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Opinion | For Asian-Americans, the Trump administration’s attack on affirmative action presents a Faustian bargain
- The Department of Justice accuses Yale University of discrimination, a move that may seem to benefit Asian students
- But it’s just another instance of white American conservatives using the Asian ‘model minority’ myth to attack the interests of others, says William Han
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Mephistopheles knocks again.
On Thursday, the United States Department of Justice accused my alma mater, Yale University, of discrimination against Asians and whites.
It’s the latest salvo in the ongoing fight in the US over affirmative action: the practice of preferentially admitting under-represented and underprivileged racial groups for the sake of diversity, and a part of America’s tortuous reckoning with its racial demons.
The US Supreme Court set up the framework in the landmark 1978 case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke – where it essentially ruled that it was illegal to set racial quotas, but found that it was legal to consider racial minority status as a factor in favour of admission.
Legal niceties have since run up against two obstacles. The first is arithmetics: every spot that Yale gives to a student of one race is a spot that it cannot give to a student of another. The second is the general perceived tendency of Asians to study hard and do well on exams.
As an Asian who studied hard and did well on exams, I must point out here that there is no such thing as an “Asian”. Half the world’s population comes from the vast land mass called Asia. There is the Indian and there is the Indonesian, there is the Korean and there is the Khmer: there is no Asian. Any similarities among them are purely in the eye of the (Western) beholder.
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