Why Prop 16 faces stiff resistance from some Asian voters
Six years ago, when California lawmakers mounted a campaign to repeal the state s ban on affirmative action in college admissions, Chinese American opponents of the proposal flooded lawmakers with calls, emails and petitions. Their campaign, mobilized on the group messaging app WeChat and in Chinese-language media, was successful, and the constitutional amendment died in the Legislature.
This year, a better-organized effort has put Proposition 16 on California s November ballot. It s an even broader initiative that would reverse the measure approved by voters in 1996 banning any consideration of race and gender in public college admissions, as well as other government functions such as hiring and contracting. The initiative s supporters have dwarfed their opponents in fundraising and endorsements.
But they are once again running into vocal resistance from Asian American families in particular, from more conservative Chinese American immigrants who fiercely oppose a return of affirmative action.
I can totally see their point. Without discrimination against Asians, there would be a lot more — who knows how many — Asian American kids at Berkeley, UCLA and other state schools in California, and that’s *with* the ban on affirmative action. If it were legalized, we would see more of it. Then you would force qualified Asian-American kids to go to lesser colleges for the crime of being born to the wrong parents. This in spite of their hard work, and believe me, there is a lot of hard work involved. It’s just wrong. Yes, this would make many universities in California predominantly Asian in character. Anglo- and other American faculty, and administrators would have to adapt, as would non-Asian students. They would have to work harder, in many cases much harder, to get top grades. That’s the way competition works. We’re looking at the basic social contract here. Is the deal you work as hard as you can or as hard as you dare. Will you be rewarded for hard work or for how rich your daddy is and the color of your skin? The natural tendency of societies for some reason is to bend toward the latter, as we are doing here in California. Just look at Stanford or USC. If universities want to survive, they had better do this, that is, strive to be as pure meritocracies as they can be. But I’m pessimistic. Some other institutions will probably have to evolve to take the place of universities, if the PRC and CCP doesn’t wipe us out by then. Which is too bad, because as Andrew Yang put it, our Asians are smarter than their Asians.