Is this just about college admissions, or is there more to it? College admissions is an entirely reasonable topic, but I’m curious if that is the extent of the concern/complaint about liberals here, or if there are other issues. If so, what other issues?
Damuri Ajashi, if you have an actual point to make in this thread, it’s being undercut by your inability to give any examples of how this “uncomfortableness” is expressed. And frankly, the more you use the word baizou, the more it seems like you’re adopting a creepy racist slang term.
These are not partisan forums. I first encountered the term on a forum about Mayor DeBlasio’s efforts to eliminate the SHSAT as the sole criteria for admission to three of the magnet schools in NYC. The term popped up in the recent proposal to eliminate all Gifted and Talented programs to make public school more equitable.
I would guess that the overwhelming majority of the participants on the forum are Democrats.
this is a phrase that I hear from Republicans frequently but I have never once heard someone serious* from the left ever push for. There’s no movement toward that.
There is a recognition that we’re nowhere near equality of opportunity. And also, when the results are so obviously unequal, people on the left are curious as to why rather than falling back on stereotypes that are based in prejudice rather than data.
*serious = widely respected with a significant platform; serious does not mean some fringe blogger or college student who has been awake all night really looking at their hands.
I don’t think this is the broad liberal position. I’m in favor of AA, but not some specific form of AA that necessarily harms Asian students. I think most AA supporters have no interest in making it harder for Asian students, and would oppose such efforts. This might be an awareness issue, if indeed such harmful policies are widespread in college admissions – and spreading awareness could do a lot to combat them.
But talking about various tests isn’t necessarily harmful to Asians. Maybe this policy should be changed – maybe using that test as the sole criteria is leaving a lot of kids out who would be great students. Are you saying that any policy other than maintaining this particular test as the sole criteria is necessarily harmful to Asians?
My first thought when anything comes up on message boards about education, especially public/charter schools, is that parents’ comments are likely driven by an overwhelming and driving compulsion to do everything humanly possible to make sure their precious child has a slight advantage over any other bastard who might get in their way. Half of the crazies on those sort of message boards would knife a seven year old to get their precious little one into an after-school coding class.
Now, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t racism in play. But since the OP can’t explain what the fuck he’s talking about other than repeating the word “discomfort” and making a reference to a thing he read on a message board probably populated by type-A parents, I’m inclined to say that there may be a more simple explanation at work here.
Stopping taking the side of colleges engaging in anti-asian discrimination. If we saw these sort of disparities in objective criteria and subjective results the left would be screaming bloody murder. But instead it seems to be happy to toss asian kids under the bus to prevent the possibility that somewhere down the line it might pose a threat to affirmative action for the kids of more politically powerful minorities.
Asian americans generally support affirmative action. We simply don’t think discrimination against asians is a necessary element of affirmative action.
Why liberals defending anti-asian discrimination?
The way liberals seem to defend anti-asian discrimination today because it might threaten affirmative action for favored races at some point in the future. The way that liberals want to eliminate or dilute objective measures of merit to expand diversity for favored races mostly at the expense of asian kids.
I don’t think liberals do this, broadly speaking. I don’t think most liberals have any awareness that college admissions policies (some of them, I assume, though I have very little knowledge of this subject at all) are discriminatory in any way against Asian students.
EDIT: I’m a liberal, and I think I’m pretty well-informed, but I know next to nothing about college admissions policies, much less if/how they harm Asian Americans.
Yes, I ran into it on a NYC education related board. NY and California is sort of where a lot of the asians live. NY asians are dealing with the push to eliminat the SHSAT and gifted and talented programs. California asians are dealing with efforts to reintroduce race based admissions into the UC system.
I think the college admissions is the precipitating factor but it is letting the conservative camel’s nose under the tent. We are seeing conservative asians saying 'we told you so, NOW will you listen to us?" They are leveraging this to build up opposition to affirmative action generally (something that asians have historically supported) by using the left’s own words about how racial justice for asians and affirmative action are mutually exclusive. They have a tough road ahead with Trump in office but Trump won’t always be in office.
Discrimination against Asian-Americans by prestige universities is the big obvious point right now.
Asian candidates today are treated exactly like Jewish candidates were earlier in the 20th century. Harvard has already been caught putting a heavy thumb on the scale to favor other groups. That’s what the big lawsuit is about. I have no idea the legal validity of the lawsuit, but Harvard was shown to be using adverse “personality” scores – as judged by people who had not even necessarily met the candidates – to weigh against the stronger “objective” measures in order to dump the applications of (apparently boring) Asian kids in favor of other groups.
This is a source of serious rage. And understandably so. This is outright discrimination against a minority group, but my feeling here (perhaps wrong?) is that relatively few on the left care about it.
It’s all well and good to say that Asians are “over-represented” at US universities based on their proportion of the overall population, as another poster has tried to argue, but when controlling for “objective” measures, it’s glaringly obvious that the Asian kids of identical or even superior accomplishment are very likely to be passed over for a kid who belongs to a racial grouping that has better “personality” scores. This includes, as you have indicated, the kids at expensive private schools who play rich-personality-sports like lacrosse or crew.
This is completely and totally true.
But politics can change over time. “We don’t have to do anything about this, because the Other Group is not doing anything about this” is not necessarily a solid long-term strategy.
With that said, I agree entirely with you that the Rich-White-Sports candidates seem like a nice, plump target here. But there are political undercurrents to that (of course!) and there are other posters here on the SDMB who know an enormous amount about that topic. I don’t personally know what the best plan here would be. But I really don’t think it should be “nothing”. There’s a legitimate grievance here. An entire group of people is being forced to play the game with a much more stringent set of rules, based solely on their ethnicity, and they have every justification to be upset about that.
How about the Mayor of NYC?
I don’t think the term Baizuo is being directed at all liberals. Most of the people on the board are self proclaimed liberals and are pretty conventionally liberal in most other respects. They are pro-choice, anti-gun, pro-lgbtq, pro-health care, anti wall, and for the time being… pro affirmative action.
College admission has been racist against Asians for quite some time. It was widely discussed where I grew up that if you were Asian, you should not indicate any race on your college application because it will make it harder to gain admission.
The history of discrimination and racism against Asians is long. From the Chinese Exclusion Act, to about 1965 or so, Asians experienced widespread discrimination. The vestiges of that is still prevalent in Asian communities. Consider that Chinese were not allowed to become citizens until about the 1940s, were not allowed to marry a white person, own land etc. It wasn’t until the 1960s where immigration from China was allowed much more than a couple hundred people per year.
Chinatowns arose because Chinese could not safely travel, do business with, or transact outside of their communities. Consider if you were a Chinese person born when immigration was allowed, you would not be about 55 years old. You could have children that are between 20-35, at the point where they would be rising in their careers. But Asians are still greatly underrepresented in management positions, in law firm partnerships:
More info at the wiki on Bamboo Ceiling.
I’d answer that, but I’d have to stop beating my wife for a second.
SWIDT? 
You realize that affirmative action has to, by its intrinsic nature, discriminate?
Yes, and my point is these Asian-Americans have a misplaced focus on Affirmative Action. If universities ceased factoring in racial and ethnic diversity in their admissions process, Asian-Americans would still be discriminated against. Legacy admissions and other processes that favor the rich over the non-rich make this a given, as summed up in this article.