I understand that Affirmative Action does not help Asians and that we have some of the detriments of being a minority without any of the benefits but having grown up in this country as a minority, it is obvious to me that racism still exists, its not as debilitating as it was when I was a kid (thats right it was within my lifetime that racism meant you didn’t get the job… even for an Asian (unless you wanted to be an engineer because there were already a lot of Asian engineers)). Sure we have Asian bankers and lawyers and CEOs these days but we didn’t have the same starting point, there was a large influx of well educated Asians immigrants that prevented too many negative stereotypes (of course we were still subjected to stereotypes that either emasculated the men and objectified the women) and we more or less prospered but we would never have gotten even that far if not for people like Martin Luther King Jr. I don’t want to make it sound like Asians owe their equality to the Black civil rights movement but if we didn’t have that, whatever progress we have made would have taken longer if at all.
So, it seems a bit repugnant to say, well we started out ahead of you; we had more hope, more education, a long and strong cultural history and familial support, we would have done better no matter what. You were responsible for opening the door wide enough for US to get through but we don’t want to let you into the party unless you can through on the same criteria we got through on.
Now to be fair, most of these people have school age children and they are concerned (with good reason) that being Asian hurts their chances of getting into a good college.
Really? Wow, my school is actually over 50% Asian, so I find this a little hard to believe. Aren’t Asians usually characterized as the “model minority”, which, although not necessarily good (stereotype) would be helpful in this case?
There is a misconception that Asians are not considered under AA. Not true…although I guess it’s how you define “Asian”. Pacific Islanders (e.g., Phillipinos) are considered a stigmitized minority group, and therefore are not lumped in with folks from China and Japan. Some AA programs also include folks from Vietnam. I was a minority program in college, and a Vietnamese dude was in it.
It’s all really interesting, this discussion on AA. When I was in graduate school, most of my fellow students were Chinese (not Chinese Americans). There was noise from some of the American tudents that there should be Affirmative Action for American students. And you know what? I totally agreed. It was hard not to notice that the Chinese TAs, while hard working and well-intentioned, were dealing with language barriers that prevented them from being effective teachers. And professors were complaining that they were unable to communicate with their own research assistants, which is a really bad thing.
I don’t know if my post is at all relevant to your rant…except maybe to say that if we are going to have AA, we should make it flexible.
Way back in high school (ahem, 2 years ago), I was in debate and we often covered things like AA. My memory is probably failing me in my old age :), but I faintly remember reading something that said that Asians- as a whole/broad brush painted group- both make more money and are higher educated than the average “white person”- let alone other ethnic minorities. Yay? Nay?
Then what you may need to realize is Affirmative Action is racism.
Maybe your friends oppose it because they recognize it is a disgusting, repgunant, racist idea that doesn’t really hit the core problems with certain ethnic groups and their woes in the first place.
[Ayn Rand]The notion of racial quotas is so obviously an expression of racism that no lengthy discussion is necessary…To demand such quotas in the name of fighting racial discrimination is an obscene mockery.[/Ayn Rand]
I wasn’t arguing that Asians should benefit from affirmative action, I was pitting the large minority of Asians who were opposing affirmative action. Or do you have a problem with ANYONE benefitting from affirmative action.
I thought the intended purpose behind affirmative action was far more than just trying to end racism. It was about creating role models; it was about equalizing past injustice; it was about providing opportunity to those who have historically been excluded from opportunity based on race; it was about levelling the playing field in a world that still sees people by the color of their skin. I can’t roll all the rationales for afirmative action off the tip of my tongue but its about more than just trying to end racism.
I am going to guess you are in your 30s because right about then, there was a yellow scare (mainly because Japan was doing pretty well then) and one of the things that people mentioned was how much more money Asians were making more money than the rest of America. Heck Asians in the same profession were making than their white counterparts.
It turned out that this had to do with the fact that Asians lived in places like NYC and San Francisco and if you compared Asians in NYC with their white counterparts in NYC, they were paid less and Asians were also making less money than the average American in any specific locality.
I don’t agree with the idea that affirmative action is racism but what are the core problems for other minorities like Blacks, Hispanics and American Indians?
I don’t know much about Ayn Rand. I know she wrote Atlas shrugged but a quick wikisearch yielded this:
Academic philosophers have long considered Objectivism to be a pop philosophy and unworthy of their attention.
It has been said that Ayn Rand is to philosophy what L. Ron Hubbard is to religion.
Poverty, higher incarceration/crime rates, lower education levels, more specifically lower quality eduction in the schools in their communities, more crime in their communities, more poverty in their communities.
The answer isn’t to try and fix this by “levelling” the playing field with racist (that is the accurate word) differentiations in admission standards/financial aid. But to try and fix the core problems, IE, more black children grow up in poverty-stricken, crime-infested neighborhoods with bad schools than white children do. Until you fix what happens in the first 18 years of life worrying about the four that come after that is ludicrous. A lot of minorities who make it into college solely because of reduced admission/scholarship standards end up flunking out. This is no surprise. The schools they went to did not prepare them for college, and just because one gets admitted and gets a scholarship one doesn’t get prepared in the 3 months between high school graduation and the first day of college classes.
If we’re going to have differing admission standards/scholarship standards it should be based not on race, but on the statistical data about schooling/income because that is what tends to keep people back. A lot of whites in areas like Appalachia are as disadvantaged as any in that they are poor and poorly educated.
The idea behind Affirmative Action however isn’t trying to correct those who are disadvantaged it’s to try and give an advantage to those whose parents were disadvantaged. Which defies logic.
