Colored folk - we ain't all the same

Shelley Batts has a post, Whites-Only Scholarship as "Reverse Affirmative Action". Shelley sayeth:

...In order to ensure that universities, and students, benefit from a diverse education, often pro-active techniques are utilized to recruit minorities.

When the race war comes all of us colored folk will be marked by our skin or our countenance as The Enemy. But, today the reality is that various People of Color have rather different interests in some areas, and that within each group there are schisms of interest due to class (e.g., what does the Indian doctor have to do with the Indian cabbie? Not very much let me tell you).

Here's a list of the 2007 Rhodes' Scholars:

Maya Shankar, Amia P. Srinivasan, Parvinder Thiara, Shaan-Chirag C. Gandhi, Elise Wang, Leana S. Wen, Charles R. Salmen (Arab Jewish), Joshua Billings, Christian C. Sahner, Jacob E. Lemieux, Kevin Shenderov, Sean Genis, Whitney Haring-Smith, Casey N. Cep, Maria Repnikova, Daniel Armanios, Zachary John, A. Manfredi, Benjamin J. Lundin, Brad M. Smith, Timothy F. Simmons, Ginger L. Turner, Michelle M. Sikes, Nicholas J. Shelly, Aaron, F. Mertz, Katie N. Lee, Avi Feller, Brian C. Johnsrud, Ryan R. Thoreson, Andrew G. Shipley, Keriann M. Backus, Genevieve Quist, Julie Veroff

I don't know if an "Arab Jewish" kid counts as a "minority" today, but that's a combination that warrants notice I think. But in any case, I bolded the minority recipients. 6 out of 32 isn't bad. In fact, 4 out of 32, or 1/8, were Indian American (brownz represent!). Using Census numbers that means Indian Americans are overrepresented by a factor of 16. In fact, last year a study came out which suggested that at elite universities:

Disregarding race in college admissions would cause sharp drops in the number of black and Hispanic students at elite institutions, according to a new study by two researchers at Princeton University.

The study, described in an article published in the June issue of Social Science Quarterly, also found that eliminating affirmative action would significantly raise the number of Asian-American students, while having little effect on white students.

Why is this? Read Dan Golden's The Price of Admission, elite universities aren't the total meritocracy you might think. "Athletic" scholarships (think rowing, not football), preferences for prep schools and reservations for the super-rich tend to benefit America's pink-cheeked old ruling caste.

Left-leaning gay pundit (and Harvard grad) Matthew Yglesias notes:

...It's true that the particular pressure to limit the number of Jewish students at elite colleges has disappeared from the admissions process, but the uncomfortable reality is that it's been replaced by a system designed -- whether intentionally or not -- to limit the number of Asian students at the very same college.

Now, discrimination against Asians isn't super-severe. If it was, you'd see fewer Asian Americans in the Ivy League than you see in the country at large. In reality, you see more Asians. But the same was true of Jews back in the day -- they were both discriminated against and overrepresented. And the mechanisms of discrimination are largely the same. Legacy preferences disadvantage Asians as a group. So do preferences for athletes. So do preferences for African-Americans and Hispanics. And so do "geographical diversity" preferences. Graduates of selective public magnet schools with high concentrations of Asians (places like Stuyvesant in NYC) are discriminated against vis-a-vis graduates of expensive private schools with few Asians (places like Dalton where I went). Consequently, the grades and test scores of the average Asian American student at an elite college are significantly higher than those of the non-Asians.

And so is life. An Asian American acquaintance of mine told me, "Yes, the bar is raised for us yellow fellers [he, being Chinese], but that's OK, we're just that good. So long as the whites know who has it easy...." A month ago I was listening to NPR, and Daniel Golden was being interviewed. He noted that the admissions offices didn't know what to do with all the academically talented Asian American applicants and viewed them as an amorphous mass. So they simply ratcheted up standards to get their numbers down The host stated, "I thought they were all international students." No Ms. Young, they're Americans all right, they just work really hard despite their slanty eyes. They are that good.

Now, there are serious issues about possible transplantation of "cram school" mentality, and the genuine need for geographic, social, cultural, economic and racial diversity. But let's just be honest about what's going on here: many whites assume that their own racial elites engage in noblesse oblige and step aside so that underrepresented minorities can have their own slots in the halls of power. The white man's burden as it were. No, not at all, the positions and privileges of the high and mighty remain, rather, it is the grasping and avaricious rise of the overachieving arriviste caste of color which is being marginalized in the name of social justice. The peril cometh.

Leviticus 21:9 And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire.