On The New UC-Berkeley Admissions Policy

Monday, March 30, 2009

I've been reading about this new UC-Berkely Admissions policy, and first - just for the record - I haven't seen all the data the report was based on - but then again neither has anyone else - and I have some thoughts on this including:

Schools, the workplace, government - they should be diverse and I'm all for creating policies that create that type of environment - because none of us live in a vacuum - at one point or another we have to work with people of different races and ethnicities and we should want to work with people who have different cultures and backgrounds where we don't just "tolerate" others who are different from us, but truly do accept them - because it only makes us better.

At the same time, I'm all for helping poor kids of any color get into college because if you're poor, on a whole, you've had it tougher than everyone else and when you're a high school kid - it's not really your fault you grew up without a college fund, had to skip meals, and work odd jobs to help pay the rent - all of which make it harder for you to be a better student and get into a college of your choice if that's that route you decided to take.

But this new policy isn't really about helping underprivileged kids get into college or making the campus more diverse.

It's simply about racism - and racism that's being directed towards Asian Americans reminiscent of the days when we couldn't testify in a courtroom against Whites, or when Asians were singled out as the only racial group who couldn't immigrate to America, or when Asian Americans were used as a scapegoat for the failings of the U.S. automotive industry (and don't you think it's kind of funny how this new push of Yellow Peril is being served up during a recession? That during harder economic times when studies show that people go back to school to learn a new skill and trade that the ones who are being pushed out are people from our community - a community that has always been looked at as perpetual foreigners?).

People on the other side can try and spin this any way they want too but the bottom line is that the new admissions policy should simply be known as the "We don't want that damn many of them chinky people on our campus" policy because that's what it really is - that's what it's saying.

And it's deplorable.