I love this article: Little Asia on the Hill. Author could’ve delved deeper into the themes more but I’m sure they will be thrashed out on the AA sites like Model Minority (aka Angry Asian Association). Every 15-20 years, this gets hashed out and the themes I argued years ago in the late 80s, early 90s is starting to come to play now. Back then I was the minority within the minority, but no doubt my views will prevail. It got me to reminisce back in the day when I crossed swords on Soc.Culture.Asian.American USENET group with the likes of Alan Hu (Stanford), Arthur Hu (AsianWeek columnist), Tim Lee, Wataru Ebihara (OSU/Ohio), JJ the curmudgeon from ATT Bell Labs (email address JJ!Alice@UUCP or something like that), George Wu, Andrew Chin, Gary Tse, Bryan Wu, Roger Tang (UWash aka Just a theatre geek), James Pak, etc.
Ah, memory lane.
Interesting article. I think one thing to really explore are the regional differences (i.e., different parts of the USA (or even NYC) have different Asian demographics – like East vs. West coast, or by borough). We might get to view affirmative action with different lenses when we actually see where Asians, at any or all socio-economic levels, may be a minority. But, we also can’t forget how, even if Asian Americans are a “majority,” they still lack actual political or social enfranchisement (considering the fact that Asian-Americans in mainland American politics is still a work in progress).
I think it comes down to what all of the participants can consider to be “fair play”, especially when it is a zero-sum game. It’s a really hard choice when you are a school that has X number of seats, and there are 4X qualified applicants, half of which scored perfect or near perfect scores in every quantitative measure. At the end of the day the other 3X people physically can’t have a seat. What happens in the close cases?
The story points out that Asian Americans are not a homogeneous group – as a somewhat artificial construct, they are incredibly pan-national and diverse. It is both about intra- and inter-action: Asians need to know how to deal with each of its component groups as well as they to other groups, and as much as the others need to deal with Asians. That’s an education in of itself.