Pulling Up The Ivory Tower's Ladder

You ever notice how people that are no longer impacted by affirmative action end up supporting it?

A protest of “Asian Americans For Affirmative Action”, featuring college students that have all gotten in already.

The Supreme Court is likely set to end race-based affirmative action this year. The mainstream media’s thinkpiece-writing industry is revving on full speed trying to spin this as a negative thing. Take the newest entry in this thinkpiece-canon, titled Affirmative Action Is in Peril and ‘Model Minority’ Stories Don’t Help.

The writer is an Asian American student at Yale. She writes,

Michael Wang was an ideal college applicant. He had a 4.67 G.P.A., a product of excelling in the more than a dozen A.P. classes that he’d taken. He was also on the debate team, played piano and sang in the choir for President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2008.

Yet even with all his accomplishments, he was rejected by six of the seven Ivy League colleges he applied to, as well as Stanford. He filed a complaint with the Department of Education accusing three of the schools of discrimination.

I remember reading about him as a young teenager already anxious about applying to college. I was indignant on his behalf. More than that, I was worried. He had done everything I was striving to do. And if he couldn’t go where he wanted to, what did that mean for me?

Despite my fears that I would become another Asian American name to add to those who seemingly qualified but were rejected by elite colleges, when the time came, in 2017, I applied to 12 schools. While I wasn’t accepted by all of them, I did get into Yale, where I am now in my final year, majoring in American studies.

I think of stories about upwardly mobile second-generation Asian Americans differently now, as the Supreme Court seems poised to dismantle race-based admissions policies. (emphases mine)

So when she hadn’t gotten into college, she was worried about being harmed by affirmative action, and was mad over the policies. But then she got into Yale, where she no longer has to worry about being harmed, and now she thinks differently. She has absorbed all the beliefs one needs to survive at America’s elite colleges, as I’ve discussed many times before.

This is a tale as old as time itself. People get rightfully upset over being discriminated against. But then when they no longer have to worry about being discriminated against, suddenly they’re fine with the status quo. Now that the author has claimed her perch high above the ivory tower, she can pull the ladder away from the poor huddled masses trying to make it up.

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Then the author claims that Asians are being used to push White people’s agendas:

Increasingly, it seems that stories about Asian Americans who say they have been victimized by affirmative action are becoming popular for a different reason: They can provide a cover for white people who resent the push for diversity but don’t want to come off as racist.

The two cases on affirmative action before the Supreme Court were brought by a group called Students for Fair Admissions, which was founded by Edward Blum, an activist behind more than two dozen suits against affirmative action and voting rights laws.

Mr. Blum also orchestrated the last major challenge to race-based policy in college admissions, Fisher v. University of Texas (A lawsuit by the Department of Justice accusing Yale of race and national origin discrimination in 2020 was dropped). The plaintiff in the University of Texas case, Abigail Fisher, said the university had denied her admission because she is white. Hers was one of several lawsuits in which white women said they had been harmed by affirmative action, despite studies showing that they’ve actually benefited the most from such policies.

Mr. Blum and Ms. Fisher lost. Mr. Blum then shifted his focus largely onto Asian Americans. His group’s lawsuits accuse the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, of discriminating against white and Asian American applicants and Harvard of discriminating against Asian American applicants by using subjective measures to gauge personality traits that disfavor them and holding them to higher standards than other applicants.

This is the end result of critical race theory’s impact on higher education: everything bad has to be White people’s fault, and people of color have no agency of their own. That’s how you end up with takes about how attacks on Asians by Black and Latino people are actually the result of White supremacy.

Never mind that Edward Blum is Jewish: the original minority to be discriminated against by Harvard and other prestigious schools. But of course, Asians and Jews are both now excluded from the minority club.

And while the idea that White women benefit the most from affirmative action is a popular one, it is also a lie. Women have outnumbered men on college campuses for decades, so much that colleges are giving men affirmative action to balance the gender ratio.

And think about the absurdity of the idea this way: if White women really benefit from affirmative action so much, then shouldn’t liberals be applauding Abigail Fisher for wanting to dismantle a policy that supposedly benefitted her the most?

Abigail Fisher, who apparently advocated to destroy a policy she benefitted from the most. What an antiracist icon!

Move over, Robin DiAngelo. Let’s all celebrate Abigail Fisher as a White ally for racial justice.

Sarcasm aside, the majority of Asian Americans are against affirmative action because it discriminates against us the most. I can guarantee you all that working-class Asian American families that want their kids to go to good colleges as a way out of poverty aren’t thinking “Hey, I am against affirmative action because I want to be used by White people to attack other minorities”. Again, the idea is absurd if one just puts an ounce of thought into it.

Asian parents that want their kids to not be discriminated against for the color of their skin.

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And finally:

In any case, these “model minority” stories don’t help. They lump together the different Asian American cultures, ignoring their differences. They pit minority groups against one another, with Asian Americans typically portrayed as overachievers. And by creating unreasonable expectations, they also put undue pressure on Asian American students.

Creating unreasonable expectations that put undue pressure on Asian American students? Wow, she just described affirmative action.

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Read more of my pieces on affirmative action:

Asian American Academic Achievement Ain't An Advantage

The LSAT's End Is Only The Beginning For More Anti-Asian Discrimination

No Affirmative Action for Asian Athletes