This just shows what a waste of time it is considering the views of an utterly disparate group such as Asian-Americans as a demographic category. Indian-Americans have very little in common with, say, Vietnamese-Americans that they don’t also share with, say, Black or Jewish folks. Extremist Hindus may be shifting to the right because of a perceived ideological sympathy between Trump and Modi, but Chinese Americans couldn’t give two shits what Modi thinks of Trump.
I’ve long been fascinated by this rather reductive statement.
IME, liberals do NOT want “equality of outcome.” They want equality of opportunity. I think claiming otherwise ignores myriad profound factors that have incalculable impacts on actual humans.
To be poor in this country is to start with an endless series of deficits, most of which cannot be overcome. Among these are nutrition, housing, employment, education, health care, addiction, safety and security, laws and enforcement, crime and punishment. For most minorities, add systemic and institutionalized racism to that list.
I like to point to this article. This is a ‘pretty clean study.’ The results are pretty illustrative of the point I’m making.
I used to say, “give me access to the IRS database and I’ll tell you almost everything that matters about America.” One thing I’m certain the data would say is that there is nearly no true upward mobility in this country any longer … if there ever was.
Trump and his supporters’ general disdain for anyone non-white and historically aberrant general awfulness is the only thing keeping a realignment from taking place. There are significant problems with the far left and non-black minority groups, and if all goes well and a Biden landslide forces Republicans to reinvent themselves, a more rational, Romney-type party may capture significant new voters. The main issues are two fold: first, the embrace of the Farrakhan, Mallory etc brand of black nationalist politics. To be a prominent activist in the black community right now is very wrapped up in overt racism towards Asians and Jews. This is one of those things that we’re not supposed to notice or say but is obvious to anyone paying attention. The daily hate crimes committed by black extremists on Jews in New York, with the tacit endorsement of the socialist De Blasio administration, are an outrage in this country and the fact that Democrats are united in responding with “no one is allowed to talk about this and you’re a racist for not wanting your head caved in” is an additional outrage. Second, the hatred of merit and achievement and embrace of quotamongering in education. Democrats are firmly committed to reducing the number of Asians in elite high schools and colleges, even at the cost of destroying the standards that make those schools great in the first place. A lot of this has snuck in over the past 6 months under the guise of somehow being related to police brutality. There’s going to be political consequences for it at some point, and I think that point is going to be when Trump is out of the picture and someone more palatable embraces these issues as their Republican platform in a swing area.
Because the racism used to come mostly from one side of the aisle. Now it comes from both sides of the aisle. Still worse from republicans but still.
So?
Then we disagree. I only have anecdotal evidence from the hundreds of asians I know saying the meritocracy issue is significant, but you might be right.
So you think disparity in results is proof of disparity in opportunity? That’s pretty much what i said.
Asians are the poorest group in NYC and yet the disparity in results there seems to be prompting Bill DeBlasio to try and change the admissions standards.
I would once again point to how immigrants move up quite a bit within one or two generations.
I agree with much of this but I am skeptical about the republican response because after the landslide victory by Obama, the republican chose Trump. The development of critical race theory outside of legal academia is pretty undisciplined and haphazard. But it is almost an article of faith that allows concepts like Kende’s anti-racism to flourish.
If you’re from the NY area (you seem to be, since you’re constantly talking about Bill DeBlasio), then the Asians you interact with may be quite different from the ones in Minnesota, the new immigrants in California, or the Americans of Japanese and Chinese descent who have been here for generations, especially on the West Coast. I know you’re extremely interested in your perceived anti-Asian discrimination by elite NYC high schools, but I think it’s unlikely that the Hmong in Minneapolis or the descendants of railroad workers in California could give a damn. Plus, the “hundreds” that you know (really, that’s more people than I routinely interact with of all stripes, and I have zero idea what they think of meritocracy) may come from specific wealth or location demographics – the desperately poor Vietnamese immigrants in NYC also probably don’t care about who is getting into Stuyvesant.
So, while others have brought cites that indicate that it’s the wealth that pushes Asians towards Republicans, you’ve brought nothing but your opinion and anecdotes.
Article from 2 years ago, but still relevant: Chinese-Americans were rallying hard, on WeChat, to defeat affirmative action.
No, we’d need a lot more evidence. And it’s all here, very clearly, for this particular case. Unless you believe black and Hispanic students are just inherently inferior, then they’re not meeting the requirements for this particular school because the requirements are biased against them to some degree. That’s why AA is necessary until we actually have a fair system in which everyone has the same opportunity to succeed.
Another factor influencing the perception of (some) Asians is that Democrats have never gone to bat for Asians when Asians were the victims of black violence. In the 1992 Los Angeles riots, for instance, when blacks targeted Koreans, the government did nothing to help Koreans, with the effect that Koreans famously had to start patrolling with guns from rooftops themselves. Last year, when a black woman punched a Chinese woman in the stomach in NYC, the response from the political left was…crickets.
Well said
A lot to deal with in this post. I would start by asking for a cite on daily black on Jew hate crimes in NYC. The closest I can find is an increase in the percentage antisemitic acts commited by other minorities late last year.
As for the rest of your post and others in this thread, I would point out two things:
- White supremecy in the U.S. is flexible. Model minority, colorism, immigrant exceptionalism and other concepts (often unstated) are used to divide groups who should be united in order to support the status quo.
- The whole meritocracy thing is so flawed right now as to totally useless. How to your measure “merit”? SATs? When there are classes you can pay $100s for that will raise your score significantly it is obviously not measuring aptitude. If area code is the best indicator of meeting college admittance requirements, how can they be based on merit?
What cites are they bringing?
In what way wouldn’t this exact same argument work for EVERY disparity in results?
I think we have discussed the source of this disparity in results before and while I believe that difference in culture can make a difference in results, you seem to think this is not the case.
But for the sake of argument lets put aside the possiblity that differences in results can be the result of differences in culture.
How is the SHSAT biased against poor hispanic immigrants in ways that it is not biased against poor asian immgirants that would explain the wide disparity in results? What bias is there?
Is this what you want to talk about in this thread? It’s your thread, so go ahead. I thought this one would be about why Asians are drifting to the right (if they are at all – looks like they’ve drifted SIGNIFICANTLY left since 1992, according to one of the posts above).
If so, have at it.
This is a canard that keeps rising from the grave like a zombie.
If test prep was really this much of a determinant, then you would expect the hundreds of blacks kids that get free kaplan test prep to produce more stuy admission but it doesn’t because 6 weeks of test prep does not overcome a lifetime of study. You can’t learn math in 6 weeks, all you can really do is learn how to deal with multiple choice a little more efficiently. The difference between the successful stuy admit and the also rans is (a) a lot of effort and sacrifice, (b) an extraordinary amount of talent (c) some combination of the two.
People (mostly white people) tell themselves that its just test prep so they don’t have to admit the extraordinary effort and sacrifice made to do well on these exams. This makes it easy for them to take this away from poor asian kids and give it to others, after all it was merely the result of a few weeks effort taking test prep.
AFAICT, it’s not the racists pitting minorities against each other. It’s the well intentioned woke crowd pushing for racial preferences for one minority group mostly at the expense of another minority group.
You really need more than buzzwords to make your case here.
Yes, we drifted significantly to the left since reagan. And in recent years we have been drifting to the right. It’s not because we find trump attractive. And it’s not the economy.
If Asians are becoming more “white” in that they are just Americans (by and large), then you would expect them to support Republicans and Democrats more according to their income or religiosity or other demographic data points rather than just their Asian-ness. So, when Velocity posts about the “whitening” of Asians, that may explain all of it.
If Blacks or Hispanics were more fully integrated into society and no longer discriminated against, I wouldn’t expect them to vote a certain way based on their heritage anymore. Without Republican bigotry, they could crush it with Hispanics – they tend to be much more religious than your average American. Same with Blacks, in terms of religion.
No discussion of meritocracy needed. Italians and Irish used to be “others” and now they’re not. No one expects Irish people to vote a certain way because they’re Irish.
It is my firm belief that “whiteness” in America is more about not being black than anything. There’s only one group in this country that descended from people who were brought here as slaves and then officially classed as a lower order of humanity. No other group is going to face the same kind of uphill battle, not after decades of disenfranchisement and housing discrimination (one of the largest obstacles to accumulating generational wealth.) This is the historical backdrop against which all the other “races” or ethnic groups and their relationship to “whiteness” plays out. That’s my belief. And I think black Americans should be entitled to some kind of support system to try to correct the way in which they were collectively handicapped and undermined in the past, in a way which no other group was.
Really, those are the ONLY options? There’s no room at all for cultural differences, the legacy of history, the effects of low expectations in early childhood education, etc?
I think you’re confusing the SAT with IQ tests - the IQ tests purport to measure something innate and are in my view and those of many biologists and psychologists very dubious. SATs measure English and math skills that reflect nothing more than being well-read and paying attention in math class. They are intended as an objective cross-region measurement of basic preparedness for college, designed to counter the wide variances in curricula and grading standards among different schools. The original reason the SAT was used was because the “holistic” admissions practices of elite schools were being used to implement a Jewish quota, and now people want to get rid of the SATs and other objective measurements to implement an Asian quota.
If anyone really thought that access to test prep was the issue then they would propose giving vouchers to low-income blacks for the test prep courses, which I’m sure the Asian families could care less about. But this is a canard - the only thing that you will accept is a racial quota in which students who cannot meet objective standards are admitted based on their race.
I don’t think this is the result of assimilation. In fact I would be money that the more assimilated asians are more likely to lean left. Most of the anti-asian apologists you see in the asian community are very well assimilated asians. The ones that are pushing back against the discrimination tend to have heavy asian accents.
I agree the republicans could pick up a lot of asian and hispanic votes by abandoning the racists but for now, they seem to think that the way to power is through the white supremacists.
And in what way is this relevant to this discussion? Do you think asians are as free from discrimination as the irish and italians? Do you think that democratic policies disproportionately disadvantgae irish and italian kids? Do you think white supremacists treat the irish and asians similarly?
It is clear that at least among immigrant chinese, they see democratic policies as anti-asian in many ways.
And yet the primary form of race based correction goes primarily to hispanics and black immigrants.