We believe that Americans should be judged by their hopes and their abilities and their hard work. They shouldn’t be punished for any of those just because they aren’t the right race.
This quote is the winning argument against racial discrimination in America. It is worthy of Dr. Martin Luther King – except I am quoting Wai Wah Chin, president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York. Mr. Chin opposes the city’s educational gerrymandering that recalls the Jim Crow era – except it is now Asian-Americans being denied equal opportunity under the law.
Asian lives matter too. As a generalization, Asians have advanced E Pluribus Unum (out of many one) as well as any other immigrant group. I believe their increasing numbers have been the paramount driver of American exceptionalism and dynamism in the last half century. Look around you: Asian-American contributions in commerce, education and medicine are impossible to ignore. Likewise, it is hard to overlook so-called liberals punching up at Asians because of their success.
The history of American liberalism includes right-minded condemnation of laws and social constructs that punched down at under-achieving minorities, whose aggrieved status was the result of discrimination. To be sure, it’s patently un-American to restrict building access to the disabled, deny Blacks the right to vote, or refuse to employ gay men. Furthermore, the central axiom of all civil-rights campaigns is equal opportunity under the law regardless of race, creed or sexual orientation.
According to our founding fathers, this equal-opportunity axiom is self-evident and to be applied universally; therefore, it is most illiberal (and wrong) to punch up at Asian-American students whose hopes, abilities and hard work deserve better than reverse discrimination. Yet, Harvard University and New York City’s high-performing specialized public high schools (HPSHS) discriminate against Asian-Americans for no other reason than to advance preferred minorities.
It is a fact that Asians have suffered unequal treatment at the hands of white America, beginning with being called the “yellow peril” shortly after immigrating here. Discriminatory laws were prevalent: the US government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 to stop all immigration from China, and many western states enacted anti-miscegenation laws that prevented Chinese from marrying whites. Japanese-Americans suffered widespread incarceration during WWII, and white liberals sit in silence when Al Sharpton called for the 1990 black boycott of Korean-American businesses in New York City.
When advanced education is central to achieving the American Dream, white liberals, such as New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Harvard President Lawrence Bacow, justify punching up at smart Asian kids because they belong to “advantaged” minorities. Harvard has a history of punching up: restricting super-qualified Jewish applicants in the early 20thcentury, when its president (Lawrence Lowell) claimed too many Jewish students would drive away Gentile applicants.
The concept of equal opportunity under the law for all should make it illegal to invent an “advantaged” minority group, even when that group has overcome discrimination. Therefore, it is wrong for white liberals to reduce Asian students to a stereotype. Apparently, living in 2-parent households, studying long hours and obeying the rules (laws) has created an unfair “advantage” in the USA. This odious (and subjective) over-generalization prevents an individual’s pursuit of happiness based on race.
De Blasio is understandably putting politics before equal opportunity in a city where Black and Latino students are 70% of the population but only 10% of HPSHS enrollment, while Asians are 13% of New York’s student population but 74% of the HPSHS enrollment. The mayor’s specific affirmative action, the Discovery Program (an HPSHS feeder program) is reserved for students from public schools with a 60% poverty rate. In essence, de Blasio has imposed racial quotas through educational gerrymandering that intentionally discriminates against Asian-Americans.
Wen Fa, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, claims de Blasio’s HPSHS quotas lock Asians in the city’s horrible public schools, where only 46.7% of grade-school students are proficient in English (and only 42.7% are proficient in math). Absent Asians and Whites, those proficiency numbers fall to 34% for English and 25.4% for Math. Asians understand the practical effect of this reverse discrimination: a “normal” New York City public education does not prepare their children for MIT, Stanford or Duke.
In a broader sense, Mayor de Blasio is a white supremacist deciding the fates of minorities for political purposes. Americans of every political stripe should oppose race-based educational quotas that weaken the concept of an American meritocracy, because ability and hard work have created an exceptional culture and dynamic economy. By promoting Black and Latino students over Asian students, de Blasio creates racial division and encourages Asian families to leave New York City.
In closing, put yourself in the shoes of an Asian-American, who has been called “Chink” or “Nip” or “Wog” or “Zip” – and imagine how you would feel if your child was restricted from high-performance high schools by racial quotas or needed higher test scores to get into Harvard. Ouch! This is today’s America, where identity politics control the pursuit of happiness and E Pluribus Unum is of little concern to modern liberals.