The goal of the latest edition of the Ironic Racism Game, aka “diversity,” a game usually played by the most whey-faced suburban liberals on God’s Green Planet, is to target Asians in NYC high schools for quotas by, heaven forbid, treating them as overachieving Anglo-Saxons.
Be still my Anglophilic Latin heart: Where can I go for that privilege?
But hold on. I thought Asians were exploited railroad workers, victims of Rooseveltian racial paranoia, and hip Leftcoast tech nerds. How did they get put on the Bolshie enemies list? Simple, they proved the left wrong by working hard, playing by the rules, not embracing victimhood, and thus achieving material success. Can’t have that now, can we?
No doubt we paint with a broad brush. In every culture there are miscreants, losers, and self-destroyers. Same with Asian-American culture. But some cultural traits do matter, like emphasis on family cohesion, work ethic, and education. These folks have not been targeted arbitrarily. Their crime is the worst in modern socialist eyes; they really don’t seem to be absurdly reliant on the state. However, liberals didn’t always hold that against people.
Let’s get in the Wayback Machine and visit 1964, time of great cinema, Beatlemania, and before the unwashed urchins of the counterculture set about ruining so much. Then-Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) said during the debate on the Civil Rights Act, “I’ll eat my hat if this leads to racial quotas.” He may even have meant it. But at the least it was the public message of a leader of the pre-Summer of Love Democratic Party.
Dr. Martin Luther King also opined, “It is a simple matter of justice that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness [the good doctor failed to mention an express purpose of the Democratic Party for a hundred years was to keep them that way], should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor.”
But since then the Left has discovered it is easier to play the victim and divide people by setting one group against another. So class quotas based on merit, a laudable goal, became racial quotas based on bloc-voting political loyalty. Those not on the magic list of goodies for apparatchiks, like Appalachian whites, were shelved and forgotten.
In education, as we mention above, this has had the pernicious effect of keeping deserving kids of any race or ethnicity out of classes they have worked hard to be in, just because of the color of their skin. Dr. King would be soooo pleased. It’s also interesting watching the Left embrace the odious Yellow Peril brand of politics.
I know a tad whereof I speak from personal experience, as I am a USDA-approved racial minority. We’ll overlook for the moment that Latins aren’t a race but an ethnicity. You know, the colors not found in nature-wearing, brand whore ethnicity.
Have I ever personally benefitted from a quota? Well, I made average grades at a big South Florida high school, went to a big state college that I promptly dropped out of to join the US Army, and after that went to college in Europe where I was about the only Latin in my classes. In none of those situations did I find some self-righteous enlightened soul proclaiming to me from on high, Oh, underprivileged and deserving helot child of Hispania, let me lift your furrowed sweaty brow unto the sunlit uplands of success by giving you jet-fueled power crutches to aid in unfairly lapping the field of your potentially harder-working, though paler, cohorts!
Given an old Army injury, I prefer the Derby cane I use to power crutches anyway.
Because that’s really what quotas are, crutches for those who, if they had an ounce of self-respect, wouldn’t take them because the implicit notion behind it is: little dark brother isn’t quite good enough to compete fairly with others, as he will inevitably lose. So here’s a quota, a Massah’s Little Helper, to even the field.
The proper response? Go coit yourself. I’ll beat you at your own game any day of the week and then take your mom out for a fine pork dinner.
And if minority students fall for the crutches (bad pun alert) they may end up in situations past their competence where they may fail. Worse, they could graduate secure in the illusion they did so out of merit. Neither a very good option. And if the illusionary aspect is known, what does that portend for their professional reputation? Let’s say for, ohhhhhh, a surgeon?
It’s Michael Gerson’s line about the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” In my view it’s patronizing Bolshie racism dressed up to look like a helping hand. Just ignore that the putrid hand itself is a scabrous pus-oozing appendage of rotting political flesh.
Or, as Thomas Sowell has put it in a slightly more diplomatic fashion, “Does the actual fate of minority students not matter to the left, as much as their symbolic presence on campus?”
To be a foe of quotas and affirmative action based on color not class does not, as opponents try to describe our merry band, make one a proponent of some kind of oligarchic aristocracy—except for the clothes…oligarchic aristocrats totally get the clothes thing…totally—where the elites keep all the good university and job slots to themselves.
What it does make you a fan of is what this country is supposed to be based on, a meritocracy. Or as close to one as we can get to, given the eternal human condition of ignorance, corruption, and rank stupidity.
By the way, after uproariously flunking out of the quota-obsessed American college system and then attending a viciously intellectually competitive European university, I graduated with honors.
Guess I’ve been just fine with only my cane.
