Top 5 Ways Affirmative Action Hurts Minorities

by Aya Katz

Proponents of Affirmative Action dismiss criticism of their policies as motivated by majority populations wanting to hold onto an advantage in education and the job market and prosperity and good health. The expressed purpose of Affirmative Action is to give minorities a chance to enter into competitive positions at higher rates than if they were judged solely on merit. But did you know that Affirmative Action also disadvantages minorities who would normally dominate certain fields, if measures were not taken keep their numbers down?

Americans from Asian ancestry have suffered setbacks due to affirmative action programs. While there are no overt quotas at institutions of higher learning, many in Asian communities in the United States are suffering, and they do not hesitate to talk about it openly.

Here are the top five ways in which minorities in the United States are discriminated against by Affirmative Action policies.

1. To be allowed into Princeton, an Asian student needs to have an SAT score of 140 points
higher than a non-Asian.

Affirmative action works by labeling people based on their ethnic origin and then making sure that certain minorities are given preferential treatment, so as to be admitted in greater numbers. What this means is that those not discriminated against affirmatively – by lowering the standards for them – are discriminated against negatively, by being required to meet more rigorous standards. Instead of everybody competing against everybody else and those with the best scores winning, people are set up to compete against others in their group. If you happen to belong to a group that generally does better, then the cut-off for you will higher. At Princeton, Asians have to score 140 points higher on the SAT than everybody else to get in. This is presumably because they score 140 points higher than everybody else on average. But this is not much consolation for an individual Asian who scored just below the cutoff point.

In a study conducted in 2005 at Princeton, it was found that if Affirmative Action were discontinued, the African American students would drop from from 9 to 3.3 percent and the Hispanic students would drop from 7.9 percent to 3.8 percent. But this does not mean this would help “whites.”

Such dramatic changes in policy would have little impact, however, on white applicants. Their admission rate would rise slightly, to 24.3 percent, from 23.8 percent. 

The big gains would be for Asian applicants. Their admission rate in a race-neutral system would go to 23.4 percent, from 17.6 percent. And their share of a class of admitted students would rise to 31.5 percent, from 23.7 percent.

So it turns out affirmative action may not be what it professes to be. It may not be a system to boost diversity and to keep the number of “white” students in check. It may not be designed to hurt whites at all. Right now it appears to be a racist policy directed primarily against Asians.

2. Some Academic Positions are Set Up to Employ Members of Specific Minorities, and all
other people, including those from Other Minorities, Need not Apply.

Imagine if you had a position for professor of physics and astronomy at some university, but it was only for whites. Wouldn’t we think that was racist? What if the best candidate for the position did not happen to be white? But there are such positions for Blacks and Hispanics and Native Americans, excluding everyone else.

People in favor of affirmative action might argue that whites deserve to be excluded from applying to positions like this because of the centuries of oppression of native Americans and African-Americans and Hispanic Americans. But did you know that there is a long history of government oppression of Asians in the United States, too? There was the Chinese Exclusion Act. There were the Japanese Internment camps. And, of course, there has been discrimination against Europeans, too. What about the Irish slaves? Where is the affirmative action to atone for that?

 

3. Tech Company recruiters are being pressured not to hire more Asians.

If it were only about admission to top universities and to academic positions set aside for minorities, then maybe Asians could give up positions in top-tier universities to less qualified applicants and forgo university appointments and still continue to dominate the scene in Silicon Valley and other High Tech companies. But the powers that be are onto them, and recently President Obama has pressured Tech Companies to create special positions for minorities and women. And by “minorities”, he means minorities other than Asians – Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans, to be precise. (It is not clear whether the women also need to be “not Asian” in order to count as women, for purposes of these positions.)

To those in the affirmative action racket, this may seem so clear and obvious as to not need any explanation or require any excuse. But now put yourself in the shoes of a mother – an immigrant from China – who sacrificed everything to give her American born son an education, but who hears that he applied to an internship at Microsoft, but was turned away. The recruiter did not even look at her son’s resume. He just said: “This position is only for blacks or Hispanics, so you don’t qualify.”

Don’t imagine for one moment that people in Chinese immigrant communities do not talk about this kind of thing in their online chat groups. The mother was distraught! She said she didn’t like any of the Republican candidates, but she was voting Republican from now on. She was doing it for the children!

 

Here is an English translation of the mother’s words quoted above:

“I thought about it over and over and eventually felt that it’s the right thing to do, to tell people what has happened.  My eldest basically decided to major in computer science.  There was a job fair on campus, and he went to apply.  When he met with the Microsoft recruiter, the recruiter, without even taking a look at his resume, dismissed him simply by saying: ‘We only hire blacks and Hispanics, and we don’t hire Asians’.  My son was sent on his way, just like that.   … I went to visit my son and asked him about how job interviews were going, and that was when he told me this with disappointment.  Both my husband and I feel very upset and angry.  My eldest is a freshman in college, and my second child is a freshman in high school.  Four years from now, one of them will be looking for a job, and the other is expected to enter college.  Just for the sake of our kids, we decided to vote for Republicans.  We don’t vote for a certain person; instead we vote based on certain policies.”

Many in the Chinese community are very liberal, and they took issue with what this mother posted. They told her that she misunderstood and that what her son had experienced was not discrimination against Chinese people. Instead, he had experienced discrimination in favor of African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans.

The mother was told that if her son had read the ad carefully, he would have realized there was no point for him to talk to the recruiter, because he did not fall into the protected class this position was created for. He should not have applied to a minority internship. He should have realized that he belonged to the vast majority in the United States who just don’t happen to be African American, American Indian or Hispanic.

More and more, Chinese students are being told that if they want to be given an equal chance at entry into top universities, they should not let it show on their application that they are Chinese. They should not talk about the struggles of their immigrant parents on their college essay. They should not include a photo with the application. They should use an English sounding name, if that is at all possible. If they don’t check the Asian box, if they self-identify as white, then maybe they will be given an equal chance. But at some point, when applying for a job, people are going to have to see your face. And if the High Tech industry is pressured to adopt quotas against Asians, then this is exactly the same kind of racism that Chinese experienced in the United States in the 1800s, only now it is passing for anti-racism, for the sake of “diversity.”

4. In California, the Asian ethnic category may be broken down into subcategories, so as to discriminate even more against the higher achieving sub-groups and to favor the lesser achievers.

Even though there is a racial stereotype of Asians as high achievers, some of the poorest people in this country are also Asian. In an effort to research this phenomenon, there has been an attempt to break down the Asian category into sub-groups, to see which are doing unusually well and which are faring badly. In California, there are about 4.5 million people who are considered Asian. They originate from 25 cultures in home countries as diverse as the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Japan, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

What would happen if affirmative action suddenly broke down the Asian population into protected classes by Asian sub-groups? Then successful Chinese students would end up having to compete for a limited number of slots with each other, while people from less successful groups would be held to a much lower standard. The more you play the affirmative action game, the harder it is for people who come from successful families to compete with others who are not as competitive. But even the Chinese can be broken down into sub-groups, and not everything is about levels of achievement. Some issues are tinged with international politics.

A mother from Mainland China has voiced her concern to me that if ethnic subcategories of Chinese are employed by the government, people from Taiwan may have an unfair advantage against Mainlanders, and that recruiters will be able to tell where they came from by their surname. When I told her Americans have no idea which surname is more likely to belong to a Mainlander than to a Taiwanese, she was not convinced. She added that her concerns were not limited to issues with education and employment. ” …One fear among Chinese about the subcategory is: we are so singled out, right?  Maybe there are more reasons behind this subcategorization than just college and jobs.  Maybe when there is a war or conflict with China, it will make things easier to put all the Chinese descendents into a camp, just like what happend to Japanese people in World War II.” That is why trying to separate out Taiwanese from Chinese on government forms alarms those from the Mainland.

While concerns such as these may seem paranoid to the average American, they can be very frightening to a new immigrant. “They just want us all to go back to China!” is a normal reaction to the insane racial policy that is currently at play in the United States.

 

5. The use of racial and ethnic  categories is now also affecting national healthcare

There is a United States government office directly concerned with “equalizing” the health of “minorities” with that of the rest of the population who are deemed to be “not minorities”. It is called the Office of Minority Health. It was created in 1986, as a response to the Heckler Report, which found that there were “health disparities” among minority populations and that such disparities were “an affront both to our ideals and to the ongoing genius of American medicine.”

The Affordable Care Act has as part of its goal the reduction of minority disparity in overall health, and there is now an action plan to bring this about. If that action plan is anything like the way minority education and employment goals are being brought about, it may well mean reducing the health of all those who are not deemed disadvantaged for the sake of the health of those in certain protected groups. If you think this will hurt only “whites”, then think again. Anybody not in the protected class will be targeted, and in all likelihood the prosperous and healthy Asians among us will be first to suffer.

If the goal is equality of health rather than overall improvement of health, the easiest way to achieve that goal is to reduce the health of all those people who are deemed too healthy. This will not help any individuals or any minorities, and it will in all likelihood injure all those who are doing better than the overall population at present.

The smallest minority of all is the individual. Each of us has a unique genetic heritage, a unique personal history and unique strengths and disabilities. Affirmative action does not care about any of that. All it seeks to do is to make things harder for everybody who does not belong to some artificially created category.

If minorities are defined as “African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans”, then the majority is defined as “anybody who isn’t African American, Hispanic and Native American.” That majority group includes people whose ancestors come from all over the world, including Asia, Africa, Australia, the Pacific Islands and Europe. Affirmative Action has nothing whatever to do with improving diversity or helping actual visible ethnic minorities. It has everything to do with making it harder for people who are successful to compete with others who are less successful. And it hurts African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans by assuming that they must necessarily be unsuccessful and that they cannot achieve health, wealth and happiness without being given a head start in every competition