NPR: Whites fooled Asians into believing affirmative action hurt them

Are people of non-European descent incapable of independent thought?

That seems like an absurd idea, but liberals keep asserting it nonetheless.

The most common examples of such claims are the assertions that Blacks cannot be conservatives unless the evil White man has fooled them. This line of attack is directed at Clarence Thomas, for instance, who is routinely insulted as “Uncle Thomas.” Pretty much every Black Republican suffers from similar insults daily.

Elie Mystal had one of his usual cool, calm, and collected takes when he claimed Clarence Thomas is a “mutilated version of a black justice” who is his wife’s puppet “he doesn’t want to see anything that Ms. Ginni tells him he shouldn’t be able to see.” pic.twitter.com/uCnk3GPL85

— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) July 1, 2023

The idea, I suppose, is that they should be worshipping at the altar of a different White man–Karl Marx.

What I did not expect, though, is the line of attack taken by NPR directed at Asian Americans: they, too, have been fooled into believing by White men that affirmative action disadvantages Asians.

Asians against Affirmative Action are not hard find. You’d think they’d ask at least one to weigh in before proclaiming them dupes.

— Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog) July 2, 2023

Now my own ideological commitment to fairness leads me to be indifferent to the racial distribution of winners and losers, and given GPAs and test scores the biggest winners with the elimination of racial preferences won’t be White people but Asians, who have, on average, the highest IQ and standardized test scores of any racial group.

If I were motivated by racial solidarity, which seems like an extremely stupid idea to me,

Countless examples of Asians being shut out of opportunities exist, whether it is in higher education, where the SAT score differential between Asians who get admitted and those of other races is significant, to admissions in elite high schools, where analyses show that Asians need to significantly outperform students of other races to get admitted.

It shouldn’t be controversial to admit these facts, but it is. It simply is true.

The Supreme Court struck down affirmative action policies in the Students for Fair Admissions vs Harvard case because the evidence was indisputable. Harvard tried to hide their own racist discrimination against Asians by using non-academic “personality” ratings but in the process they demonstrated significant bias against Asians by rating them as, essentially, too boring to admit to the school.

Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university.

Asian-Americans scored higher than applicants of any other racial or ethnic group on admissions measures like test scores, grades and extracurricular activities, according to the analysis commissioned by a group that opposes all race-based admissions criteria. But the students’ personal ratings significantly dragged down their chances of being admitted, the analysis found.

The court documents, filed in federal court in Boston, also showed that Harvard conducted an internal investigation into its admissions policies in 2013 and found a bias against Asian-American applicants. But Harvard never made the findings public or acted on them.

NPR, though, insists that Asians are being used as the minority face of White Supremacy, presumably because all people with a melanin content higher than an Irishman in winter must have solidarity against the White man.

[A] combination of real feelings of racial marginalization paired with personal experiences of children and students not getting into a very few spots at a very elite college, helped Blum tap into a narrative that affirmative action was targeting Asian Americans; that they were “less equal.”

“Predominantly white, conservative political forces are leveraging this experience of being racially marginalized among Asian Americans to say, yeah, and by the way, there’s this policy that you’re not benefiting from,” Poon says.

“It’s really tapping into fear with zero evidence.”

The fact that Asians are, indeed, discriminated against in academia has been litigated to death already, so I won’t even bother going over the evidence. The only people denying this are doing so in bad faith, so what is the point of once again proving the established and, frankly, obvious fact?

For that matter, the premise of affirmative action is that failing to use race as a factor in decision-making will result in inequitable results, pretty much admitting that in a color-blind system, the results will not please the race-obsessed. You can’t have it both ways: either affirmative action will change the racial balance of a group, advantaging some and disadvantaging others, or it makes no difference at all and is utterly unnecessary.

Pick a lane.

NPR, though, has a slightly different take: Asians are being used by White Supremacists to harm others, and Asians are simply being fooled into believing that they have been discriminated against because of affirmative action.

“We were able to get the University of California to actually admit that they had discriminated against Asian Americans by dis-advantaging them in what we’re supposed to be head-to-head, merit-based types of competitions between Asian and white students,” [Jeff] Chang says.

Chang says he can’t help but notice that Blum and his supporters borrowed, even co-opted, their movement and their message, along with some of their legal strategies, but for the exact opposite ends. Instead of fighting for affirmative action, they were fighting to kill it.

The group Chang co-founded in 1987 was called the Student Coalition for Fair Admissions.

When Blum founded his organization in 2014 he called it Students for Fair Admissions, or SFA.

But for one word, it was an exact copy of the name of the organization Chang co-founded.

But the missing word—coalition—is a key one. Chang’s group was founded and filled with Asian American students and activists. Blum’s group, on the other hand, was founded by a white man and “never produced any students who were discriminated against as they had in the Fisher case,” Chang says. Some students have spoken out in the media, but none have testified in court.

“They’ve spoken on our behalf and they’ve erased our history,” Chang says about Blum’s SFA.

“I feel like Asian Americans have been used.”

The discrimination that Jeff Chang fought decades ago–Asians were being disadvantaged to ensure more White students got into the University of California system–did indeed exist and was just as wrong as the discrimination against Asians to advantage Blacks and Hispanics in more recent years. This was the sort of discrimination my father faced when he was admitted to Harvard–Jews at the time were admitted under a quota system, and while he made it in, many other qualified Jews were excluded to ensure that enough WASPs were enrolled.

That, too, was wrong.

Notice Chang’s and NPR’s slant though–the fact that Students for Fair Admissions was led by a White man meant that Asians were duped by him. Asians, apparently, cannot think for themselves when confronted by a White Svengali figure. They are being “used.”

This is absurd, and worse, it is exactly the sort of ideological assertion that makes a race-neutral society impossible to achieve.

There’s a lot more insanity in the NPR article, but one more thing stands out: not a single opponent of affirmative action is interviewed, Asian or otherwise. The only people allowed to speak are those who the “reporter” agrees with.

We don’t know the exact reason why different racial groups perform dramatically differently in academia, although my own belief is that the primary driver is culture rather than genetics. The fact that IQs are dropping in recent years after decades of secular increases suggests to me that the vast cultural changes of the past few decades have dulled the intellectual abilities of people–our attention spans are shorter, for instance, and we get bored almost instantly. People read less, use emojis rather than words, and our public schools are execrable.

Whatever the reason for achievement gaps, the best place to address them is very early in the educational process, and not in college or at the job interview. We do know that Black students get a raw deal in our public schools, and affirmative action will never be a substitute for a good primary education.

Addressing that is much harder, though, than just using quotas.

Given that, statistically speaking, nobody goes to Harvard, changes to the racial composition of the school make zero difference to the achievements of racial groups in our society. Harvard College graduated about 1,500 students last year, out of about 2 million bachelor’s degrees awarded in the country. Affirmative action in such a tiny number is purely symbolic, and the symbolism is that racism is a good thing if done for the right reasons.

No, it isn’t. All it does is create racial division.

Which, apparently, is what NPR wants.