How False History Is Used to Justify Discrimination Against Asian Americans – Tablet Magazine
On June 29, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) in a landmark decision that overturned explicit race-based affirmative action in America. The decision was a major victory for Asian Americans whom Harvard had routinely and openly discriminated against. To impose quotas on the school s racial makeup, Harvard had systematically given Asian Americans lower personality scores on applications, the suit alleged, drawing from stereotypes of robotic and inscrutable foreigners from the Orient. It was the same tactic Harvard had used a century ago to systematically discriminate against Jews.
In the aftermath of the ruling, rather than celebrating the victory against racial discrimination, a number of prominent media figures advanced a narrative blaming Asian Americans for betraying other racial minorities. The narrative went as follows: Black Americans and their work leading the Civil Rights Movement are the reason you Asians are in America in the first place how dare you now sell out the very people you should be thanking for bringing you here.
Jemele Hill, a columnist for The Atlantic, tweeted that an Asian American mother celebrating the court s decision carried the water for white supremacy and stabbed the folks in the back whose people fought diligently for Asian American rights in America. Former CNN anchor Soledad O Brien quoted the same tweet, saying that the mother was screwing over other people of color & Particularly those whose efforts in civil rights paved the way for your family to come to America. And activist-attorney and House candidate Qasim Rashid claimed that Asians were only able to immigrate to the United States b/c Black civil rights leaders passed immigration reform.
This trope about Asian American debts did not emerge spontaneously in the last few weeks. It was seeded into the public discourse by the most influential project of historical reframing in recent American history: the activist-journalism of The New York Times 1619 Project. In her opening essay for the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones asserts that Because of black Americans, black and brown immigrants from across the globe are able to come to the United States and live in a country in which legal discrimination is no longer allowed. It is a truly American irony that some Asian-Americans, among the groups able to immigrate to the United States because of the black civil rights struggle, are now suing universities to end programs designed to help the descendants of the enslaved.
Although I don’t like big government, top down solutions, we could do worse than just mandating federally straight merit-based admissions for all schools that accept federal money. That would make Harvard, Yale etc. a lot more Asian, but that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. UC Berkeley is quite Asian and that’s ok. There would still be a place for more ordinary kids as well. But this is not going to happen, not for a while at least.