- Jules Gomes
Harvard University’s hatred of Asian meritocracy reveals the Left’s racist underbelly
Come fly with me. I’ve launched a new airline called Diversifly. We’ve got a woke motto: “We put diversity first.” We’re headhunting Black and Hispanic pilots and aeronautical engineers to meet our diversity targets. We’ve too many Asian and White applicants with blue-chip credentials, so if you are from a minority that is underrepresented we’ll give you a job even if you’ve failed every aviation or engineering test. We don’t buy into the myth of meritocracy.
We’ve crashed a few 737s, but don’t let this minor matter distract you from our bigger goal of reversing centuries of discrimination. We’ve got a special offer: if you crash while flying with us we will emblazon your full name with your chosen gender on our Diversifly Martyrs Memorial. So fly Diversifly and become a woke social justice warrior.
I got my idea of a non-meritocratic airline from Harvard University’s affirmative action policy. I almost ended up doing my doctorate at Harvard. My three colleagues had just returned with PhDs from Princeton, Harvard and Yale. The Harvard chap insisted I follow in his footsteps. Then, John Stott, England’s pre-eminent 20th century Anglican author and preacher, nudged me in the direction of Cambridge (England not Massachusetts) and I gladly consented.
I’m glad I didn’t go to Harvard. I don’t like separate drinking fountains for Blacks. Harvard hasn’t yet installed these segregated dispensers, but last year it hosted a graduation ceremony exclusively for Black students. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day go to a university where they will not be judged by the content of their character or the grade on their SAT scorecard, but by the colour of their skin,” Martin Luther King might have thundered in his speech if he was the keynote speaker at this historic graduation ceremony.
We know the Left detests whites (even though most Lefties are miserable white gits) but why do progressives hate Asians?
“I have a dream that one day we will have safe spaces, transgender bathrooms, gender fluidity, preferred pronouns, micro-aggression lists, fewer hetero-white males and Asian-Americans on campus and then all God’s LGBTIQ+ children will be able to sing, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’” Dr King would declaim to rapturous applause. Yeah!
The leftwing goons running Harvard would love this dream, wouldn’t they? They’ve festooned Harvard’s portals with “Whites and Asians Not Welcome” signs. Ever since Lefties made reverse discrimination fashionable in academia, they’ve been performing contortionist tricks to ‘manage diversity’ by increasing the intake of African Americans and Hispanics and ethnically cleansing campuses overpopulated with Asians and whites.
A 2009 Princeton study showed Asians had to score 140 points higher on their SATs than Whites, 270 points higher than Hispanics and 450 points higher than Blacks to have the same chance of admission to leading universities. At Harvard, Asians not only have to score hundreds of points higher on their SATs to get in, but admissions officers consistently score Asian applicants lower on personal traits like “positive personality,” “likability,” “kindness,” and “humour”.
If admissions were based strictly on academic performance, Asians would make up more than 51 percent of the average admitted class, according to Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA). A 2013 Harvard report found Asian applicants performed significantly better on test scores, academics, and overall scores. Of 10 total characteristics, white students performed significantly better in only one—rankings of personal qualities.
Following a 2014 lawsuit accusing Harvard of capping the number of Asian students, this week SFFA is suing Harvard in the federal district court in Boston in what has been called the “Harvard affirmative-action case”. The court will decide if Harvard has gone beyond what the Supreme Court has said are permissible ways to consider race in admissions—and, specifically, if it has shown bias against Asian American applicants.
We know the Left detests Whites (even though the Left is a juggernaut comprised of mostly self-hating Whites) but why do progressives hate Asians? The answer lies in inequality of outcomes, which is bound to happen in any meritocracy.
In a race-blind merit-based admissions system like New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, the admission outcome is 74 percent Asian, 18 percent White, 3 percent Hispanic, 1 percent Black, and 4 percent multiracial. In California, which eliminated race-based affirmative action in 1996, 42 percent Asians are admitted to the University of California at Berkeley.
“INEQUALITY!” shrieks the Left, prophesying the doom and death of diversity like Shakespeare’s three witches in Macbeth.
Is “Asian privilege” becoming the new “White privilege”
in America?
Tell that to Vijay Chokal-Ingam who pretended to be black to get into med school. Chokal-Ingam, an Asian American, shaved his head, trimmed his long Indian eyelashes, and interchanged his middle name with his first name. He became Jojo, the African American, and was admitted to St. Louis University School of Medicine. Jojo dropped out of med school but was bright enough to get into UCLA Anderson, a business school that doesn’t practice affirmative action.
Asians are toppling the Left’s equality applecart, but despite Jojo’s black skin having nearly the same degree of melanin as an African American, why would Leftist affirmative action policies so cruelly exclude him? Is it possible that progressive academics are terrified that the controversial “Bell Curve” theory proposed by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray is true and because Asian Americans have a higher mean IQ than white Americans, who in turn outscore black Americans, the equality utopia of the Left will never be realised even in their bastion of academe?
Or is it because “Asian privilege” is becoming the new “White privilege” in America? A recent Pew study describes Asian Americans as “the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States”.
Needless to say, there are differences within Asian Americans. The Indian population’s average annual earnings of $75,000 exceed the U.S. average of $46,000, largely due to high-paying science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers. Forty percent of Indians age 25 or over have degrees higher than a bachelor’s, compared with 11 percent for the U.S. population age 25 or over.
Asian Americans exceed all other U.S. adults also in median annual household income ($66,000 vs. $49,800) and median household wealth ($83,500 vs. $68,529). They are more satisfied than the general public with their lives overall (82% vs. 75%), their personal finances (51% vs. 35%) and the general direction of the country (43% vs. 21%).
They are socially conservative and stand out for their strong emphasis on family. More than half (54%) say that having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in life; just 34% of all American adults agree. They are more likely than all American adults to be married (59% vs. 51%); their newborns are less likely than all U.S. newborns to have an unmarried mother (16% vs. 41%); and their children are more likely than all U.S. children to be raised in a household with two married parents (80% vs. 63%).
Asian Americans hold strongly to a work ethic and believe in the rewards of hard work. Nearly seven-in-ten (69%) say people can get ahead if they are willing to work hard, compared to 58% of the American public. So they don’t need to go begging to the Welfare State for handouts.
And they love America! Only 12% say that if they had to do it all over again, they would remain in their country of origin. They prefer the U.S. to their country of origin in such realms as providing economic opportunity, political and religious freedoms, and good conditions for raising children by lopsided margins.
The success of the Asian American experiment completely debunks the Marxist hypothesis of structural oppression.
The success of the Asian American experiment completely debunks the Marxist hypothesis of structural oppression. The Left cannot get Asians to gripe about slavery or colonialism or racism because the Asians are too busy building a new American dream. “This country doesn’t owe us anything,” says Uma, mother of stand-up comic Hari Kondabolu, in a National Geographic interview.
It’s all about power, for the Left. Their task is to create victim groups and classify them in a hierarchy of intersectionality. The more oppressed a group, the better for the Left, because it has a cause to fight for—a raison d’être in an otherwise pointless world. Asians don’t give the Left much of a reason for existence. They don’t see themselves as victims, but as victors. If you are successful, you don’t need the Left. Rather, the Left is an impediment to even greater success.
This is both incomprehensible and intolerable to progressives because the Left loves to carry the White Man’s Burden and the White Man’s Guilt and the Asian looks askance and patronisingly pats the leftie saying, “Hey pal! Chill out and stop the self-flagellation. We’re doing great without your help, but thank you anyway!”
At heart the Left is deeply racist. For decades, the Democrats were the party of slavery, segregation, lynching, Jim Crow, forced sterilisation, and the KKK. By admitting blacks and Hispanics with rock-bottom grades to top universities and by segregating them in separate dorms, progressives can continue the racial caste system. So every time you meet a black with a PhD from Harvard or Stanford you won’t think Clarence Thomas or Ben Carson or Thomas Sowell. What you’ll think is: “Poor bugger! Got in on the black quota! Three cheers for the bigotry of low expectations!”
Meanwhile, Vijay Chokal-Ingam may have dropped a bomb on the progressive playground. If a man can self-identify as a woman and join a women’s sports team or sleep in women’s dorms or shower in women’s bathrooms, why can’t an Asian American self-identify as an African American and get into Harvard? As a leftwing variant of Professor Higgins would sing: “Why can’t an Asian American be more like an African American?”
(Originally published in Republic Standard)
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