted for a recall.
By William McGurn | July 26, 2021 | 6:26 PM EDT
If the land of woke has a capital, it’s San Francisco. Which makes it all the more extraordinary that the City by the Bay has now become ground zero for a revolt by unwoke moms and dads.
The racism of white liberals has made itself clear
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” — Chief Justice John Roberts, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1
A PTA Purge of Asians
America’s top public high school shows us what discrimination looks like today.
By William McGurn | July 12, 2021 6:14 pm ET
When Jeannie C. Riley released “Harper Valley P.T.A.” in 1968, her hit single mocked a parent-teacher association for telling a school mom she was wearing her dresses way too high. Today the real-life sequel is playing out at the Virginia Parent Teacher Association and its chapter at a high-performing public school in Fairfax County. This time, however, parents are complaining about the PTA—that it’s in cahoots with those watering down entrance standards with the aim of reducing the school’s Asian-American population.
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is a school for gifted students ranked No. 1 among all public high schools nationwide by U.S. News & World Report. In December the county school board changed its admissions process, replacing a rigorous, race-blind entrance exam with a “holistic” (read: subjective) formula that includes grades but also puts caps on the number of students each middle school could send to TJ—a de facto limit on middle schools with high numbers of Asian-American students.
The desired result has been achieved. The percentage of Asian-Americans admitted to TJ dropped to 54% this year from 73% last year. Whites, blacks and Latinos all saw their numbers go up. No doubt this is only the beginning.
Were such a program installed to lower the percentage of blacks or Hispanics at a selective high school, the left would be screaming bloody murder. But when it punishes a high-achieving group, even a minority one, you can see what has happened: equality of opportunity has been replaced with “equity,” a ‘progressive’ shorthand for equality of results. I’d really like to just quote the entire OpEd piece, but that’s plagiarism, and a violation of Fair Use standards. Read the entire thing, if you can. Sadly, about half of the article is behind the subscriber paywall.
- One of these coalition candidates is Harry Jackson, a retired Navy officer. In a March 10 piece for The Washington Post, he explained his position this way: “When I see the effort to water down the admissions standards to TJ — and let’s be clear, that effort is led by paternalistic White liberals who are determined to ‘help’ minority students at any cost — I see it for what it is: a tacit admission that they don’t think Black and Hispanic students have what it takes to compete on merit.”
It’s more than just that. Not only do the white liberals not think that black and Hispanic students “have what it takes to compete on merit,” but they dismiss the achievements of students of Asian ethnicity as “white adjacent.”
- Asra Nomani is a Bombay-born newswoman who previously worked as a reporter for this newspaper. She is also the mother of a recent TJ grad, a member of the local PTA and a co-founder of the Coalition for TJ. She describes what’s happening this way:
“The mostly white Virginia PTA is trying to hijack our all-minority TJ victory because we are an inconvenient minority for them. The woke warriors are so afraid of our mostly immigrant, mostly Asian parents because we defy their narrative of oppressed minorities in a racist America. We’re unapologetic, and that scares them so much that they don’t even realize how they are now perpetrators of a systemic racism and tyranny they claim to oppose.”
It’s more than that. For the #woke to accept the notion that Americans of Asian descent might have achieved the success that they have due to their hard work — this Washington Post article tries to debunk that idea — then the left would have to accept the idea that behavior does influence success, and the lack of it, and that would open the door to the horrible, horrible notion that less successful groups are less successful due to their own behavior.
- It’s certainly not bringing out the best in people who pride themselves on racial sensitivity, Virginia’s education secretary, Atif Qarni, likened Asian-American kids taking test preparation to athletes taking illegal performance-enhancing drugs.
Really? So parents trying to do the best thing for their children, such as giving them the opportunity to practice for admissions tests, is a terrible, terrible thing, but parents who might send their kids to, say, a basketball camp, to try to improve skills to make their high school teams, that’s OK?
You know, that’s what parents do: they try to make life easier for their children, they try to give their kids the best start on life that they can. Isn’t that what sending their children to school is all about in the first place?
William McGurn’s closing paragraph, however, pretty much misses the boat:
- Today’s targeting of successful Asian-American kids lacks the crudity of a Jim Crow lunch counter or a whites-only drinking fountain. But it is no less ugly — and no less racially discriminatory — for being more genteel.
That’s just it: what the ‘progressives’ are doing today does not lack crudity, and is not more genteel. It’s obvious, it’s blatant, it’s visible to anyone with the eyes to see . . . and the willingness to look.
A stunning lack of self-awareness at The Harvard Crimson
I will admit it: The Harvard Crimson is not one of my first reads of the day, and I would not have spotted the article referenced below were it not for this tweet from my good friend Hube of The College Fix. It seems that the Editorial Board of the Crimson are just terribly, terribly upset at discrimination against Asians:
Anti-Asian Hate and Atlanta’s Aftermath
By The Crimson Editorial Board | April 5, 2021
Racism directed against Asian people in America is old and urgent. The recent murder spree carried out in Asian spas and massage parlors in Atlanta — in which eight people, including six Asian women, were shot and killed — is the latest horrific entry in the history of violence Asian American and Pacific Islanders have been subject to in the United States.
This violence sickens and shocks us, but perhaps our shock is a failure in and of itself. Asian Americans have been sounding the alarm on their lack of protection for over a year as attacks against Asian Americans have sharply risen. Covid-19, despicably dubbed “Kung Flu” and “the Chinese Virus” by former President Donald Trump, has triggered a wave of irrational violence against people of Asian descent. Between this piece’s publication and when our board first gathered to grapple with the Atlanta shooting, a woman of Filipino descent was brutally attacked in Times Square by a man spitting that she did not “belong here.” Yet even as the threat became more evident and pressing — even as New York reported a more than nine-fold increase in anti-Asian hate crimes, and an 84-year-old Thai man lost his life in San Francisco to a brutal attack his family describes as racially motivated — most of American society remained unfazed until Atlanta. It took a massacre for us to pay attention.
Would it be wrong of me to point out that the cities in which the incidents pointed out by the Editorial Board occurred, Atlanta, New York, and San Francisco, are heavily Democratic?
The suspect in the Atlanta shootings claims that he was not racially motivated; that his decision to shoot up three separate Asian-affiliated establishments was a reflection of his ‘“sex addiction” and desire to remove the “temptation” Asian spas presented. The sheriff in the county the crime took place seemingly sympathized, saying on the alleged perpetrator: “He was pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.”
This coddling and utterly absurd response underscore how racism and white supremacy shaped the course and fallout of the Atlanta shooting.
I do love how the Editorial Board, made up of matriculants at one of the most highly selective universities in the country, have managed to conclude that the accused killer’s motive was different from what he said it was. Ought we not to expect that such brilliant students would do something really radical like, oh, examine the evidence?
Have they interviewed the suspect? Have they talked to him? The Editorial board noted searches for Asian women are among the top hits on a pornographic site, and assumed that because millions and millions of (mostly) men search for such, that this one individual male must have an Asian fetish. If the left object to my pointing out that the anti-Asian attacks listed above occurred in heavily Democratic cities, that just because the cities are liberal in the aggregate does not mean that the perpetrators of individual acts couldn’t be evil reich-wing Trump supporters, then the logical fallacy of the Editorial Board’s statement becomes obvious.
We are a country with a rich history of coddling white, male mass murderers. Authorities and the media extend undue sympathy even when their crimes demonstrate an extreme disregard for human life. It’s a privilege we rarely afford other demographics; one we only seem eager to extend when victims, unlike the perpetrator, belong to a minority group: Cops buying mass murderer Dylan Roof Burger King comes to mind. The dynamic is symptomatic of how racist biases and misconceptions can shape our response to crime, and of how failing to understand their pervasive influence can mean completely misinterpreting the root of tragedies born from racial hatred.
Dylann Roof was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on South Carolina state charges, and received a capital sentence on federal charges. I’m not certain just what more can be done to him.
Of course, the Editorial Board seem to think that Mr Roof was coddled because the police brought him food after his arrest, when he said he was hungry. Not feeding Mr Roof, who told the police he hadn’t eaten for a couple of days, would have been a civil rights violation which could have tainted his arrest. It took me, with my baccalaureate degree from the not-so-selective University of Kentucky, about three seconds to find that information.[1]While UK has selective admissions now, when I matriculated there in the fall of 1971, any Kentucky resident who had been graduated from an accredited Kentucky high school was guaranteed admission. UK … Continue reading
Solidarity means focusing on our common societal goal of defeating white supremacy, whatever shape it takes. In doing so, we must avoid pitting urgently needed movements against each other; forcing them to prove their comparative validity. Oppression Olympics are counterproductive, particularly when the common, violent enemy looms as large as white supremacy. Stop Asian Hate must function as a rightful ally of its counterparts like Black Lives Matter; minority ethnic groups standing in solidarity against the lashes of white hatred and rage. As for white Americans: Start fighting white supremacy in your own communities.
Solidarity among marginalized groups counters white supremacy in and of itself by chipping at the model minority myth, used to pit Asian people against other minority groups and to promote the falsehood that anyone can succeed their way out of racism. The financial success of some Asian Americans has been weaponized to perpetuate the notion that other people of color could achieve the same success if only they worked hard enough. The model minority myth not only glosses over the huge income disparity that exists within the Asian American community but also ignores the historical injustices and systemic barriers that have been constructed to keep African Americans specifically in poverty. Expressions of unity are one way to dispel this insidious myth, alongside rejecting any stereotype that caricatures the incredibly diverse Asian American and Pacific Islander community as a monolith.
I have omitted much of the editorial, because I do not wish to plagiarize, and try to adhere to fair use standards. You can follow the link to the original, but at least when I read it, at 8:20 AM, there wasn’t a single word in it notiong that their own university, Hahvahd, has an admissions department which regularly discriminates against Asian applicants!
Not that it’s just Harvard. The Justice Department, under President Trump, brought a lawsuit against Yale University for the same thing, but the Biden Administration dropped it two weeks after coming into office.
Finally, to our Asian American peers: We see you, and understand that Atlanta is just the latest straw after a year-long onslaught of unjustified vilification and hatred. You deserve better than the response Harvard has given you, and more than what this editorial could ever offer. In the aftermath of Atlanta, we can offer no silver lining; only a reaffirmed commitment from this board to listen, learn, and use our voice to discuss and dismantle anti-Asian hate as best we know how.
If the Editorial Board see them, just how do the Board not mention, in their long editorial, that their own University discriminates against Asians. But, the Board, being beneficiaries of Harvard’s admissions processes, might not want to take that step. It is, after all, a reasonable question: if Harvard admitted strictly on academic achievement, how many of the Board would have been quoting Tom Cruise in Risky Business, “Looks like the University of Illinois!“[2]The Editorial Board could not have been unaware, given that the Crimson’s website lists as it’s fifth most read article Texas Files Amicus Brief Supporting SFFA in Harvard Admissions … Continue reading
References
| ↑1 | While UK has selective admissions now, when I matriculated there in the fall of 1971, any Kentucky resident who had been graduated from an accredited Kentucky high school was guaranteed admission. UK made up for that with a high flunk-out rate. |
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| ↑2 | The Editorial Board could not have been unaware, given that the Crimson’s website lists as it’s fifth most read article Texas Files Amicus Brief Supporting SFFA in Harvard Admissions Lawsuit. That article was published just three days earlier. |
The truth? The truth? They can’t handle the truth!
I have had my differences with Patrick Frey, the Los Angeles County assistant district attorney who blogs as Patterico. A devout #NeverTrumper, I believe that he allowed his hatred of President Trump to outweigh the huge policy problems of having Joe Biden in the White House.
Nevertheless, unlike some of the conservative #NeverTrumpers, he actually remained (mostly) conservative.
Law Professor Ends Her Career By Speaking Uncomfortable Truths About Race
As a second professor ends his own career by listening.
Patterico | March 14, 2021
Let’s handle the latest Big Racial Controversy in a different way. Instead of reading a predictable, cookie-cutter story summarizing the Big Racial Transgression and the aftermath, let’s watch the transgression unfold first, and imagine how we should react if we saw this happen but didn’t know how it had played out. I’ll give you the cookie-cutter summary afterwards. (You already know if you read the headline.) Try to ignore the commentary in the next two tweets and just watch the videos.
.@GeorgetownLaw negotiations Professors Sandra Sellers and David Batson being openly racist on a recorded Zoom call.
Beyond unacceptable. pic.twitter.com/q5MoWjBok8
— Hassan Ahmad (@hahmad1996) March 10, 2021
Here’s the transcript.
PROFESSOR SANDRA SELLERS: They were a bit, jumbled?
PROFESSOR DAVID BATSON: Yeah.
PROFESSOR SANDRA SELLERS: [Laughs] That’s the best way I can put it. It’s like, OK, let me reason through that, what you just said, kind of thing.
PROFESSOR DAVID BATSON: Right, right.
PROFESSOR SANDRA SELLERS: Yeah, unfortunately. And you know what? I hate to say this, I end up having this, you know, angst, every semester that a lot of my lower ones are blacks. Happens almost every semester.
PROFESSOR DAVID BATSON: Hmm, mmm. [Nods]
PROFESSOR SANDRA SELLERS: And it’s like, “Oh, come on.” Get some really good ones, but there’s also usually some that are just plain at the bottom, and it drives me crazy.
PROFESSOR DAVID BATSON: Yeah, and, and —
PROFESSOR SANDRA SELLERS: So I feel bad.There is more: namely, the other professor’s response.
You can follow the link embedded in the article title to read more; the entire thing is around 2,600 words long, but, very briefly, Mr Frey discusses the obvious impacts of Affirmative Action, that admitting lesser qualified students based on race means that those students, being less well-prepared, are more likely to underperform or fail.
In the meantime, Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania, has apologized for the private remarks of two nursing professors. At least as far as I can tell from The Philadelphia Inquirer article, there were no racially based comments made, but simply general assessments of their students.
In the video, two members of the nursing faculty at Widener University are discussing their students’ academic progress in blunt terms.
“They’re going to bomb this next test,” one said to the other, who responds, “I think so, too.”
“I don’t care though. Let ‘em fail.” the first one said.
The conversation was meant to be private, according to the university, but the professors mistakenly shared it with their nursing class, causing conversation on social media accounts and outrage among some students, parents and alumni in the Widener community. . . . .
“They do not know anatomy at all,” Francis says on the video, expressing concern that students would “move on” and not “represent the school well.” Marquis said she got so mad at students last year before the pandemic hit that she decided to make her “heart failure” questions harder.
I’m just an evil reich-wing conservative, but it seems to me that when a nursing professor assesses that her students “do not know anatomy at all,” that’s not being mean and cruel and vicious, but a real assessment on something nurses are supposed to know. That statement isn’t one for which the University should apologize, but one which should concern the school about how poorly the students are doing.
If a waitress messes up an order, a customer might not get the food he wanted. If an accountant makes a mistake, the books won’t balance. But if a registered nurse makes a mistake, a patient can die! Depending upon specialty, a nurse has to be able to accurately administer chemotherapy, which is basically the administration of poison into the body in a dose designed to kill cancer cells but not quite kill the patient. A nurse has to be able to accurately assess a patient. A nurse has to be able to read orders and spot errors that a tired doctor might have made.
But now, the most important educational concern is that the school not hurt someone’s precious little feelings. That’s far more important than actually educating students, and granting degrees only to those who have learned the material.
The truth is not always a pleasant thing, but the truth is that not all people were created equal, that some were simply born smarter than others, some simply worked harder than others, some are simply better prepared for academic challenges than others. But as long as we pretend differently, as long as we fail to recognize the plain truth right in front of our faces, we are going to get poorer performances from people who asked for admissions and jobs and roles for which they were simply not well-prepared.
Mr Frey’s article noted the differences between performance in law schools based on race, differences which are very real. My part noted two Widener University professors, and race does not seem to be a part of the equation; the problem was that most of their students, regardless of race, weren’t performing, and weren’t performing in a field of study which could lead to them having other people’s lives in their hands.
The acceptance of mediocrity leads to mediocre performance; the acceptance of the lesser leads to poorer performance.