Dems want California’s universities to resurrect an ugly institution.
By
Are our boys and girls wrong
In expecting you who make your living
Exclusively off the white race
To stop patronizing Jap laundries.
And thereby assist your fellow men and women
In maintaining the white man’s standard in a white man’s country?
In expecting you who make your living
Exclusively off the white race
To stop patronizing Jap laundries.
And thereby assist your fellow men and women
In maintaining the white man’s standard in a white man’s country?
— Placards belonging to the Anti-Jap Laundry League, Calif., 1908
California has a long and ugly history of discriminating against Asian Americans. From the Anti-Jap Laundry League, the Anti-Chinese League, the Asiatic Exclusion League, the alien land laws, the Anti-Coolie Act . . . the list is long. Much of that discrimination had its origins on the left, with the Ant-Jap
Laundry Act, the Asiatic Exclusion Act, and the Anti-Coolie Law being
in the main projects of organized labor, which did not like the idea of
being made to compete against Asians for work.
And now another group of left-leaning Californians is chafing at the idea of being made to compete with Asian Americans.
The
California state legislature was on the verge of approving a referendum
to restore the consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions to
state universities. The referendum originally had the support of three
state senators who have since had a change of heart: Leland Yee of San
Francisco, Ted Lieu of Torrance, and Carol Liu of La Cañada, Democrats
all. They changed their minds when they were overwhelmed with telephone
calls and e-mails — thousands of them — from angry constituents who know
exactly what such affirmative-action programs mean in the context of
elite universities: Asian quotas. A petition to cancel the referendum
has already been endorsed by 100,000 signatories. Subsequently, the
senators sent a letter to the speaker, John Pérez (do I need to note
that he’s a Democrat?) seeking to have the measure tabled. The letter reads in part:
“As lifelong advocates for the Asian American and other communities, we
would never support a policy that we believed would negatively impact
our children.”
If they mean that, all three of them belong to the wrong political party.
Asian
immigration into the United States is a complex social phenomenon; in
fact, the phrase “Asian immigration” hardly means anything, implying as
it does a unitary phenomenon involving the radically different cultures
of China, India, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, etc. But one thing that is true
of Asian immigrant groups as different as the Chinese and the Indians
is that they tend to be “bimodal,” meaning that the immigrants come from
two distinct socio-economic groups. We get the Asian elites — doctors,
scientists, academics, business executives — and we also get less
educated, less skilled, less well-off Asian immigrants. As one observer
of South Asian stereotypes notes, the impression is that Indian
immigrants come in two varieties and two varieties only: doctors and
clerks at 7-Eleven. Nothing in the middle. That isn’t true, but there is
a wide disparity, just as there is between the Chinese Americans in
Stanford, Calif., and the Chinese Americans in Sunnyside, Queens, who
tend to be relatively downscale.
What both sides of
the bimodal Asian immigration population have in common is that their
children do uncommonly well in school. They are represented in
California’s much-admired universities in far larger numbers than their
share of the population would suggest: Asians compose 14 percent of
California’s population but 37 percent of the undergraduates at its
state universities. They make up about 40 percent of the students at UCLA,
43 percent of the students at Berkeley, half the students at UC San
Diego, and more than half of the students at UC Irvine. A relatively
small minority, they compose the largest single ethnic group on
California university campuses (at least as California defines “ethnic
group”).
Asians have the grades and the test scores —
but, at 14 percent of the population, they don’t have the votes. Who
has the votes? In California, it’s an almost even split between Latinos
and non-Hispanic whites, representing 38.2 and 39.4 percent of the
population, respectively. But as the woeful careers of Barbara Boxer and
Nancy Pelosi should have made obvious by now, who really has the votes
in California is liberals. Less than 30 percent of Californians identify
as Republicans, while 44 percent are Democrats and 21 percent are
formally unaffiliated, which in California is shorthand for “too liberal
for Diane Feinstein’s party” as often as not.
Liberals
talk a great deal of mindless rot about what they like to call
“privilege,” the supposedly omnipresent advantages that accrue to the
white, the male, the heterosexual, those whose sense of self is more or
less congruent with their biological genitals, etc. But it is worth
keeping in mind that progressive social-engineering programs such as the
use of racial criteria in university admissions do not hurt only hurt
well-off white people sporting penises. (Not that we should shortchange
the interests of well-off white penis-sporters.) They also hurt poor
people and immigrants, in this case a group of immigrants that we as a
country should count ourselves lucky to have. It is important to
remember why race-based admissions are such an important issue for
progressives: The Left lives in the public schools, which do a terrible
job of teaching black, Hispanic, and poor students, who consequently
show up in embarrassingly small proportions at elite institutions. Asian
students, on the other hand, do a tremendous amount of work outside of
school, spending ten times as much time as non-Asian students do on
organized non-school activities ranging from music lessons to tutoring
to test-preparation courses. That is true across the economic spectrum:
Working-class Asian immigrant families in Queens send their children to
tutoring sessions and piano lessons at a much higher rate than does the
non-Asian population, even though the relative financial sacrifices
necessary for them to do so are heavy.
For that, California’s professional race hustlers, and their allies across the country, would see them punished.
In
an earlier day, California’s union-goon-powered politics meant using
the law to “maintain the white man’s standard in a white man’s country,”
today the same apparatus is used to maintain the Democrats’ standard in
the Democrats’ country — or at least what the Democrats’ country would
look like if they had one. In either case, it’s still at the expense of
Asian immigrants. New rhetoric, same old bigotry.
1 comment:
Great Read...
The Asians, specifically the Chinese and Indians, have proven themselves to be as mighty as the Jews and Christians. When it comes to powers of human Spirit, to build, change, fix, technology, medicine, they too thirst and hunger for such human searching, learning and perhaps even serving at a right price. Hard work and great rewards entices mightily and perhaps good in these groups...
Perhaps They are not as generous and instinctive when it comes to giving and humanity, as Christians or the Jews. But when it comes to helping with human needs, food, medicine, shelter, comfort, travel, industry, Asian sure have a special place as hard workers...
As me Grampa use to say: There isn't anything in this world that a thousand Chinese can not build or fix... Bridges, tunnels, Roads, Dams... You may loose 100 of them, but they will do it get the job done...
There is gotta be a great admiration for such non-Abrahamic human spirits...
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