Asian American Discrimination in Harvard Admissions [pdf]

The problem is that Asians don't have a story of discrimination. Blacks have slavery, Jews have the holocaust, Native Americans have their land being taken from them, and Latinos have being raised in a third world country and fled to America on foot. These are simple, visual stories as to why they were all discriminated against.

But Asians, along with Indians are mostly relatively wealthy immigrants that came here legally. There is no story of their collective hardships, so no heart strings are pulled, so no one cares.

If there was a movie about discrimination and hardship, the Asians would be cut out of it, being their story was too boring and not dramatic enough. That is the real reason.

Asian discrimination in the US includes the Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1917 Immigration Act, bans on the ownership of property (leading to the development of Chinatown ghettos), and internment camps.

Furthermore, many Asian immigrant groups came to the US quite poor, such as early Chinese, and in more modern times, Vietnamese.

I think this comment speaks more to personal ignorance than the actual truth of the matter.

> Asian discrimination in the US includes the Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1917 Immigration Act, bans on the ownership of property (leading to the development of Chinatown ghettos), and internment camps.

> Furthermore, many Asian immigrant groups came to the US quite poor, such as early Chinese, and in more modern times, Vietnamese.

Compared to slavery, the holocaust, having your land stolen away from you, and a fleeing refuge from war and poverty, these are small potatoes.

> I think this comment speaks more to personal ignorance than the actual truth of the matter.

I never said that Asians didn't have their own hardships, and in general, I don't think it's fair to lump people in categories such as race or sex and say your group of people suffered in such a way, therefore you personally are more deserving than others. What I'm saying is there lacks a simple visual story for Asians of suffering and this has a societal psychological effect on how they are being treated.

Don't confuse what I'm saying as what should be vs what is. I don't pay much attention to what should be, because as an individual I can have little effect. I do like to understand what is and why it is (and like to comment about my theories about it)

> Compared to slavery, the holocaust, having your land stolen away from you, and a fleeing refuge from war and poverty, these are small potatoes.

Fleeing refuge from war and poverty are literally the circumstances from which Chinese have arrived in the US for centuries (not to mention the more obvious groups like Vietnamese and Cambodian). Modern China has only been wealthy for a very short time, shorter than affirmative action policies in the US (I'm not trying to argue for or against AA, just want to point out the timeline).

Look, I'm not going to say Chinese suffered more during their great famine than Jews in the Holocaust. But I'm also not going to say the opposite. Everybody has suffered here, enough so that these events are burned into the consciousness of both groups. If you can only see the visual story of one of these, it's not because the other one doesn't exist, it's because you haven't sought it out.

I agree with this assessment. Racial grievances are based on a shared narrative of how the white man hurt them.

You still don't get it, I'm not talking about myself, just how the public reacts. I don't think preferential treatment based on skin color is ever a good idea.