Chunhua Liao

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/08/03/dont-use-asian-americans-to-justify-anti-affirmative-action-politics/?from=groupmessage&utm_term=.cbe00b3d3ea8
Many Thanks to Crystal Lu for editorial improvements.
This is a stunningly biased and prejudiced article in an attempt to advance race-based policies. It blatantly ignores the sufferings of Asian Americans and paints conservative Asian Americans as mindless tools exploited by White Americans.

First of all, race-based college admission is widely reported. Look at the fact: Harvard and many other ivy league universities have maintained a defacto 20% quota on Asian applicants for decades while the population of Asian Americans significantly increased. Asian students are put into a separate bucket and are pitted against one another. The competition gets so cut-throat that it has caused tragedies including numerous suicides. Just talk to any parents of high schoolers in the Bay Area, where I’m from. Saying that Asians are not hurt by racial quota is a bold-faced lie.

The author’s attack on conservative Asian Americans is especially hideous. Somehow she assumes all Asians must uniformly follow liberal views, or else they must be mindless sheep herded by conservative White Americans like Mr. Blum. She preaches against stereotyping but she just proves that she holds a racist view about Asians Americans.

I am an Asian American from Silicon Valley and I take pride in my independent thinking and my conservative views. Many Asian Americans around me have similar conservative viewpoints. Let me set the record straight. In early 2014 there was a groundswell of Asian Americans like me -scientists, engineers, accountants, lawyers, small business owners, stay home moms, etc. – who started to advocate treating individuals equally regardless of races or genders as part of our campaign against the California Senate Constitutional Amendment No.5 [1]. We heard about Mr. Blum’s cause in 2015. We then invited him to California to speak on a forum about his lawsuit[2]. We subsequently encouraged Asian students who have fallen victims to institutional discrimination to join his nonprofit organization (Students for Fair Admissions). In less than one week, we helped Mr. Blum recruit 7000 new members. We, Asian Americans, are taking the initiatives to fight against discrimination. We are “using” Mr Blum as an ally to do so, not the other way around.

As a scientist, I could’t helping diving into the research the author employed to prove her point. The study she cited[3] is not a peer reviewed research paper, but a report self-published by a foundation. Even this report concludes that the key factors of benefits are deeper diverse experiences and viewpoints, not superficial skin color differences: “In a class discussion or on a problem-solving team, bringing together different viewpoints and experiences makes everyone think harder and provide better evidence for their opinions.” You would wonder what skin colors have to do with this?

For real, respectable academic research, you should look no further than the article published by ACM[4]. The author admits: All cited studies about the benefits of gender/race-based diversity were just observations of correlations. None of them were designed to prove causal relationship, which I doubt they could ever do so unless we use meaningful human qualifications to re-design these studies.

Let me clarify what I think diversity really is. Diversity is defined by the collection of different life experiences, thinking models, approaches to problems, and fresh perspectives within a group of people, not defined by the superficial differences in skin colors. Improving education diversity is to improve different thinking methods and problem solving skills for students so they can be better prepared for life challenges later on, not to increase the number of different skin colors.

Using skin colors to decide diversity is racial discrimination since the assumption is that people of the same color must think alike and cannot have diverse qualities. It will also mislead educators that once their students have varied skin colors, they have reached their diversity goal. This is expedient and short-sighted thinking and will undermine the future competitiveness of our nation.

Still I share the same belief of pushing social justice for all people. But I would use a much more effective approach: considering the socioeconomic status of students in college admission, instead of using their skin colors. By doing so, every disadvantaged student can get help regardless of their skin colors. You will not wrongly deprive a poor Asian student of his or her opportunity and give it to Obama’s daughters.

In the end, I wish the author could toss aside her tainted glasses when viewing conservative Asians Americans. Please treat us with respect and don’t assume we are others’ tools only because we disagree with you. I wish she could talk to the Asians American communities and have a little empathy to Asian students hurt by institutional discrimination rampant in college admissions. I hope she can rely on peer-reviewed studies proving causation before advocating for social policies that are race-based.

Citations
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Constitutional_Amendment_No._5
[2] https://www.svcaf.org/?page_id=2485
[3]https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/02/29/research-shows-diverse-classrooms-improve-learning-for-everyone/
[4]https://m.cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/11/179827-the-data-on-diversity/fulltext