All the Steam Went into the Whistle
All the Steam Went into the Whistle
"Stop Asian Hate," our Leaders say, while continuing to promulgate anti-Asian discrimination
Did you know that month of May is an AANHPIs month? No, it’s not a Chihuahua sneezing. It’s actually an acronym for Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders. Here is a missive from our Chancellor of color, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco of May 6, 2024 on the subject. Let’s have a look:
Dear Beacons,
The month of May is recognized nationally each year as Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, a time to uplift and reflect on the many ways Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (AANHPIs) have enriched the history of this country and the world.
…
This year’s national theme, “Bridging Histories, Shaping Our Future,” is timely and important as it encourages us to embrace the interconnectedness of AANHPI stories and endeavor to build bridges across generations, experiences, and cultures to forge a future where all can thrive. [here and below, emphasis ours]
Really, thrive?
And despite facing exclusion, displacement, discrimination, and racist violence from their first arrivals to the present day, AANHPIs have persevered....
Enough! Here is Wikipedia, on the situation in the country as a whole:
After controlling for grades, test scores, family background, and athletic status, [it has been found that] whites are three times … as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian Americans.
Here is the University of California (UC) contributing to righting the wrong. This Atlantic article describes the effects of 2021 abolishing SATs on Asian enrollment as follows:
Aligning enrollment with state demographics would require cutting the share of [Asian] students by almost two-thirds.
Boston has its own share of (dis)honoring Asian-Americans. Here is City Journal on what happened when the zip-code red-lining of Asian districts and the no-entrance-test policies were introduced by the three Boston exam schools, in 2021:
This policy, while facially race-neutral, diminished the share of… Asian students (from 21 percent to 16 percent) at Boston Latin School (BLS), Boston Latin Academy (BLA), and John O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science (O’Bryant).
Pretty generous, huh. Not two thirds are sent away, like in UC, but only a quarter.
Not surprisingly,
Boston Public Schools’ “school committee” chair Michael Loconto was forced to resign after being caught on a hot mic ridiculing the names of Chinese-American parents.
We did mention on these pages that even when an Asian-American student at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology gets a National Merit Award that could help them overcome the equity walls, their equity-minding teachers
withhold notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s families, most of them Asian.
This equity plot was discovered in 2021, and it had been continuing for years: approximately 1,200 students where robbed equited of their awards.
Incidentally, this very same Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, till 2020 one the best American public high schools, recently legally won its right to discriminate1: its 2020 reforms reduced the number of Asians by 20%. Also pretty generous, isn’t it?
Back to UMass Boston: The Genius of All Things Anti-Racist-and-Health-Promoting, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, is speaking again (the same May 6, 2024 pan-UMB e-mail):
In honoring Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we strengthen our resolve to become the best university we can be for all students, faculty, and staff.
In solidarity,
Marcelo Suárez-Orozco
Chancellor
The whistle is loud, we agree, he used all the steam to make it that loud. It has to be. How else can it dampen the pants and moans of the hard-working Asians who must labor thrice as much to get by? Indeed, DEI mostly hurts the most industrious among us, and it must DIE.
This just in! As we were writing the post, a new email landed in our mailboxes, notifying us of the 2024 Chancellor’s awards for distinguished scholarship, teaching and service. The distinguished scholarship award goes to an Asian American studies professor whose research has been “notably debunking the "model minority" myth for Asian Americans”2. How convenient.
P.S. As for the NHPIs (Bless you, Chihuahua!), aka Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, we would be so lucky to get one of them for our President:
A similar case, pertaining Boston’s exam schools, BLS, BLA, and O’Bryant, began its journey towards the Supreme Court justices in April.
According to the principal article on the subject [“Deconstructing the model minority myth and how it contributes to the invisible minority reality in higher education research,” New Directions for Institutional Research, v. 2009, p. 5 (summer 2009)],
[i]t has been argued that the exclusion of AAPIs from scholarly inquiry in postsecondary education is in part due to the pervasive influence of the model minority myth on contemporary thought about the AAPI population. The model minority stereotype is the notion that Asian Americans achieve universal and unparalleled academic and occupational success.
Why bother then? Don’t fix what ain’t broken! Aha, here we go.
Asian American studies scholars have long noted that the myth has been used strategically by opponents of equal opportunity policies and programs to support the notion of meritocracy with evidence that racial discrimination does not exist…
Ah, the War on evil Merit again, and these hard-working Asians make it look silly.