Progressive discrimination: Your kids matter, unless they’re Asian

In 2007, in a case involving school desegregation, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts stated what some have always thought was obvious: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” 

But when race is involved in the United States, it’s never that simple.

Cases involving schools and affirmative action historically have been about minorities on one side of the divide and white kids on the other. Minorities have been portrayed as victims; whites, as the privileged ones. But now we’re witnessing something new: disputes with minorities on both sides of the line — Black and Hispanic kids on one side, Asian Americans on the other.

It’s raising a question that must make liberals and progressives, who see themselves as the champion of racial minorities, uncomfortable. Is it fair to discriminate against one minority, Asian Americans, to increase enrollments at some of America’s top schools for other minorities, Blacks and Hispanics? 

The answer to that question will have more than legal ramifications. Politics is deeply ingrained in the debate. Asian voters in this country long have supported the Democratic Party. As the authors of one study put it, “Political differences within the Asian American community are between those who are progressive and those who are even more so.”

But political loyalties now may be up for grabs. As a headline over an opinion piece in the New York Times puts it: “Will Asian Americans Bolt From the Democratic Party?”

And Thomas Edsall, a contributor at the Times, goes on to say, “The question now is whether this party loyalty will withstand politically divisive developments that appear to pit Asian Americans against other key Democratic constituencies — as controversies emerge, for example, over progressive education policies that show signs of decreasing access to top schools for Asian Americans in order to increase access for Black and Hispanic students.”

Later this year, the Supreme Court will hear a case involving alleged anti-Asian discrimination at Harvard, where the admissions office set up subjective personality assessments to help decide which students Harvard would accept. And guess what: Those subjective assessments regularly rate Asian Americans as lacking in traits such as courage, leadership and likability. This lowers their admissions scores and makes it easier for Harvard to reject them and free up space for Blacks and Hispanic applicants.

It’s not only at Harvard where this kind of thing allegedly is going on. The ideology of progressive educators has made its way down to lower levels of public education, too.

Two years ago, the school board in Fairfax County, Va., changed its admission standards at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, one of the top public schools in the country. Standardized testing requirements were eliminated and replaced by subjective criteria for admissions.

We could sugarcoat this in a number of ways, but it became apparent to everyone that the goal was to bring down the number of Asian American students admitted to the school and increase the number of Blacks and Hispanics.

And it did. After the changes went into effect, Asian enrollment in the school’s freshman class dropped — from around 73 percent to less than 50 percent. Parents filed a lawsuit claiming racial discrimination against their children, and a federal court recently ruled that the school board acted improperly, that the changes they made, as the parents claimed, were unconstitutional.

In San Francisco, Asian American parents led the drive that ousted three progressive school board members, in part because, like parents in Virginia, they were angry that the board changed admissions standards at a top high school in the city — a change that benefited Blacks and Hispanics at the expense of Asian students.

And there are similar uprisings involving prestigious public schools in New York City and Boston, where according to progressive thinking, Asian students are overrepresented, even if they don’t say so in so many words.

“In the past, anti-Asian bigotry took the form of direct assaults. These reflected claims that Asian Americans were inferior, incapable of assimilating or stealing jobs. But today many Asian Americans are learning that the progressive form of discrimination may be the most insidious of all,” is how William McGurn put it in the Wall Street Journal.

Whatever their intentions, it sure appears that we’re witnessing a new kind of discrimination based on race these days, one created by woke progressives, the same people who keep telling us how much they care about minority children — apparently as long as those children aren’t Asian kids who do “too” well in school. 

Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He was a correspondent with HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” for 22 years and previously worked as a reporter for CBS News and as an analyst for Fox News. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Patreon page. Follow him on Twitter @BernardGoldberg.