Wednesday, June 25, 2003

Another Filipino-American, Michelle Malkin in Asian-Americans have nothing to celebrate says, that as practiced, affirmative action amounts to nothing more than the promotion of certain politically favored minority ethnic groups at the expense of others:

Clueless Asian-American students and leaders are proclaiming "victory" with other minority groups in the wake of the Michigan decisions. But as Peter Kirsanow, one of the rare voices of sanity on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, notes, "were Asian-American students not discriminated against in the college-admissions process, they would constitute the largest minority group, if not an outright majority, at many schools." A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the percentage of Asian-American applicants granted admission at the University of Texas-Austin rose from 68 percent to 81 percent immediately after the Hopwood decision struck down race-based admissions policies in the Fifth Circuit. After California's Proposition 209 ended race-based admissions, the percentage of Asian-American freshmen at Berkeley rose 6 percent.

Kirsanow continues: "Asian Americans, though only 4 percent of the nation's population, account for nearly 20 percent of all medical students. Forty-five percent of Berkeley's freshman class, but only 12 percent of California's populace, consists of Asian Americans. And at UT-Austin, 18 percent of the freshman class is Asian American, compared to 3 percent for the state."

For liberal race-fixers, having "too many" Asian-American students winning admissions on their own merits is a bad, bad thing. Overcoming the encumbrance of colored skin is viewed not as an accomplishment, but as a liability. A sad irony of the battle over racial preferences on campus is that many of the leaders who want to re-jigger the numbers to fit a politically correct, proportional ideal are traitorous Asian Americans themselves.

The notion that something besides merit counts in weighing the worth of a person has now been enshrined by Grutter v. Bollinger. Filipino-Americans who have in the past, automatically voted for liberal Democratic candidates might have something to think about when their sons or daughters receive their college rejection letters in the mail.