Common Sense Political Thought

As my younger daughter and I were driving to pick up a wireless receiver for her new computer yesterday, we got into a discussion concerning achievement. She had asked me why, if Adolf Hitler hated Jews so much, he didn’t just draft them all into the Wehrmacht, and send them to fight the Red Army. As it happens, I’m currently reading Mein Kampf¹, so I did have some answers for her.

The conversation moved on — it was a 45 minute trip — to why Adolf Hitler hated the Jews, and why anti-Semitism was so easily spread in Europe at the time. I noted that, as a culture, Jews had their own, internal pressures to study and work hard in elementary and secondary schools, to try and get admission to the best universities, and to study and work hard in the universities, to try and get the best start on their professional lives as they could. Many Europeans, many Germans, wanted scapegoats for their own poverty, and found this group of “different” people, successful people, as handy targets. But what Jews in Europe had done, I said, was what we, as Americans, would call the American way: work hard, and you’ll be rewarded. I also noted that Asians in the US do the same thing.

Interestingly enough, this story was on the front page of today’s Washington Post:

At Magnet School, An Asian Plurality²
Group Forms 45% Of Freshmen at Thomas Jefferson
By Michael Alison Chandler, Washington Post Staff Writer

Asian American students will outnumber white classmates for the first time in the freshman class at the region’s most prestigious public magnet school this fall, a milestone reached as the number of African Americans and Hispanics has remained low and the Fairfax County School Board prepares to review the school’s admission policy.

At Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in the Alexandria area this year, more than 2,500 applicants vied for 485 seats. Asian American students got 219, or 45 percent of the total, while white students got 205, or 42 percent. About 38 percent of the school’s students were Asian American in the past school year.

Naturally, the story is copyrighted, and I can’t reproduce more than a small amount of it under “fair use” guidelines. But the story continues to show that the Fairfax area has only about 16% of its population as being of Asian descent, and the Washington metropolitan area in toto has fewer than 10% Asians, and notes that Asian-Americans are frequently “over-represented” in top-level public high schools.

The success of Asian American students reflects the educational commitment found in many immigrant communities, particularly for second-generation students fluent in English and encouraged by upwardly mobile parents who came to the United States for higher education or professional positions.

Which is pretty much what I told my daughter. Sounds perfectly reasonable, sounds like the right thing to do, huh? Well, not so fast.

The demographic imbalance in top public magnet schools has become a sensitive issue, however. Black and Hispanic students often are vastly under-represented. Many of the schools struggle to reflect the diversity of the wider population while maintaining a transparent admissions process with uniformly high standards. . . .

Some Asian Americans contend that they face informal quotas and are forced to meet higher standards, similar to hurdles that Jewish Americans faced in the first part of the 20th century.

It’s a long article, but it’s worth your time to read it.

Though the author doesn’t try to make any political points, one thing comes through clearly: some ethnic groups in this country have internal cultural standards which simply do a better job of encouraging their members to work harder to get ahead. And in any discussion about Affirmative Action, it’s obvious that every time we try to help those who did not work as hard to get ahead, because they come from “under-represented minorities,” we are doing so at the expense of the people who did the right thing, the people who did work harder.

White people, my overly broadly defined “ethnic group,” will have only 42% of the seats in the incoming class at Thomas Jefferson. And whites make up a lot bigger percentage of the population in that area. Well, so what? If the white students didn’t work hard enough to get better grades, didn’t do what it takes to beat out the successful applicants, then they don’t deserve a larger number of seats. And if black and Hispanic students are under-represented, it is because they, too, didn’t work hard enough. Sorry if that offends anyone, but that’s just the way it is.

Asians in the United States were never actually enslaved, but the first Asians in this country were the “coolies“, a racial slur that was applied to Chinese manual laborers, many of whom worked on the railroads in the West in the nineteenth century. Our first immigration restriction law was the Chinese Exclusion Act, designed to keep a racial minority out. During World War II, we had the infamous internment of the Nisei, Americans of Japanese descent, simply due to their race. And subsequent Asian immigration also involved people fleeing tyranny or persecution, often arriving with barely the clothes on their backs.

If Americans of Asian descent, people who are obviously “different” from white Americans at a glance, have prospered, it is because they have worked hard, harder than anyone else, to do so. If they have earned places in top schools in number exceeding their percentage of the population, then the operative part is that they truly earned them.

That is the American way!

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¹ - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., © 1943) 688 p[ages, translated by Ralph Manheim
² - The Washington Post, Monday, July 7, 2008, p. A-1
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Cross posted on Red State.