Asian American Discrimination in Harvard Admissions [pdf]

Not Harvard, but (being Asian American) this sort of soft characterization as being deficient in personality metrics rings true in my head.

For starters, my father in his full time government job repeatedly got "no leadership potential" reviews. Meanwhile in his part time job with the US Navy, he advanced to the level of captain and in his final act for the Navy led a team that completed its first fully digitized inventory system, saving the Navy billions of dollars, and delivered it under budget and ahead of time. (Fwiw he was non-technical, just "good at making things happen for nerds", his words not mine)

In my personal life, I've encountered several situations where people have expressed to me explicitly or implicitly they didn't consider me to be leader-worthy despite my having successfully managed small teams several times in my career.

Asian is such a generic term that I think one could characterize it as racist. My commanding officer in the US Marines were Korean-American and I can confidently say he was a great leader and someone I deeply respect and would follow into battle again even today.

There is such a broad and rich smorgasbord of cultural traditions from the Asian continent in the US that I don’t think it’s fair to lump them all together. When we start using personal anecdotes to prove some belief, we revert to some sort of pre-modern bigotry.

One thing that is for sure, in an attempt for equity, those with cultural norms to work hard, study hard and excel in life are being discriminated against. In the previous generation it was the Jews (in the US, as well as Europe) and today (broadly speaking) its Americans with an ethnic heritage from Asia. But the same underlying philosophy that killed undesirables in the Gulags of the Soviet and the death camps of the Nazi, are hard at work in the US today under the false pretense of “equity”.