An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian
American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy
Kenny
Xu's New Book Isn't Just about Asians; It's about All Americans
I
approached this lecture, semester after semester, with the focus of a medieval
knight challenging the dragon threatening to incinerate the village. I needed
to summon honesty that would slice like a surgeon's scalpel, but also compassion;
I needed to exercise cool rationality, while conveying the subject matter's
heat. I gazed at my students' faces. They arrived in class from diverse
backgrounds: housing projects in crime-ridden inner cities; wealthy, white and
Asian suburbs; night jobs as janitors and EMTs; mornings getting five or six
little brothers and sisters off to school. There were whites, blacks, Asians. I
had told them on the first day that this class in education might, at first
glance, appear boring and safe. In fact, I warned, Americans were at each
others' throats over the ideas we'd be debating.
I
walked to the chalk board with the brisk clip of someone bucking herself up. "It's
called the achievement gap," I would say. "Americans of East Asian
descent, as a group, score at the top of standardized tests." I wrote "East
Asians" on the board. "Remember that 'East' part. It will be
important later. Then, after East Asians, whites. Then Hispanics. Then blacks.
This happens test after test, year after year. The achievement gap persists
even among African Americans making as much money as white Americans."
I
turned from the board to my students. My emotional torniquets were handy. I was
ready to mop up any metaphorical blood. I always sought the same reaction:
surprise. I never saw it. I was merely speaking the quiet part out loud. Everyone
in class already knew, from their "lived experience." They knew that
in 2014, for example, in nearby Paterson, a majority-minority city, only nineteen high school students – 3.2% of the eligible
student population – were deemed qualified for college. They sat in classes
where white and Asian kids were comfortable with mentions of World War II and
photosynthesis and black kids from Paterson exchanged nervous looks with each
other, and only a tiny few were brave enough to say, "Please tell me what
that word you just used means. I don't understand it. I've never heard it
before."
What
surprised me most of all was what I saw on most of my black students' faces. No
self-pity. No outraged protests that this could not be true. No insistence that
"the white man" was to blame. Rather, what I saw was resignation and
determination. "I am going to be different. I am here to work hard and get
a degree." My black students were often ruthless Darwinians, steely little
capitalists, and American dreamers, believing more firmly than I in the old
adage, "Work hard and you will be rewarded."
I
quoted an article. "'If Harvard admitted students based on their
academic qualifications alone, Harvard would be 43% Asian, 38.4% white, 0.7%
black, and 2.4% Hispanic, according to a 2013 study by Harvard's Office of
Institutional Research. Instead, Harvard's undergraduates in 2013 were 43.2%
white, 18.7% Asian, 10.5% black, and 9.5% Hispanic.'" I asked, "Imagine
that you are the president of Harvard. Would you admit students based only on
academics? Or would you practice affirmative action?"
Again,
semester after semester, my students shocked me, rather than vice versa. "Admit
students to college on merit, not affirmative action," they insisted. When
I probed them, they explained. They lived among people who had thrown in the
towel. One black student said that he had an able-bodied uncle in his fifties
who had never held a job. He had lived his entire life on government largesse. Another
student reported a cousin who had child after child by a string of different
men. She lived on benefits to single mothers and petty crime. My students vowed
that they were going to be different. They were working, sacrificing, and
keeping their eyes on the prize. If Harvard admitted 0.7% black students, they
would be part of that 0.7%. Maybe not this year, but someday.
"But,
if Asians dominate elite universities, won't resentments build up against them?"
I asked.
"So
what if Harvard is mostly Asian? The NBA is mostly black," they'd respond.
"You
know, my black students are more conservative than I am," I casually
remarked to a superior one day.
This
African American woman replied sharply, "It is not your job to discover
their worldview. It is your job to change their worldview. We have to bring
them around." Bring them around to a leftist point of view. In short,
indoctrinate them, not educate them. Indoctrinate them into believing that any
inequity between African Americans and any other demographic is the result of
white supremacy and that inequity must be fixed with taxpayer-funded, government
programs.
I
did introduce my students to leftist ideas, but I introduced them to
conservative thinkers, as well. I let them decide for themselves which set of
ideas were most coherent.
"Remember,"
I said to my students. "The Asians doing really well in American schools
are largely from East Asian countries like China, Korea, and Japan. What these
countries have in common is a Confucian heritage. In that tradition, the
parent-child bond is sacred. This is called 'filial piety.' Contrast that with
the current state of the African American family." We watched a Prager
University video featuring Larry Elder explaining how
progressive policies, begun under President Lyndon Johnson, damaged the black
family, driving fathers out of the home, and increasing illegitimacy.
We
talked about the fifty-year-old, longitudinal, Stanford Marshmallow Experiment. Experimenters told a
child he could have one piece of candy immediately, or two pieces of candy
after a short wait. Over time, the children who were able to delay
gratification in order to gain a greater reward showed better lifetime
outcomes. The presence of the father in the
home
was correlated with children's ability to delay gratification. Progressives
have attacked the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment; they don't like its "conservative"
conclusion that children benefit from having their father in the home. After
all gender is "fluid," "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a
bicycle," "Heather has two mommies," and single mothers are to
be admired. "It takes a village to raise a child." For "village"
read "the government, not the parents." In spite of progressive
criticisms of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, other studies support the
experiment's conclusions. A 2017 study of 33 developed
countries concluded that "the absence of fathers from the household … is
associated with adverse outcomes for children in virtually all developed
countries … this is generally true in terms of both cognitive and non-cognitive
skills."
"No,"
I said to my students. "East Asians are not racially superior, and black
people are not inferior. Remember, non-Confucian countries bordering East Asian
countries have racially similar populations but their immigrants to the US are
not acing exams like the immigrants from Confucian cultures. Can we apply this
lesson about culture to African American populations? What would happen if
black leaders like Al Sharpton began a push for intact families and parental
support for academics?"
My
students sneered. "Al Sharpton is not our leader."
"Who
is?"
They
had no answers.
I
thought of this class lecture many times while reading Kenny Xu's explosive new
book, "An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack
on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy." Xu is mad as
hell and he's not gonna take it any more. His book is a rant. Asian Americans,
Xu points out, believe in the American Dream. They have intact families. They
practice delayed gratification. They work hard, and parents support their
children in their academics. They do not buck authority.
In
spite of all this, American educational and corporate institutions often
discriminate against Asian Americans, for fear of appearing "too Asian"
at a time when "diversity" is a value, and "diversity"
means visible African American and Hispanic faces in films, classrooms, and
corporate suites. Indeed, leftist race activists have resorted to accusing
Asians of cheating. So-called Asian-American "cheating" consists of
working hard and doing well. The white leftists pushing diversity, Xu points
out, are often members of socioeconomic elites, and they are not surrendering
their place in the hierarchy for anything. Rather, they are picking and
choosing which social groups beneath them in the pecking order will be tapped
with the magic wand of preference. Rather than being identified as racial
minorities in programs that favor racial minorities, successful Asians are
damned as "white adjacent."
In
place of current concepts of affirmative action, Xu recommends a renewed
commitment to meritocracy, the principle that whoever is best qualified for a
school slot or a job receives it, regardless of race. Xu reminds his reader
that Americans care enough about excellence in sports – for heaven's sake! – that
there is no call to produce an NBA team with a representational number of
Asian-American players. We should care at least as much about academics and
highly responsible jobs in government, industry, and health care as we care
about sinking baskets. Xu warns that abandoning meritocracy results in
incompetence in high places, and subsequent bad decisions about health,
technology, and national policy, bad decisions that hurt all members of
society.
There
are many statistics in "An Inconvenient Minority." Here are some:
*
In 2020, Virginia's Thomas Jefferson High School for Mathematics and Science,
ranked number one in the country, admitted a class that was 73% Asian. Of the
486 students accepted, 6 were black.
*
In 2018, Asians made up 73% of students at Stuyvesant, a specialized high
school in New York City. This is not about high income: almost 50% of
specialized school students qualify for free or reduced cost lunch.
*
The Bronx High School of Science has produced eight Nobel Prize winners.
Stuyvesant has produced four. These schools' traditional emphasis on
meritocracy has national and international import.
*
Poor and rich Asian students alike study an average of 13 hours per week. White
students study an average of 5.5 hours per week.
*
In a 2012 Pew poll, Asian Americans, at 69%, were the most likely to believe
that hard work results in success, and the most likely to respect traditional
family values, and to experience upward social mobility.
*
In California in 1940, Asian Americans earned on average an amount comparable
to the average black American. By 1980, Asian Americans were earning more than
average whites and significantly more than blacks.
*
The arrest rate for whites is 3.6% for blacks, 6.7%, for Asian Americans, 0.8%.
*
To gain college admission, Asian-American applicants must score, on average, 140,
270, and 450 points higher on the SAT than their white, Hispanic, and black
fellow applicants
*
15% of Harvard's student body comes from the top 1% of household income; 70%
come from the top 20%; 43% of Harvard's white students are affiliated with
Harvard alumni, faculty, or donors.
*
71% of minority Harvard students come from "well-off backgrounds." In
2004, 41% of black students at the 28 most selective campuses in America were
immigrants or the children of immigrants. In other words, racial preferences at
elite colleges disproportionately help economically well-off American blacks,
and black immigrants, rather than members of the American black underclass.
*
Black law school graduates who had received a racial preference admission to a
tier one law school tend to have lower GPAs at these top schools and, because
of these lower GPAs, end up earning about the same as graduates from a tier
three law school, that is, the law school they might have been admitted to
without any racial preferences.
*
After Richard Sander's research uncovered the above facts, the University of
California spent "close to a million dollars" to prevent Sander from
accessing any more facts about its racial preferences and how they affected
students' life trajectories, because publication of such material posed "a
threat to affirmative action" and to the university's reputation.
Apparently how the university's policies affected its students was not the
university's concern.
*
The California Institute of Technology admits students on the basis of
academics, not race. Caltech's undergraduate student body is 48% Asian. Its
endowment is six times smaller than MIT's, but it ranks fifth in the nation in
scholarly citations per faculty member, compared to MIT's number two rank.
As
we can see, above, Xu reports ample statistics to prove that Asian Americans
are doing well at academics, and that academic institutions, from specialized
high schools to Harvard, are erecting barriers punishing Asians for their
success. Xu's clearly stated conclusions are only part of the story his book
tells. Xu alludes to another, equally significant narrative. Xu never spells
this parallel narrative out. In this review, I will do so.
Xu
mentions discrimination Asian Americans have faced. He writes, briefly, about,
for example, the internment of Japanese
during World War II. Xu's sketch of anti-Asian prejudice in the US is brief and
understated, perhaps suiting what Xu refers to as Asian "humility."
He could have written a much more lachrymose account, one that included brutal conditions for Chinese railroad
workers, Chinese immigrants assessed as "the meanest slaves on earth,"
laws against Chinese marrying whites, and against the importation of Chinese wives, resulting in many
Chinese-American men being unable to marry anyone, and the 1871 Chinese Massacre, or mass lynching, in
Los Angeles. Xu is similarly understated in his page and a half of remarks
about anti-Asian violence occurring on the streets of America's cities today. Again,
if Xu were tempted to play the pity card, a more detailed account of these
deadly attacks, many recorded on video, would be the opportunity to do so, but
Xu forgoes the opportunity to play up the suffering of his fellow Asian
Americans.
Xu
mentions, but does not dwell on, treatment of Asians in American film. He could
have said so much more. It could be argued that American film, in spite of anti-black
racism, has been much kinder to African Americans than to Asian Americans.
American film has for decades attempted to address anti-black racism, see, for
example, 1934's "Imitation of Life" and 1949's "Pinky." Scroll
through online lists of the top American
films of the 1930s and 1940s in vain to find any major American film from the
30s and 40s that addressed anti-Asian prejudice in the way that films addressed
anti-black prejudice. Hattie McDaniel, in the sympathetic role of "Mammy,"
won an Academy Award for best supporting actress in 1939. The Wikipedia page of
African American Academy Award winners and nominees is 24 pages long. The list of Asian
winners and nominees is 17 pages long, and those 17 pages
are padded with Caucasians. For example, the British actress Vivien Leigh, who
happened to have been born in Darjeeling, and Armenian-American Cher are
included as "Asian." It wasn't until 1957, eighteen years after
McDaniels' win, that an East Asian, Miyoshi Umeki, won for an onscreen
performance, as best supporting actress in "Sayonara." American films
have pumped out pretty horrifying depictions of Asians, from 1915's "The
Cheat," to 1919's "Broken Blossoms," to numerous Fu Manchu
movies, to Mickey Rooney in 1961's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" to Long Duk Dong in 1984's "Sixteen Candles," right up to 2019's "Once
Upon a time in Hollywood."
The
perceptive reader will realize, given the above facts, the parallel, unspoken
narrative in Xu's book. Xu insists that there is a minority population in the
US that has experienced deadly persecution, highly negative stereotyping, and
racist legislation, and that, indeed, is discriminated against in the present
day, by powerful institutions like Harvard and Google, but that loves this
country, respects the law, works hard, and achieves highly.
The
conclusion a perceptive reader cannot help but draw is that the Asian American
narrative threatens the leftist version of the African American narrative. Extremely
powerful persons and institutions, including President Joe Biden, Vice
President Kamala Harris, cultural superstars Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, kindergartens
through elite universities using critical race theory curricula, corporations
using affirmative action hiring, and entertainment media producing content all insist
on a very different narrative. That power narrative asserts the following as
unquestionable: the achievement gap and higher rates of violent crime among African
Americans are inevitable, they are attributable exclusively to white supremacy,
African Americans are powerless to change these trends, and the only solution
to the achievement gap and all inequities is for whites to surrender their tangible
and intangible goods to blacks. Thus the achievement gap can only be closed by
white people giving up school slots to blacks, and abandoning grading and
testing completely. Crime rates can be lowered only be "defunding the
police."
As
Kendi puts it, "The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist
discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present
discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future
discrimination." An infamous internet meme, "Equality v Equity," illustrates this
approach. Three black males, an adult, a child, and a toddler, are standing on
crates behind a wooden fence, attempting to watch a baseball game. The toddler
is too short to see over the fence. The adult man gives up his crate so that
the toddler can stand on it and see the game. The person with more gives his
belongings to someone who has less. That's equity. That's Kendi's "present
discrimination."
This
limited-good, zero-sum worldview has been applied to commodities as diverse as
Hollywood films and test scores. Recently NPR film critic Eric Deggans insisted that Tom
Hanks, by making well-received films about white heroes, made it harder for
films about black heroes to be made. Hanks, to be "anti-racist," must
"dismantle … white American heroism."
Similarly,
Asians must be chastised, not lauded, for their success. Xu quotes Ice Cube's
over-the-top anti-Asian racism, hate, and threats of violence as expressed in
his rap "Black Korea."
"Every
time I wanna go get a f------- brew
I
gotta go down to the store with the two
Oriental
one penny countin' mother-------…
"Look,
you little Chinese mother------ …
"Mother
---- you!"
…
your little chop suey ass'll be a target …
pay
respect to the black fist
Or
we'll burn your store right down to a crisp"
Korean
families stick together, support each other, work hard, and open stores in
underserved neighborhoods. For this, they must be insulted and threatened, not
praised. Leftists accuse Asians of "opportunity hoarding." As if
opportunity were a limited good, and as if Asians, by grabbing at the brass
ring, prevent others from doing so. This is, as Xu points out, the logic and tactics
of a Maoist struggle session.
Ibram
X Kendi writes, "The use of standardized tests to measure aptitude and
intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised to
degrade Black minds and legally exclude Black bodies. We degrade Black minds
every time we speak of an 'academic-achievement gap' based on these
numbers."
Asians
are inconvenient because Asians throw this powerful narrative into question. In
Paterson, NJ, Asian-American students, largely Muslim, attend class
side-by-side with African American students. These Muslims are often recent
immigrants from Bangladesh and Pakistan. In Woke parlance, they are the
"brown" half of "black and brown." They speak a different
language at home than at school. Their parents still dress in saris, abayas,
and shalwar kameez. They are members of a religious group for which many
Americans feel great hostility and suspicion. They attend the exact same
low-rated schools as black students. Even so, Asian-American students in
Paterson do better than African American students in Paterson (see for example here).
Further,
black females attend the exact same classrooms that black males sit in, and
black females are doing better at academics than black males. The Journal of Blacks in Higher
Education
reports that "Black women currently earn about two thirds of all
African-American bachelor's degree awards, 70% of all master's degrees, and
more than 60% of all doctorates. Black women also hold a majority of all
African-American enrollments in law, medical, and dental schools." The
Woke dogma of intersectionality decrees that female black students suffer from
misogyny as well as white supremacy. And yet female students are outperforming
males. And then there is this difficult fact: whites, on average, score less
than Asians. By Kendi's own rule, that any inequality is the result of racism,
white students' lower place in comparison to Asians must be explained by
anti-white racism and Asian privilege. Absurd. Kendi's and others' insistence
that white supremacy is the one-size-fits-all explanation for the achievement
gap is transparent in its inadequacy. If Kendi had any compassion for black students
at all, he would echo the many black conservatives who insist that culture must
be examined.
Asian
Americans, just by living their lives, prove the critical race theorists wrong.
Those who have faced prejudice are not doomed. White supremacy is not the
Rosetta Stone that explains everything about black people's lives. African
American adults, like all other adults, are equipped with agency, that is, the
ability to make choices about their lives. Some of those choices are good, and some
of those choices are bad. If adults in the African American underclass were to
make different choices, their children's academic and life outcomes would
improve.
The
late, great George Mason University economics professor, Walter E. Williams, published,
in 2005, an article entitled "How Not to be Poor." "First,
graduate from high school," he wrote. "Second, get married before you
have children, and stay married. Third, work at any kind of job, even one that
starts out paying the minimum wage. And, finally, avoid engaging in criminal
behavior."
To
those who insist that white supremacy prevents African Americans from escaping
poverty, Williams replied, "Is it racial discrimination that stops black
students from studying and completing high school? Is it racial discrimination
that's responsible for the 68% illegitimacy rate among blacks? … Among black
households that included a married couple, over 50% were middle class earning
above $50,000, and 26% earned more than $75,000. How in the world did these
black families manage not to be poor? Did America's racists cut them some
slack?"
To
Williams' suggestions, one might add: if you want to thrive as well as just
survive, take a cue from Asian Americans. Work together as a family. Keep that
nose to the grindstone, at school as well as work, delay gratification, and
someday your ship will come in.
I
return, in my mind, to the lecture I delivered so many times. I never answered
the question I asked my students. If I were president of Harvard, would I
practice race preferences? I do not believe that any racial group is superior
to any other. I believe that there are as many budding Bill Gates and Nobel
Prize winners in Paterson as in any other city. I know that the black kids here
are deprived. I know that that deprivation is totally unfair and is the result
of choices made by adults, not relatively powerless children. I know that most
are growing up in fatherless households. I know that Paterson's single mothers
are overwhelmed and can't give their kids a fraction of what kids need to
thrive.
All
the breast-beating in the world about the horrors of slavery, and all the articles
like this citing statistics that show that strong families can overcome tough
circumstances and mold children who advance to society's highest levels, have
zero impact on Paterson kids' lives. What does have an impact on their lives?
Exactly what has an impact on most of our lives. What is right in front of
them: streets full of garbage, loud and violent rap broadcast, day and night,
from car stereos, mothers too stressed to offer consistent love, and a popular
culture full of cheap images of sex and violence. Too many of the men they
interact with are standing on street corners, day in and out, smoking
marijuana, drinking from bottles, and lying in their own waste.
Government
programs? White guilt? There is no deficit of these "solutions" here
in Paterson. Men sleep on the street across from the Salvation Army. They could
sleep inside but doing so would require that they surrender drugs and weapons
and many choose not to comply with those requirements. Skeletal junkies, white
and black, beg and prostitute themselves steps away from treatment centers,
welfare offices, and Catholic Charities. They are adults and have made their
choices. The students walking past them on their way to school are what we all
were once – relatively powerless children, vulnerable to the choices of adults,
adults like the nearby junkies; adults like the distant president and ubiquitous
race activists.
Do
I want Paterson kids to go to Harvard? Yes I do. When they graduate from local
high schools, are they at all prepared to benefit from being airlifted onto the
Harvard campus? No, they are not. Is there any force in America right now
communicating to Patersonians the practices that will prepare children in
Paterson's black underclass for Harvard? If there is, I don't know what it is.
And I despair.
Kenny
Xu's book speaks important truths. America's Kendi-mandated flight from
meritocracy is harming and will further harm America. Asian-Americans are
discriminated against exactly because of their investment in the American
Dream. A national return to traditional values will advance America in general
and Asian Americans specifically.
But
I hope and pray that we don't stop there.
I
hope and pray for these ideas to be applied more widely than they are now in
cities like Paterson. Yes, there are charter schools, old-fashioned parents,
and other pockets of resistance to Woke. We need more. We need brave voices
that will speak up for personal responsibility, delayed gratification, for
stable, two-parent families to support academics, for respect for the authority
of teachers, for standards, for orderly classrooms that facilitate learning,
rather than the "indoor street corners" condemned by veteran Paterson
teacher Lee McNulty in this video.
Let's
remember who will benefit first and most from a return to traditional values.
An Asian-American student rejected by Harvard who later accepted a place at a
lower tier, but still respectable, university will be okay in the long run, in
spite of the unfairness of race preferences that discriminated against him.
Yes, Asians like Kenny Xu will benefit from a return to traditional values, but
Xu's strong background will stand him in good stead in spite of the left-wing,
anti-Asian, anti-meritocratic racism he has faced. Rather, those who will
benefit most from any return to traditional values will be the innocent African
American children who have been damaged by well-meaning but destructive
policies, policies that have effectively shut them out of a full intellectual
life.
Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
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