The LSAT's End Is Only The Beginning For More Anti-Asian Discrimination
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The LSAT's End Is Only The Beginning For More Anti-Asian Discrimination
"Test-free" is an euphemism for Asian elimination.
The Supreme Court is ready to strike down race-based affirmative action next year.
In a total coincidence (not), the American Bar Association has voted to eliminate the longstanding requirement that schools use the Law School Admission Test when deciding who gets into law school and who doesn’t.
The crazy thing is that there aren’t many Asian law students to begin with. Unlike STEM and business fields, Asians are actually underrepresented as lawyers. Asian women are particularly underrepresented. As lawyer Vivia Chen writes:
White men are still the winners. While White women have made greater strides in recent years, few are represented among top rainmakers at most major firms. And the majority of corporations in the study give out a paltry amount of business—less than 10%—to racial or ethnic minorities.
Among racial minority groups, Hispanics, followed by Black lawyers, fared the best—though that seems to pertain to the men in those groups. Black and Hispanic female lawyers received “a very tiny amount” of business, the study finds.
As for the bottom of the bottom, Asian Americans, along with Native Americans, reign, with women in those groups receiving “almost none” of the work.
For a group that some have dubbed “honorary Whites,” it’s stunning that Asian American lawyers are failing so miserably at business development.
However, when Asians do want to become lawyers and take the test, we on average perform better than everyone else, just like we perform better than everyone else on basically every standardized test. I laugh when people claim standardized testing is “white supremacy”, as if the people who created these tests had names like “Sheluyang Peng” in mind. If you think about it, standardized testing is basically affirmative action for Asians, and now people want to get rid of it. Chinese immigrants built the railroads, now we’re the ones being railroaded.
Asian Americans don’t take the LSAT as much as the MCAT or GRE, but when we do, we tend to score in the top range, 160-180. When Asians apply to law school, there are two big identity categories: URM and nURM. URM stands for underrepresented minority, which Asians actually are as lawyers and at most law schools, with the notable exception of T-14 schools, the top law schools in the country.
Asians are considered ORMs: overrepresented minorities. Asians have the sole (dis)honor of getting the ORM title.
Make no mistake: the LSAT’s removal is just the opening salvo in higher education’s attempts to decimate the numbers of Asian students on campuses after SFFA vs. Harvard. First they come for the LSAT. Then it’s the MCAT. Then the SAT and ACT. In fact, many colleges are already removing the SAT and ACT as a requirement.
Without those standardized test scores, admissions officers will judge more on “personality”. And we all know that people see Asians as having low “personality” scores. And we all know what “personality” really means.
Such is the life of the Asian American. The American legal system routinely discriminates against us, then prevents us from being lawyers, thus denying us the chance to unshackle ourselves. If you think about it, Lady Justice is probably Asian. Why else would she need to wear that blindfold? It’s the eyes.
