A Black and White World Meets Asians

The Rolling Stones wanted to paint the world black. Today’s deep thinkers want to paint it black and white.

By now, you know the narrative. Whites all profit from white privilege. They receive certain advantages merely on the basis of being white. No one ask whether they or their ancestors accomplished anything in life… the privilege is unjust, on its face.

And blacks are the objects of discrimination. They have been victimized by whites for centuries and need special privileges, in the form of affirmative action or diversity programs, in order to catch up.

Such is the argument. Yet, as David Marcus notes on The Federalist, the argument becomes dust when you consider that the nation’s overachievers are not white or black, but are Asians. And they are not wealthy Asians.  They are invariably poor Asians whose only path to prosperity involves very hard work on their studies. 

Now that higher educational institutions have discovered that a disproportionate number of Asians are outcompeting both whites and blacks, they are trying to do something about it. They are discriminating against Asian applicants. Harvard University admissions departments concocted a personality test, according to which Asian students with less than scintillating personalities were considered less desirable applicants than cool kids from minority groups.

Marcus explains:

Historically the basis and justification of race-based admissions was that white students benefited from centuries of racial injustice in myriad ways. As a result, affirmative action was meant to redress historical imbalances and level the playing field for minority students. But now that we see race-based admissions are disadvantaging Asians more than they are whites, this basis simply falls apart.

It is farcical to imagine that somehow centuries of systemic white supremacy are benefiting Asian students, many of who are first-generation Americans or even immigrants themselves. Moreover, there is no plausible way to suggest that these recent arrivals had any hand in creating the systems that disadvantage other minority groups.

True enough, it is absurd to blame white supremacy for the achievements of poor Asian students. This proves that it’s not a black and white world.

Marcus also addresses the larger argument in favor of affirmative action, namely that diversity is its own reward. He quotes the newly woke Max Boot:

Boot’s second argument, and the one more likely to gain purchase on the Left, is that diversity in student bodies is its own reward. He writes: “You learn more about life if you go to class with people who are different from you — who have different abilities, different geographic origins, different social classes, different sexualities, different religions, different political views and, yes, different ethnicities. You don’t necessarily want a student body made up entirely of bookworms.”

Yes, but… Boot and other proponents of diversity-as-its-own-reward forget one salient fact. If you admit students who are vastly underprepared to do the work, you will need to dumb down the curriculum. Otherwise they will be totally lost in class and will all flunk out. The argument arose in New York City when the new school chancellor decided that there was something wrong with New York’s most prestigious public schools, Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science. The problem: too many Asian students and too few minority students.

Now the chancellor and the mayor are trying to admit more students who cannot do the work. To which teachers and alumni responded that you cannot teach multivariable calculus when a tenth or so of your students cannot do algebra. Or some such.

The American university system has been using diversity quotas for decades now. The courts and the bureaucrats mandated it. Do you think that the generally inferior education students are receiving in universities derives from the fact that more and more students cannot really follow the material as presented, and that professors are now required to dumb it all down, to prevent the diversity programs from being exposed as failures.