So says today’s Seattle Times in a story headlined, “Mailers spur debate over claims of discrimination against Asian Americans”. The America First Legal Foundation, about which I know not a thing (the Times says that it “is led by Stephen Miller, former senior advisor to President Donald Trump”), has sent a leaflet “to voters in Washington and across the country this week, appearing to target Asian American voters”.
One side of the mailer says that President Joe “Biden and the left want to decide who gets hired – and who gets fired according to their skin color,” and features pictures and headlines from news stories.
The other side says “Joe Biden and left wing officials are engaged in widespread racial discrimination against white and Asian Americans … even though it’s against the law.”
The reporter then quoted various Democratic partisans, who declared that such statements were “racially divisive and inflammatory” and “attempting to drive a wedge between Asian Americans and other communities of color”. A Republican Party official married to a Filipino was given a sliver of space to say that her husband “kind of just agreed with it” and that both of them opposed affirmative action. Aside from that, all was denunciation.
Guess what was never mentioned: the two cases that the Supreme Court heard last Monday challenging Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s blatant discrimination against Asian-American applicants, a practice energetically defended by the Biden Administration. According to the evidence presented by the plaintiffs, an Asian-American applicant to Harvard in the upper ten percent of academic performance has a worse chance of admission than an African-American applicant in the bottom 40 percent. Indeed, the Asian-American admit rate is below all other groups in every decile.
Might not a mention of that litigation furnish a scintilla of context? Is it possible that Asian-Americans are in fact targets of discrimination by the woke identitarians who nowadays dominate the Democratic Party? Or is the only acceptable “anti-racist” response to close one’s eyes tightly shut?