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.
