Anti-racism betrays Asian students
unherd.com
unherd.com
Asian parents for the most part aren't spending money to guarantee their kids entry into schools like this (though some are), the vast majority are just doing a better job of parenting because they don't have any other option if they want their kids to have a better life than what they came from.
I spend a lot of time in Asia so I have come to know many people that have saved up and made the move to Australia or the US in the hopes of giving their kids a better chance in life. They make every sacrifice to this end. Upending their lives, moving away from their social support network (often leaving grandparents behind which is a massive deal for Asian culture). When you understand this it makes much more sense why there is so much pressure on the kids to do well and for the most part they accept that and most come to appreciate it once they are old enough to understand what it cost to get them where they are.
It's easy for a bunch of rich white folk to look at a nerdy Asian kid and think they have an unfair advantage but in reality an entire family worth of resources is likely behind that kid, trying to make them the best they can be.
Maybe instead of being racist dicks we can learn something from Asian culture here, atleast understand the tradeoffs and don't pretend it's not hard work and time that is powering these results.
Nigerian immigrants have higher educational attainment when compared to Nigerian-Americans that were born citizens. It doesn't mean Nigerians born in the US are lazy, only that they are operating under different circumstances. The idea that Asians are just inherently good at math or whatever is incredibly offensive, these things are a product of nurture not nature.
i could say the sky is blue. that's one conclusion. you're saying in addition to that statement you can conclude that everything else is not blue. which is ridiculous because the ocean is blue too. the whole "the opposite is true" logic is a fallacy.
Personally, I think the answer is somewhere in the middle.
Does your experience not suggest the same?
I'd certainly be happy to change our admissions process such that it's purely meritocratic (but then remove legacy admissions, which mostly benefit white students). However, this idea that minorities need to "assimilate" into US culture is exactly the kind of racist nonsense that makes us decry the norms as whiteness. A lot of immigrants to the US face direct and indirect violence for things as simple as wearing a hijab. Having to present ourselves in a way that's comfortable for you all to not view us as a stereotype is taxing, especially when these efforts are aggregated as "anti white and anti asian hate"
Like what even is anti-white hate when less than a century ago Italians were considered nonwhite? "White" as a social construct only exists to contrast with ethnicities we view as lesser. We should not collapse 300 million Americans into 5 groups (none of which cover those from the middle east) and then base decisions off of such a subjective classification. It's obviously going to cause issues
Let's use a Middle Eastern person as an example. They're geographically from Asia, but aren't considered Asian, and have significantly differentiated cultures from what is traditionally considered "Asian" culture. Then, the US largely classifies them as white independent of how "white-passing" they are. I'm just baffled in general by it all at this point.
US racial categorizations are too fuzzy as concepts to warrant seriousness in defining people. Yet, despite this, people heavily invested in this want to perpetuate and solidify information like:
https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/926/d5f/a334baf0d43cd480b3ea...
Which starts to explain why they want to discriminate against Asians for perceived cultural similarities with what they consider "white culture."
It's frustrating to watch unfold.
They specifically said "anti-racism' which does not mean "against racism", any more than the Patriot Act was Patriotic. It's a word game played by groups of people seeking to legitimize their racism against specific groups of people who tend to overachieve (ie asian, ashkenazi jews etc). It's big with the same group of people who have replaced racial equality with racial equity. At the end of the day, it's just all about "positive racial discrimination" in their mind.
Google did the same thing, by grouping whites and asians together in their diversity stats.
[0] https://www.asian-dawn.com/2020/11/17/school-district-catego...
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2018/10/29...
[2] https://www.epi.org/blog/racial-disparities-in-income-and-po...
The systemic part is especially interesting. A concept I was exposed to quite late in life by black colleagues and friends was the idea of “Acting White” [0]. Basically, a (black) colleague of mine first introduced me to the term when he recalled how he was ostracized at school for saying out loud he enjoyed trigonometry (something everyone at the table shared seeing as everyone went to CS or engineering).
Selective schools like Lowell here in SF must be a heaven for kids stuck with peers that are dragging them down. It’s really sad they want to end it with a lottery and race quota.
> The obvious explanation is something like that Asians are too hard-working to be held back by white racism, but as others have noted it's hard not to take that as implying that blacks and non-white hispanics are inferior to Asians in their work ethic. Lumping whites and Asians together makes all of these difficulties go away.
That right here is the reasons humanities are considered a joke and politely ignored.
> The question of whether or not white hispanics suffer from racism is cloudy, because the data is rarely broken out.
This story came from an acquaintance, so I have no way of verifying it’s true. But at their daughter’s school several years ago the college counselor basically told a girl with a Spanish sounding name to claim she was Hispanic. Her parents were white, and her dad was from Europe (came to the bay for a PhD at a certain local university and then worked for an early internet company with a colorful logo). She got into a few pretty good universities despite having worse grades than her (self-declared) white friends who coincidently didn’t make the cut.
"Instead, he claimed that Japanese people should be properly classified as "free white persons"."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozawa_v._United_States
"Instead, he attempted to be classified as a "free white person" within the meaning of the Naturalization Act based on the fact that Indians and Europeans share common descent from Proto-Indo-Europeans."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bhagat_Singh_...
One of the reasons "caucasians" came into our lexicon is because we were having trouble defining non-white whites. So indians and persians could be causians, but not white which is primarily used for northern europeans.
And even better one is in the early 20th, after we pretty much wiped out all the natives, the government decided to offer subsidies to the native americans. The native american population increased like 600% within a few years ( aka lots of non-natives claiming to be native to get the goodies ).
The situation is even wackier in central and south america where their racial history separated races by gradients of skin colo with white on the top and black on the bottom.
It took radical experiments like desegregation to open up those doors (admittedly, as a Black man, I’m on the fence about those policies because they led to a massive reduction of the Black teacher workforce).
I applaud her taking a stance, but when your best evidence requires you to characterize 8 dropouts as academically-unprepared, despite having zero knowledge on those students situation, then it just comes off as fear. The author suggests as much in the very last sentence.
Sadly, fear of what’s potentially lost has always and will continue to keep us from establishing any significant parity in our public education system.
The issue is we determine funding for them based on zip code. Poor schools get less funding. Isn't that ass-backwards? All the elites get to enjoy wonderful districts or private options they can afford and the public gets stuck with textbooks from the 50s.
> And when people try to fix this by starting better-run charter and/or magnet schools, these efforts are basically sabotaged by the public education establishment as seen in this very article.
Another opinion... though I respect it. I don't really think there is a difference based on my 12 years of working with and being in proximity to education reform efforts across the U.S. Nonetheless, we can trade sources all day proving[0] or disproving whether or not charters (I can't speak to magnets) are better run or more academically effective or being sabotaged by the establishment. Either way, any conclusion is as anecdotal as this very article, since both systems operate in a distributed manner, and are designed to produce data that protects their political self-interests rather than improving the quality of public education in their respective locales.
[0] https://www.ncsl.org/research/education/charter-schools-rese...
As for everything else, I feel like things aren't as clear cut as the post portrays it as.
One only need look at the source publication (a magazine of stories deemed “unheard” by a British oligarch). Skimming Wikipedia, this bit made me laugh: “a magazine publishing people who are generally unheard because people edge away from them at parties." Exactly the case here, except the author felt her oh so privileged voice was silenced because she wasn’t heard at a school boarding meeting…2800 miles away from where she lives. Also, if 70% of the school shares characteristics with you, maybe introducing some diversity isn’t the worst thing in the world.
Anecdotally, as a former internship director, I’ve taught many of the students from high schools named in these articles. Ultimately, every student is unique and needs to be considered on a case by case basis. But many of the students who struggle are those with helicopter parents like the author. Through early hard work and ambition they have book smarts or can study, but have never encountered any real setbacks and expect everything to just go their way, which obviously doesn’t happen in the real world. It’s those students who have to struggle, the one the author otherizes in her article and doesn’t want to see in the same school as her kids, that go the farthest.
Author says the very opposite: "It also insults and demeans the achievements of black and Hispanic students who get into schools like Lowell and TJ through sacrifice and achievement. The message is clear: stop trying so hard." Where "It" is the new race-biased admissions policy. Please do not make misleading and outrageous claims.
But isn't that exactly the opposite of what affirmative action programs demand?
Fairness, to the privileged, can look like persecution.
I.e. Because some parents are more interested in boosting their children scholastically when very young, doesn't mean they deserve a disproportionate share of the public school services. They've been getting it because helicopter parents are pushy. When there's pushback they make these spurious claims of being more deserving, and somehow persecuted.
If an individual student is getting less than average access to resources in order to statistically balance allocation of resources by race, that individual student isn’t getting (or even asking for) a “disproportionate share of resources”. They’re asking for an equal share, but in reality getting less because what group they are being categorized into.
Parents who are interested in boosting their children scholastically are not necessarily privelidged.
They could be privelidged. But wouldn't it also make sense for the least privelidged parents to also want to boost their children scholastically?
Do you have to be privelidged to be a "helicopter parent?"
Believing in the value of education and pushing your children to achieve educationally is an inherent demonstration of the possession of privilege.
This sort of thinking seems...religious.
A parent can only push as far as their ability to identify, access and afford opportunities, and that’s where privilege does play a major role in terms of information asymmetry and spending power.
Having 'access to knowledge' is one thing. Believing that knowledge - say, from personal experience of it applying to people you know - is privilege.
- not understanding standard of care regulations around early childhood education and thus believing that your child's current learning environment is of sufficient quality or not knowing there are paths to advocate/demand more
- having your child attend a school that lumps all students with learning differences and behavioral issues in the same classroom (for all kinds of systemic reasons like the lack of qualified special education teachers), and not understanding how to get your child diagnosed in a way that gives them legally-mandated better accommodations... like more time to take the "tests in school"
- having the school itself be unaware or untrained in all of the accommodations your child could possibly need, or having the school be ambiguous about where learning/values/behaviors are the responsibility of the school vs. home, and thus having no direction on how to partner with your child's school
An okay analogy is "doing taxes". Sure all of the rules, codes, regulations are there in plain sight, but unless you know someone who has maximized their tax return under a similar situation as your own, then you're just doing your best unless you have the resources to hire an accountant. Similarly, a parent can know all of the ingredients that go into a successful education pathway, and can endeavor to understand all of the rules and regulations. But with no understanding of how these things play out for their kid's specific use case (or with no money for tutors, test prep, application coaches, college visits) then it can be tough sledding in actual practice.
Knowing how to act in a productive and effective manner is privilege.
That's the whole point, that so many are contorting their logic to ignore: children all deserve a chance. To make education a game that parents play is to tragically disadvantage innocents.
For example, the janitor dad who wants a "better life" for their kid, and pays for their college education by working overtime. Or the single mother who puts her child through school working two jobs as a secretary and waitress.
These are generic, but just look around. There are countless examples I'm sure from your own life.
So the problem lies not with privilege or lack thereof of parents. It's the fact that in this country good education is scarce.
Education is a public good and should ideally not be a scarce resource.
It's great for a parent to boost their children. But to have benefitted from extra attention for their childsren due to what was essentially the parents' attributes, then complain when it's suggested public money could be allocated more evenly, is 'equality looking like persecution'.
Just read the OP to get a taste of it.
Given the history of anti-Asian racism in the US, I don't know how anyone can say with a straight face that Asians are "privileged".
As for "parents are more interested in boosting their children scholastically", this being HN, few here will see that as anything other than an absolutely good thing that we should want all parents, regardless of color, gender, creed, or anything else, to be doing.
The earlier half of the 20th century was an awful time to be asian in America, and the systematic suppression of generational wealth for purely racial reasons is not an effect that just goes away overnight.
Black Americans fought for Asian's rights to immigrate to the US and once they arrived, Asians were turned into a buffer class because they mostly had no interest in fighting the global system of white supremacy (partially due to ignorance). This made them less of a threat to the ruling class and dominant society.
This game is still being played (even in this thread) and many recent non-white immigrants are still too ignorant of unsanitized/heterodox US history to understand why native blacks fought & died for them to come here in the first place.
US mainstream historical propaganda - 1
Native black Americans - 0
Asian parents by-and-large do. ANd certainly the school system favors their children. That's the premise we started with.
The children are doing well because their parents are helping them. Then fudged the rules so their children got the lions share of attention and programs.
Those without parents that helps them (culturally, economically) do poorly. Through no fault of their own (being born to the wrong parents?)
Try to help all the children, and the cry of "Reverse racism!" or some such nonsense gets raised every time.
What degenerate world are we living in, parents wanting their children to succeed and do what they know is causing _you_ to discriminate them for their success?
It's public money - meant for everybody. Ignoring that, whitewashing fairness as discrimination, is exactly my point.
Thank you for illustrating this sense of outrage perfectly.
Because they both experienced poverty, violence, and actual warfare, they understood the value of education - to prevent me from falling into similar circumstances.
I suppose, to you, this now constitutes privilege? I always thought this was something reserved for the whites. Or, are you bringing the notion of "white privilege" into question? Otherwise, it seems that you are implying that I am not deserving of preferential treatment based on my race, and that I have not experienced any particular form of persecution.