Asian American Discrimination in Harvard Admissions [pdf]

Asian American itself is an interesting (and quite arbitrary) category. It perpetually fascinates me what is considered "Asian". East Asians are undeniably lumped in. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who considers Chinese/Korean/Japanese not Asian. SE Asia as well. South Asian (i.e. Indian, Pakistani, Bangla, etc.) ditto.

But the moment you cross this devious little Bactrian border, you start getting more and more pushback upon being labeled Asian. Talk to someone from Georgia or Armenia, or even Israel (yes, Israel is in Asia), and they'll quickly tell you that no, they're not Asian. Except...yeah you are.

One could make an argument that well, they're culturally European. I don't buy that. If you're in Asia and then your culture is Asian culture by definition. Of course nobody goes by that metric. So how do people determine Asianness? My estimate is that they do it by otherness. I.e. Asian culture is that which is not European or at this point American-European. A neat corollary to this is that Asianness is associated with a lack of social capital. Hence the insistence on not being Asian that you face in Central and Western Asia.

Which ties itself neatly into this problem. Asian-American as a category is borne out of otherness. It's that which is not European or American. And it makes sense that this group would face trouble in getting cultural, if not financial acceptance.

What to do about this? Well one thing not to do is to lash out at other people who are struggling to gain social or financial capital. Black and hispanic people are not our enemies here. A society that does not acknowledge the damaging effects of racism in its institutions and in its culture will not be a society that is beneficial to Asians.

I'm not sure what the solution is to college admissions. I don't think anybody does. But I'm adamant that it should not be used as a tool to divide minorities.

Around these parts, Asian most readily conjures either far east or south. The other option is not simply european, but near East / middle east and central Asian. Though middle east is predominately associated with Arab, there's also plenty of other such as Egypt, which is technically in Africa.

Generalizations are useful for generalizations. We should remember that, and abandon them when dealing with individuals.

If we want to help the impoverished, then do so. No need to introduce race into the mix, or erroneous assumptions about how race affects a person's character or finances.

I mean, perhaps we should ask the people who enslaved black people, or redlined districts specifically and solely for white anglo-saxon protestants, or segregated schools, or destroyed prosperous black communities—perhaps we should ask them about introducing race into the mix. The reason for policies dedicated to underrepresented minorities is that they were underrepresented for very clear, very egregious reasons.

I'm not a huge fan of the "not introducing race" argument because it purports that the person who is attempting to correct the historical disenfranchisement is somehow the first person to bring race up. When in reality the emphasis on not noticing race is a recent phenomenon.

Do poor black people deserve more help than equally poor brown, yellow, red or white people?