Perspective: Race-focused educational rhetoric “dispiriting,” harmful, logically flimsy
Kenny Xu, prez of Color Us United, was a leading advocate in the successful fight for race-blind public school admissions (also backed by SCC GOP head Connolly and Palo Alto CM Tanaka). At the Liberty Forum of Silicon Valley, Xu unpacks how the Left's “equitable” educational paradigm exploits Asian and other minority students—by falsely, and dangerously, equating hard work/success with whiteness.
We Asian families who work so hard to get our kids into the best colleges and educational institutions in our country, and we succeed in large part, despite Harvard's discrimination. It's like, “Oh, Harvard's going to have a 200-point SAT policy where they admit Black Americans at a higher rate with 200 points lower on the SAT than Asian Americans? Fine, we're just going to work even harder. We're just going to push our way even further.” And that's the Asian mentality in many ways.
And we work so hard to climb up that educational ladder, and then, boom, once we make it, what happens? Brainwash. Brainwash. Then Harvard and all the Ivy League colleges come in, they say, “Congratulations. You got in, but admissions isn't really merit-based. You didn't really get in here based on merit. It's a lottery. Anybody can get in.” That's what they start saying. They start saying, “And by the way, your parents are telling you that you deserve this spot. You don't deserve this spot. Really, you should give it to someone who is a more oppressed minority than you are.”
And this is actually the message that they will teach Asian Americans. It's like, all of the hard work, all of the study hours—and Asian Americans study twice as many hours as the average American, you can put it in the bank, you can put that fact in the bank—all the study hours that Asian Americans put into their studies is then regurgitated back at them like vomit. And Asians are taught to be embarrassed by that. They're taught by the universities to be embarrassed by the fact that they study twice as many hours as the average American....
And there is no respect, there's no respect that they give for this Asian American work ethic—so much so that after the Harvard case broke in 2018 and all of the data was revealed showing all the discrimination that Harvard was doing against Asians and all the Ivy Leagues were doing against Asians, the new rhetoric among the Left was, “Well, Asians kind of deserve it because they're kind of white-adjacent. Sure, they're minorities, but they're not really minorities. They're not the real minorities. They're the white-adjacent minorities, as in they're kissing up to the white guy, they're sucking up to the white man.” Why? Because they work hard? Think about what that implies. That implies that to work hard and to study is to be white. (13:42–17:00)
You teach Black children now that working hard equals being white. Well, I'll tell you what: Black kids do not want to be white, so therefore, they shouldn't work hard. You have this theory—Critical Race Theory—that tries to associate all of the principles that we should be striving for with whiteness. And then you're bound to get something like this. You're bound to get something like a dispiriting theory that really says minorities shouldn't even try. (17:35–18:13)
Dumbing down standards [in schools] and all those things is terribly racist, it's horrible, but when you stack that on top of an ideology that tells these young minority kids that they can't succeed because of their race; that fundamentally, white people are stacked against them; even if that were true, it's still the wrong thing to teach their kids. And it's not true because 60% of Black people believe they're in a better financial position than their parents. There are more Black doctors, Black lawyers.... they should not be taught that their life prospects are dimmed because of racism, systematic racism in America. (46:10–47:08)
Watch the whole thing here.
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