Another NA beauty:
Underrepresented minorities: a shift in the racial dialogue
By James J. Na
Special to The Seattle Times
May is Asian Pacific American History Month, designated by President George H.W. Bush. So perhaps it is a fitting occasion to bring up one of my pet peeves:
We are not a biracial nation.
Yet, until recently, "America: black and white" had been a common title in discussions about race relations. Hispanics and Asians were often subsumed into a broad-stroke category of "minorities" along with blacks.
Hispanics have gained some attention of late, because of shifting demographics, particularly electoral demographics. President George W. Bush won 44 percent of Hispanic voters in the last election, up 9 percent from 2000. Some Republicans hope that increasing support among Hispanic voters will counter the overwhelming lock the Democrats have on black voters (over 90 percent in most elections).
Asians, however, are still invisible at the national level. So it is no big surprise that many Americans seem to be unaware of a subtle language shift in the racial dialogue. The operating catchphrase today is "URM" — "underrepresented minorities."
The "traditional" model of race relations in the post-civil-rights era was simple (and simple-minded): Whites oppressed minorities, the latter therefore could not succeed, and so-called affirmative action was deemed necessary to redress the balance — for "racial justice."
Enter Asians. Asians may be the fastest-growing racial group, but they are still a tiny minority at about 4 percent of the U.S. population. In comparison, blacks account for more than 12 percent of Americans. Yet, even as other, larger minority groups languish in economic and educational underperformance, Asians have the highest average household income, the highest college-graduation rate and the highest rate of home ownership of any ethnic-racial group, including whites.
In other words, Asians have become inconvenient to the old model of race relations. In fact, where affirmative action becomes a "soft" form of quota, such as in some university admission schemes, Asians are actually discriminated against by a system purportedly designed to help minorities.
A racial enrollment "target" or quota system forces applicants to compete within their own ethnic groups for the allotted slots, rather than as individuals against the entirety of the applicant pool. Since Asians, on average, outscore whites by 20 points and blacks by 226 points in the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), this means that individual Asians must score higher than whites and substantially higher than blacks to be treated equally.
Similarly, what was conveniently glossed over in the media during the debates preceding California's Proposition 209 to ban racial preferences — portrayed as a black vs. white issue — was the predictive analysis that removal of affirmative action would mean only a marginal rise in white university enrollment, but a significant increase for Asians who would now be free to compete with everyone else.
Thus, far from benefiting all minority groups, affirmative action often promotes the interests of a politically powerful, but underperforming minority group at the expense of limiting and downplaying the success of an overperforming, but politically weak, minority group. This form of discrimination against success is not confined to academia, but is also ingrained in pop culture.
Witness, for example, the latest hit medical drama, "Grey's Anatomy." Of nine major characters playing doctors at a fictitious Seattle hospital, three are black. Only one is Asian. In the real world, Asians account for 20 percent of medical-school graduates while blacks make up 6.5 percent of new doctors.
"America: black and white"? Only according to the Hollywood affirmative-action system, where blacks are dutifully assigned a sizable portion of major roles whereas Asians are lucky to get one spot, reality be damned. (An odd side effect of this is that foreigners who are exposed to America through television indeed think of it as a nation of whites and blacks; one Indonesian villager, when told I was from America, exclaimed, "But your face is so Asian!")
In today's world of affirmative action, there are whites and then there are "URM." I suppose that makes Asians an "overrepresented minority," but that doesn't exactly warrant an acronym. It is merely inconvenient to those who push affirmative action.
Of course, there are racial discriminations, as there are discriminations and preferences based on a myriad of other factors including looks (it is documented by studies, for example, that handsome military officers do better in their careers), height (women prefer taller men) and regional origin (woe unto non-native Seattleites in Seattle). Should we enact affirmative action for ugly, short, non-native Seattleites, too?
Instead of building intricate and ultimately futile social-engineering schemes to account for differences in circumstances of birth, I would prefer that our institutions judge individuals solely by their merit and character — by how they overcame their inborn adversities and took advantage of natural gifts.
And instead of "America: black and white," I prefer "E Pluribus Unum."
James J. Na is a senior fellow in foreign policy at Discovery Institute (www.discovery.org) and runs the "Guns and Butter Blog" (gunsandbutter.blogspot.com). He can be reached at jamesjna@hotmail.com |
