Vox: Asians complain they are used as a tool against affirmative action

Alvin Chang is horrified how Asians are being used as a tool against affirmative action. But he does not see that a system that helps blacks isn't far from being the same system being used against Asians. In my view, this could be fixed by saying preferences that help blacks are good but those that harm Asians are bad, 

Racial Quotas Just 21st Century Version of Separate But Equal Admissions? 

my bigger view is that having 2 different admissions systems, one for picking out the highest scores, and one for picking out racial quotas is just another variation on the idea of separate but equal. 

I would take the position of Thomas Sowell, why would I argue for racial quotas to get into Harvard when the very idea of honor of getting into Harvard was that you were admitted because you had the highest score, just just a good enough one to make a racial quota, and the real benefit is for the white and Asian candidates who would be harmed by a lack of racial diversity????

Asians are being used to make the case against ... - Vox

https://www.vox.com/2018/3/28/17031460/affirmative-action-asian-discrimination-admissions

https://www.vox.com › affirmative-action-asian-discrimination-admissions

Aug 30, 2018 - We are cast as victims in a pernicious story about race. ... professor Sumi Cho coined a term for this conservative tactic: “racial mascotting.”.

 Asian-American leaders are/were horrified that their cause was being co-opted by conservatives to dismantle policies that helped other racial minorities — and they refused to play the part.

 I was fed a certain story about affirmative action, so when I saw this data a few years later, it only solidified this mental model:

The data is from an influential 2009 book in which two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandra Radford, quantified how well you needed to score on your SATs to have an equal chance of admission as someone of another race. It implies that a black student who scores 1000 on her SATs would have an equal chance of admission as a white student who scores 1310 or an Asian-American student who scores 1450.
This study gave legs to a longstanding conservative argument that affirmative action is a misguided progressive policy to help black and Hispanic people while unfairly penalizing Asian and white people.[it doesn't prove that affirmative action has to hurt Asians while it helps blacks but perhaps it shows it's part of the same pattern - Asians and whites could be lumped together as one "non-disadvantaged minority" group but studies seem to show that Asians aren't treated the same was whites, or counted as the same]

No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life

• Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford

Hardcover

against the backdrop of today’s increasingly multicultural society, are America’s elite colleges admitting and successfully educating a diverse student body? No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal pulls back the curtain on the selective college experience and takes a rigorous and comprehensive look at how race and social class impact each stage — from application and admission, to enrollment and student life on campus. Arguing that elite higher education contributes to both social mobility and inequality, the authors investigate such areas as admission advantages for minorities, academic achievement gaps tied to race and class, unequal burdens in paying for tuition, and satisfaction with college experiences.

The book’s analysis is based on data provided by the National Survey of College Experience, collected from more than nine thousand students who applied to one of ten selective colleges between the early 1980s and late 1990s. The authors explore the composition of applicant pools, factoring in background and “selective admission enhancement strategies” — including AP classes, test-prep courses, and extracurriculars — to assess how these strengthen applications. On campus, the authors examine roommate choices, friendship circles, and degrees of social interaction, and discover that while students from different racial and class circumstances are not separate in college, they do not mix as much as one might expect. The book encourages greater interaction among student groups and calls on educational institutions to improve access for students of lower socioeconomic status.

No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal offers valuable insights into the intricate workings of America’s elite higher education system.

When Trump first took office, the Justice Department dug up a two-year-old complaint against Harvard that alleges the school has quotas on how many Asian Americans it accepts. It opened an investigation into Harvard’s admissions practices, which many feared would create a chilling effect on other schools with affirmative action programs.

Then in October, a federal court heard arguments on a lawsuit that alleges the same thing. And in the lead-up to thetrial, the Trump administration wrote a statement of support for the plaintiffs, who echoed the exact argument conservatives have been making for decades:

...the record evidence demonstrates that Harvard’s race-based admissions process significantly disadvantages Asian-American applicants compared to applicants of other racial groups — including both white applicants and applicants from other racial minority groups.

But of greater concern is that this story — of merit artificially tweaked to engineer a certain racial demographic — implies that there is an objective way to measure who is deserving and who isn’t. And it suggests that if we went purely by this idea of merit, it is white and Asian people who would be on top, and that that is the natural state of the world. 

The “racial mascoting” of Asians

The use of Asian Americans as a political prop isn’t new.

In the mid-1980s, Asian-American groups started to uncover admissions practices that hurt Asian applicants. Eventually, top schools like Stanford and Brown conceded there was real bias against Asians in their admissions policies.

The Reagan administration saw an opportunity in these controversies.

William Bradford Reynolds, then the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and a longtime opponent of affirmative action, said in a 1988 speech that Asian Americans faced discrimination because of efforts to help other minority groups:

While university officials are understandably loath to admit that they are discriminating against qualified Asian-Americans, rejection of such applicants ironically appears to be driven by the universities’ “affirmative action” policies aimed at favoring other, preferred racial minorities.

But Asian-American leaders were horrified that their cause was being co-opted by conservatives to dismantle policies that helped other racial minorities — and they refused to play the part.

UC Berkeley professor L. Ling-Chi Wang wrote to Reynolds, “At no time has anyone in the Asian American community linked these concerns to the legitimate affirmative action program for the historically discriminated, underrepresented minorities.”

Law professor and activist Mari Matsuda argued Asians shouldn’t be used to “deny educational opportunities to the disadvantaged and to preserve success only for the privileged.”

DePaul professor Sumi Cho coined a term for this conservative tactic: “racial mascotting.”

...

The latest challenge to affirmative action began with a lawsuit filed by Edward Blum, who also launched the previous attack on affirmative action. In that case, Blum recruited Abigail Fisher, a white student who claimed she was rejected by the University of Texas Austin because of her race. That case went to the Supreme Court, and many believed it would finally strike down affirmative action — but it didn’t.

For his next act, Blum took another swing at affirmative action — this time, using Asian Americans as the victims in a lawsuit against Harvard.

But shortly after Blum filed his lawsuit, something interesting happened: A coalition of more than 60 Asian-American groups filed a Justice Department complaint largely mimicking Blum’s lawsuit.

Leading that charge was a Chinese-American man named Yukong Zhao, a Florida businessman in his 50s.

Zhao is the president of the Asian American Coalition for Education, the collection of groups that filed the DOJ complaint. And he and his followers are ideal allies for white, anti-affirmative action conservatives. They not only claim that race-conscious policies are unfair but argue convincingly that they are victims.

What’s unique about Zhao is his large audience; he’s a star on the Chinese social media platform WeChat, which has turned into a kind of “virtual Chinatown,” as activist Steven Chen puts it. It’s an isolated place populated by mostly first-generation immigrants from mainland China, with high barriers to entry for everyone else. And it has become an echo chamber for stories of anti-Asian discrimination.

Zhao has been one of the loudest voices on this front. “In the future,” he told me, “our dream, just like Martin Luther King, is we want every child to be judged on their talent and content of their character, not by their skin color.”

....Poon, the education researcher, found that they’re actually much smaller and more homogenous than the coalition’s profile suggests.

She interviewed 36 Asian Americans last year who have advocated for or against affirmative action. And she found that those who have advocated against affirmative action are almost entirely recent immigrants from mainland China — the same group that spends time on WeChat. They tend to be affluent and educated, but also racially isolated. They work in places that are predominantly white, and occupy social spaces that are predominantly Chinese.

...Zhao says the way to address racial discrimination is to remove all race-based policies,[rather than just remove anti-Asian bias] echoing other affirmative action opponents. Otherwise, he says, Asian Americans become victims — perhaps like his son, who he says experienced racial discrimination from at least two Ivy League schools who rejected him, despite an application that was more than deserving.

”We’re hardworking, we never ask for any government favors,” he told me. “But you blame us as overrepresented. We contribute to society. ... Why are Asian Americans being punished?”