Do any of these people railing against affirmative action really think that Native/African/Hispanic Americans should be locked in a self-reinforcing cycle of declining educational and economic outcomes?
Maybe going to your second choice school is an ok tradeoff for trying to raise and entire segment of society from relative poverty and discrimination.
* Am Asian, got rejected by Stanford and Harvard
You need to stop thinking this is a fight between Asian Americans and other disadvantaged groups. The fight is about Asian Americans being systemically treated unfairly in American society. It is not acceptable. It wouldn't even be up for debate if we were talking about any other disadvantaged group. Not all Asians come from wealthy families and are trying to get into Harvard.
The reality is that rich, white men have been entrenched in power since long before American society was a thing. You might consider whether retreating into tribalism and picking a fight over affirmative action is eroding or entrenching that advantage by dividing the consensus to change it.
https://www.vox.com/2018/3/28/17031460/affirmative-action-as...
There must be a way for all disadvantaged peoples to be treated fairly under the law. I reject the idea and seeming consensus that American society has come to in deciding that it's Asians who should be thrown under the bus in favor of other groups, even though on an individual level, many impoverished Asian people are being passed in favor of other people from wealthy families who happen to be the favored race/ethnicity at the time.
Equality.
Is it fair to be born into a racial group thats 50% or 25% less likely to earn a degree?[2] Perhaps taking a person's circumstances into consideration, while narrowly and individually unfair, is actually fairer in a broader sense. That goes for race, socio-economic status, and whatever else impairs your opportunities.
It's just disappointing to see the victimization being thrown around here, especially in contrast to the groups being vilified. The sad truth is that a sense of empathy and being able to see the bigger picture will get you a lot farther in life than the words on your diploma.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
What happens if you're a rich Black or Latino kid in America? You Get Two advantages! You get to be raised in a wealthy family and you need to accomplish much less than other kids to be admitted to the same prestigious universities.
Trying to fight inequality from birth with racism is not the right approach.
It was a thought I had in the past as a young Asian American person, that maybe other people didn't stand up for Asian people in America because we didn't really stand up for each other. Something I observed in other groups like African Americans and Hispanic Americans was that they generally will back each other up and give their group support without questioning it, because it's intuitively the right thing to do. Us vs them. On the other hand, Asians can be pretty divided amongst each other. Some even hate each other. A number of them hate themselves. The unity isn't there. So when someone like you would see another Asian person being systemically discriminated against, you wouldn't go to bat for that person. You'd tell him that they're unempathetic and that he should think about people who are worse off than him. And I can't help but think back over my life being online, at school, observing other people, other Asians, and realizing how often this was the case. I was even guilty of thinking like this in the past. Because I'm such an individual and I don't think tribally unlike those other minorities! I thought. And now I realize that wasn't really a good way to think. Because while other groups got together and fought for their rights in American society, us Asians were left behind. We left each other behind by not going to bat for the little guys in our group. We didn't want to cause trouble or bring negative attention to ourselves. That's how we were raised. And that's how we'll die.
If you don't grow up in an asian community or have a lot of asians at your work place, you wouldn't even have an opportunity to form a community, let alone start thinking that you need to prioritize the needs of that community.
The mental calculus to shift to a community-first mindset might be analogous to forming/joining a union. You give up some of your own individual upside to get better benefits together as a group. You'll certainly better improve the "floor" of the group, but harder to tell if doing so ends up improving or lowering the "average" of the whole group.