Liberals can’t handle the Asian factor in affirmative action – CNN
Do you see the problem? It's a common one in liberal defenses of affirmative action. We realize it in an admission a few sentences later in the story. The Justice Department document that The Times has obtained, you see, says nothing about white people. In fact, the document doesn't identify any specific victim of affirmative action, only the procedures of "intentional race-based discrimination."
The big surprise in the study was that Asians had to score significantly higher than whites, as well as blacks and Hispanics. Despite having a higher average SAT score, Asians have lower odds of admission than do "comparable whites."
Liberals can't absorb the Asian factor. It doesn't fit the whites vs. people of color setup. What is most frustrating to liberals is that advocates can't point to Asians as victimizers of blacks and Hispanics to justify the unequal treatment. The old argument of compensation-for-past-abuses doesn't apply to them, only to whites.
In other words, the element of white guilt disappears. And with it goes the most powerful moral argument for affirmative action. It is true, yes, that advocates have shifted their arguments for affirmative action from compensation-for-past-abuses to diversity -- that is, the contention that a more diverse classroom produces better learning -- but the diversity rationale doesn't impress most people except in a fuzzy way. They can't quite see how a student in calculus will improve his grades if he has a different race representative sitting next to him.
Nobody wants to take sides against the victims. Unless, that is, someone uncovers a new, nonwhite beneficiary to the elimination of preferences.
With legal efforts by Asian groups against affirmative action policies likely to continue as Asian high schoolers, foreign and domestic, flood the applicant pools, it is reasonable to expect that the Trump administration investigation will end up saying much more about the admission of Asians relative to blacks, whites, and Hispanics than it will about whites relative to Asians, blacks, and Hispanics.
In this narrow focus on affirmative action in America today, the Trump administration is once again crossing a progressive sacred principle, the division of educational achievement into whites and everybody else.
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Liberals can't handle the Asian factor in affirmative action - CNN