Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination
I attended TJ, back when it was about 30% Asian. I’ve always felt like the school should do more to get more underrepresented minorities. I’ve found the recent efforts very off-putting however.<p>It’s based on a modern strain of social justice ideology that adopts some very ugly assumptions about Asians. I’m reminded of Alison Collins in San Francisco, who called Asians “house n—-ers” and said they use “white supremacist thinking to get ahead.” <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;missionlocal.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;alison-collins-school-board-tweets" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;missionlocal.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;alison-collins-school-board...</a>.<p>Not everybody out and says stuff like this, obviously, but I sense the sentiment lurking under the surface in a lot of modern social justice discourse. In order to fit Asian economic success into their framework of “white supremacy” they end up making some extremely offensive assumptions. For example I’ve seen respectable articles arguing that the “model minority” stereotype arises from white people “allowing” Asian to be successful, to use them as a “wedge” against other minorities. I’ve been told to my face that Asians aren’t “grateful” enough to Black people for the Civil Rights movement and we “owe them.”<p>You see a form of this in particular the discussion around TJ. For example, opponents of merit-based admissions act like test prep is basically cheating, and elevate its effectiveness to mythic proportions. I prepped for the TJ test and SAT. It consisted of going to some Indian dude’s house for an hour every Saturday for a summer. Not private tutoring—six or eight kids crowded around a small dining room table doing practice problems. If that’s a game changer what does that say about American K-8 math education? And they act like the cost makes it unattainable for anyone else. But it’s a few thousand dollars if that (as low as under $1,000) which is reachable to all but destitute families. My uncle does math tutoring in Canada. His students are all immigrant kids from the high rise subsidized housing complex where he lives with my aunt and cousin. (My cousin lived there until he got his engineering degree and MBA and moved to a nice apartment in Toronto.)<p>The modern social justice folks blame all economic disparities on white people, and thus don’t even have the intellectual tools to explain what’s happening with Asians except through some distasteful assumptions.