grit n' grace

do u mind talking more about/sharing a link about asian discrimination in admissions? or smth that contrasts that w/ so-called white discrimination bc this issue is smth ive only heard about in conjuction w/ like, affirmative action and the articles and convos ive seen almost always get/invite anti-black sentiments so ive been wary of them. plus they also talk about asians as if we're basically white/facing the same situation so it's been difficult to understand?hope it's ok &thanks 4 listening!

disclaimer: I know that not all Asians are East Asian, but this is a post about American college apps and let’s be honest adcomms don’t know what a Southeast Asia is and most of the anti-Asian measures are designed to target East/South Asians

1. Background

Discrimination in admissions happens mainly because of two things: stereotypes about Asian people and an admissions system that was created as a tool to discriminate from the very beginning.

Holistic admissions, aka. looking at subjective material like essays, interviews, and photos of the applicant, was initially created to sneakily reduce the amount of Jewish students at the Ivy League schools. These subjective measures were designed to make accusations of antisemitism hard to prove, and schools could defend holistic admissions by claiming they were rewarding the hard work of kids with average intelligence or intelligence beyond “book smarts”. The schools wanted to reduce the number of Jewish students because they believed the students would only keep to themselves and repel WASPs by changing the campus culture.

Sound familiar? It should, because to this day many schools still request photos of applicants and Asian kids are constantly emphasizing how they will contribute to the ~*community*~ in their essays. The Common Application requires students to list their ethnicity, their parents’ ethnicity, where their parents went to school, and the languages they speak at home to seal the deal. 

Holistic applications are especially damaging to Asian kids because the common stereotypes of Asians run completely counter to the values being tested in holistic apps. Asians are nerdy, holistic students are not, Asians are precise scientific machines, holistic students have creative souls, Asians are chilly and awkward, holistic students are social butterflies. Asians are dead-eyed puppets for their parents, holistic students are self-motivated and genuine. These are the signifiers that mark someone as Asian for the purposes of college admissions.

The theoretical Asian student is someone who is very good at what they’re ordered to do, but doesn’t have thoughts of their own and thus doesn’t have enough of a soul to appreciate the Arts (read: the Western canon). 

(You will note that all of these stereotypes align with stereotypes about autistic people. The disgust held for both autistic people and Asians bleeds into one.)

The end result is that an Asian student needs to prove two very big things to adcomms: they have the academic strength to succeed at a top tier school, and they are a human, and not an Asian student. It turns college admissions into a two-front war: one against the adcomms, one against all the other Asians you’re trying to distance yourself from. It encourages students to alienate themselves from their peers, their communities, even their own heritage. Many of my Asian classmates pretend they can only speak English or force themselves to flounder in the humanities just so they can be not Asian. 

People become extremely competitive candidates through luck and not the meritocracy that holistic admissions sells itself as. I have much better chances at an Ivy than most of my peers because I am interested in politics and Western literature, two fields that serve as powerful signals that I am a cultured, assimilated American with American concepts of the future, and “not Asian”. I also have an art portfolio with a lot of conceptual/experimental work, which again marks me as someone with the capacity for creative thought in the footsteps of 20th century Europe  and therefore “not Asian”.

Do I really deserve that admission more than the Filipino boy in my stats class who could wipe the floor with anyone at a math competition and has done so multiple times? 

Do I deserve that admission more than the soft-spoken Korean girl who isn’t so good at math but creates entire worlds with plain, traditional pen and paper art?

Does the “someone taught me American body language and that’s why I’m always smiling and moving weirdly” Chinese girl in my lit class who won scads of awards in FBLA deserve admission more than them? 

2. Effects on the Asian community

I have written 4 dense paragraphs and not mentioned affirmative action once. This is because AA really isn’t the root of the problem and in practice it benefits white women more than anyone else so people saying it’s “white discrimination” can shut it, especially when the mere threat of AA causes a great deal of grief for Asian students. It generates quite a bit of anxiety which causes harm on its own and in the case of anxious parents, is usually expressed through abusing their children and severely restricting their personal freedom in favor of promoting personalities honed for college admissions. 

The abuse is the worst problem. It’s destroying the morals of an entire generation and holding us back. My parents did this to me by essentially raising me for college apps and treating me as their employee starting from 6th grade which led to 2 serious suicide attempts, self harming, worse grades (yep lmao) and a call to Child Protective Services where the agent told me I was overreacting because “all Asian parents are like this”. My parents have told me many times that they wouldn’t do this if they didn’t “have” to, and they only “have” to because I’m Chinese and not white.

I don’t want to get too personal but I’m glad that I was able to find places where I could develop a personality outside of my parents and outside of college admissions, because otherwise I don’t think I could call myself human. And even after all this, my mom tells me that in retrospect she was lucky to have such a “manageable” child who didn’t need to be brainwashed into being attractive during interviews. And even after all this, I still consider myself lucky because I constantly hear about other kids who are being beaten or sent to tutoring centers in elementary school or just don’t have the skills or resources required to keep up with the ever-raising bar of “Asian achievement”. Parents form online communities solely focused on college admissions and treat their children as projects and openly discuss whether it’s acceptable to let their 6 year olds “be happy” because they KNOW for a fact that their kid is going to live in constant pain and suffering for at least 7 years and they think making them suffer their whole life will make the process easier. 

And usually this still isn’t enough to get us in. Whether they want to admit it or not, the top schools that everyone is gunning for have a Asian population cap at around 20% of their total students and holistic admissions make it very hard to take legal action against them. 

And worst of all, the schools use the abuse and anxiety and competition as retroactive justification for their discriminatory practices. They say this is why they can’t trust us, this is why they need to be so picky about the signals that students carry, this is why it’s oh so important for all the Asians to prove they’re humans, not Asians. 

In reality, without all of the damage they’re inflicting on us in the name of equality, white people wouldn’t stand a chance against us. Schools like Berkeley and Caltech that don’t use affirmative action have Asian populations at around 40%. The tradeoff is that they have very few Black, native, and Latino students. The easy solution to this is just…lowering your white people quota.

I wonder why white people act like Asian people’s spots are the only ones up for debate whenever affirmative action reform is proposed?

TL;DR: Affirmative action is not even remotely a problem for Asians in college admissions. Holistic admissions and racist admissions committees are the problem, and they will be racist regardless of whether affirmative action exists.