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Translation: We must have more Hispanic and black students, and if that means throwing out the entrance exam to cut the numbers of Asians and whites, throw out the exam. Soo Kim, president of the Stuyvesant alumni association, is having none of it: “Correct me if I’m wrong, but they’re saying these schools are too Asian, so there must be something wrong. … Am I the only one who looks at that and says, ‘I don’t understand how that’s even legal.'” Councilman Peter Koo took it straight to the mayor: “The test is the most unbiased way to get into a school. … It doesn’t require a resume. It doesn’t even require connections. The mayor’s son just graduated from Brooklyn Tech and got into Yale. Now he wants to stop this and build a barrier to Asian-Americans — especially our children.” “I’m not sure if the mayor is a racist,” says Kenneth Chiu, chairman of the New York City Asian-American Democratic Club, “but this policy is certainly discriminatory.” As Asians demonstrated this week against changing admissions standards to reduce the number of Asian students, schools chancellor Richard Carranza gave them the back of his hand: “I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admissions to these schools.” Yet it is Carranza and De Blasio who are claiming an entitlement to seats at the schools based on race. The Asian protesters are insisting on maintaining merit and performance, measured by tests, as the standard of admission. This issue is not confined to New York. It has gone national and pits Asian-Americans who believe in and benefit from a meritocracy in education against egalitarians who embrace race quotas and affirmative action to bring about a greater equality of rewards. That Asians are the new victims of race discrimination seems undeniable. In August, the Times reported: “A Princeton study found that students who identify as Asian need to score 140 points higher on the SAT than whites to have the same chance of admission to private colleges, a difference some have called ‘the Asian tax.’ “A lawsuit cites Harvard’s Asian-American enrollment at 18 percent in 2013, and notes very similar numbers ranging from 14 to 18 percent at other Ivy League colleges, like Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton and Yale.” Now, compare the numbers from California: “In the same year (2013), Asian-Americans made up 34.8 percent of the student body at the University of California, Los Angeles, 32.4 percent at Berkeley and 42.5 percent at Caltech.” Among possible reasons for the racial disparities: In 1996, by voter referendum, Californians outlawed racial preferences. What the Ivy League is doing may be criminal in the Golden State. In 1965, in words written by Richard Goodwin who died last month, and delivered at Howard University, LBJ declared: “This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just … equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.” In today’s clash in liberalism’s citadel over which races have too many seats at Brooklyn Tech and Stuyvesant, and which races have too few, we get a glimpse of America’s future. It appears to be a future of endless collisions and conflicts over who deserves and who gets what — based upon ethnicity and race.Do You Appreciate Reading Our Emails and Website? Let us know how we are doing – Send us a Thank You Via Paypal!
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