"It’s the people rising up in revolt in San Francisco and saying it’s unacceptable to abandon your responsibility to educate our children."

Said Siva Raj, a San Francisco parent a leader of the recall effort, quoted in "In Landslide, San Francisco Forces Out 3 Board of Education Members/The recall, which galvanized Asian Americans, was a victory for parents angered by the district’s priorities during the pandemic" (NYT).

The recall was a victory for parents who were angered that the district spent time deciding whether to rename a third of its schools last year instead of focusing on reopening them. It also appeared to be a demonstration of Asian American electoral power, a galvanizing moment for Chinese voters in particular who turned out in unusually large numbers for the election.

"Chinese voters"? I guess they mean Chinese-American voters. Yikes. What's in their style guide?!

In echoes of debates in other cities, many Chinese voters were incensed...

 They really must mean to say "Chinese voters." Isn't that an embarrassment?

"Where aristocratic children once reveled in their privilege, meritocratic children now calculate their future—they plan and they scheme..."

"... through rituals of stage-managed self-presentation, in familiar rhythms of ambition, hope, and worry....  A person whose wealth and status depend on her human capital simply cannot afford to consult her own interests or passions in choosing her job. Instead, she must approach work as an opportunity to extract value from her human capital, especially if she wants an income sufficient to buy her children the type of schooling that secured her own eliteness. She must devote herself to a narrowly restricted class of high-paying jobs, concentrated in finance, management, law, and medicine. Whereas aristocrats once considered themselves a leisure class, meritocrats work with unprecedented intensity.... Elite managers were once 'organization men,' cocooned by lifelong employment in a corporate hierarchy that rewarded seniority above performance. Today, the higher a person climbs on the org chart, the harder she is expected to work....  Meritocracy traps entire generations inside demeaning fears and inauthentic ambitions: always hungry but never finding, or even knowing, the right food. The elite should not—they have no right to—expect sympathy from those who remain excluded from the privileges and benefits of high caste...."

From "How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition/Meritocracy prizes achievement above all else, making everyone—even the rich—miserable. Maybe there’s a way out" by Yale lawprof Daniel Markovits (The Atlantic).

If privilege in this new form sucks, it should be self-limiting. The "she" in this tale of woe can easily take the off-ramp by not having children. Why intensify the horrific grind that is your life by having children for whom you can see no other path than the same tortured life? If you don't have better spiritual values, leave the childrearing to others.

On the other hand, is the life of the elite really as bad as Markovits portrays it? I can't help relating his polemic to the lawsuit Asian-American students brought against Harvard. Does one's subjective perception of horror of the meritocracy depend on who is winning the competition?

Finally, the kids can always say no. In my day, we had the hippie movement. The worse the competition is, the easier it is for young people to see that what their parents have is not what they want for themselves.

"She bristles at the notion that Students for Fair Admissions represents Asian Americans."

"[Edward] Blum, the group’s founder, had previously challenged affirmative action at the University of Texas. For that case, he recruited a white female plaintiff who said she was rejected from UT because of her race. When that suit failed, Blum tried again, this time arguing race-conscious admissions policies penalize Asian Americans.... He found support for his crusade among well-educated and wealthy Chinese Americans in places like Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay area, people who had grown suspicious when their high-achieving children were rejected from top-flight schools. They spread the word of their fight through WeChat, a Chinese messaging program. In Lee’s eyes, it is Students for Fair Admissions, not Harvard, that doesn’t recognize socioeconomic diversity among Asians. 'It’s very specific groups filing this lawsuit, and yet we’re all being clumped together,' she said. She is skeptical that eliminating race from college admissions decisions will benefit Hmong students, young people who, like her, grew up poor and in households where no English was spoken. 'It will definitely hurt them,' she predicted."

From "The Forgotten Minorities of Higher Education/What affirmative action means for low-income Asians" in The Washington Post Magazine.

But if using race as a factor were forbidden, I think schools would pay more attention to "young people who... grew up poor and in households where no English was spoken." So why shouldn't those who champion the interests of less well-off Asian groups support the lawsuit? I see that there's an estimate that 43% of Harvard students (instead of 23%) would be Asian if only GPA and test scores were used. Maybe the idea is that if there were a higher proportion of Asian students, the Asian students attempting to rely on low economic status would be discriminated against, because the schools would be afraid of looking too Asian. Asian, as the article points out, is a very large category, comprising many subgroups, but if school are concerned about looks, the question is whether these subgroups are visually distinguishable to... who?... white Americans. And that's the problem with using economic deprivation (rather than race) as a factor: It's doesn't show. Not vividly anyway.

What would we do without sociologists?

From "The ‘Whitening’ of Asian Americans/Recent lawsuits suggesting reverse discrimination have aligned the interest of white Americans and Asian Americans, raising complex questions about identity and privilege" by Iris Kuo (The Atlantic):

This alignment of certain Asians with whites evokes historical instances of ethnic groups migrating from minority status to becoming part of the majority racial group. Sociologists have a name for this phenomenon: “whitening.” It refers to the way the white race has expanded over time to swallow up those previously considered non-whites, such as people of Irish, Italian, and Jewish heritage. In the next wave of whitening, some sociologists have theorized, Asians and Latinos could begin to vanish into whiteness, as some assimilate culturally into white norms and culture, and become treated and seen by whites as fellow whites. “The idea of who is white and which groups belong and don’t belong to it has been malleable and has changed. It is different across place and time,” Jonathan Warren, a University of Washington sociology professor who has written about whitening, told me....

I’ve always been proud of my Taiwanese roots, but lately, I’ve started to question how much of my culture I’ve voluntarily released in the effort to belong in a country dominated by white people. American society is built around what white people like and don’t like. They decide which foreign foods are “in” (bubble tea, burritos) and what’s “gross” or “exotic” (menudo, say, or marinated pig ears). American standards for acceptable behavior—the way people talk, the language they use, the food they eat in a mainstream company—are carefully tailored to the tastes of white people. It makes sense. White people run the country and the vast majority of its institutions. They hold most of the wealth. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that some Asian-Americans are aligning themselves with white people when it comes to university admissions. Appealing to white taste, after all, is a baseline requirement for advancement. But at what price?

I don't think it's fair to say that the lawsuit is "some Asian-Americans... aligning themselves with white people." The plaintiffs are showing that Asian-Americans are, because of race, being treated worse than white people. And they're hearing the argument that for them to succeed will require other non-whites to lose out. So why don't they back off and accept the worse treatment? Just be nice.

Which actually, ironically, sounds like a demand that they act white.

"Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Affirmative Action Win Justice Dept. Support."

The NYT reports.

“Harvard has failed to carry its demanding burden to show that its use of race does not inflict unlawful racial discrimination on Asian Americans,” the Justice Department said in its filing.

The filing said that Harvard “uses a vague ‘personal rating’ that harms Asian-American applicants’ chances for admission and may be infected with racial bias; engages in unlawful racial balancing; and has never seriously considered race-neutral alternatives in its more than 45 years of using race to make admissions decisions.”

The top-rated comment at the NYT is, somewhat surprisingly: "Glad to see this. The only way to stop discrimination based on race is to stop discriminating based on race."

Speaking of stereotypes...

"When I won a scholarship that paid for part of my education, a selection panelist told me that I got it because I had moving qualities of heart and originality that Asian applicants generally lacked. Asian applicants were all so alike, and I stood out. In truth, I wasn’t much different from other Asians I knew. I was shy and reticent, played a musical instrument, spent summers drilling math, and had strict parents to whom I was dutiful. But I got the message: to be allowed through a narrow door, an Asian should cultivate not just a sense of individuality but also ways to project 'Not like other Asians!'"

From "The Uncomfortable Truth About Affirmative Action and Asian-Americans," by Harvard lawprof Jeannie Suk Gersen in The New Yorker.

"This is deeply disturbing. It would be a dog whistle that could invite a lot of chaos and unnecessarily create hysteria among colleges and universities..."

"... who may fear that the government may come down on them for their efforts to maintain diversity on their campuses."

Said Kristen Clarke, president of the liberal Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, quoted in the NYT article that begins "The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times."

(The word that jumps out at me is "white." What about Asian-Americans? Aren't they the ones losing out?)

The top-rated comment at the NYT is:

A revolting and infuriating display of this administration's warped priorities. A dog whistle to white supremacists and another distraction from the country's real problems, which are mounting by the day.

Another highly-rated comment:

Trump knows what he's doing. He knows that 'affirmative action' is one of the loudest dog whistles there is. White people will come out of the woodwork to tell their tales of how unqualified, illiterate Black people got their place at Harvard and THAT'S why they've never amounted to much in this world.

Trump must be getting really desperate if he's playing the affirmative action card so early in his presidency. I would think he would hold on to that until just before the election. Mueller must be close to something.

There's what the NYT calls an "ethnic divide" between white and Asian-Americans in "a high-achieving school district" in New Jersey.

The divide is between white parents and Asian-American parents. The headline says "ethnic divide," though the article never refers to ethnicity. The terminology in the article is race:

A packed Board of Education meeting this month at Grover Middle School in West Windsor, N.J., where a districtwide debate that often splits along racial lines is underway about the pressure put on students there to succeed....

[I]nstead of bringing families together, [the principal's] letter revealed a fissure in the district, which has 9,700 students, and one that broke down roughly along racial lines....

Not all public opinion has fallen along racial lines...

I guess a headline saying that a school district was divided along racial lines would get readers hot to see another one of the many stories the Times runs about divisions between black and white people. There are so many of those that I doubt that the NYT wants to dial back the racial divisiveness. Maybe they just didn't want to disappoint readers who hunger for more black-versus-white material.

Anyway, this is a fascinating conflict, with white parents put out that the Asian-American kids are upping the competition. Immigrants from China, India, and Korea have moved to the school district, near Princeton, in large numbers precisely to get their kids into the very best, high level schools. The Asian-American kids are now the distinct majority in the schools — 65%. These families were big supporters of advanced mathematics, instrumental music, and maximizing honors and Advanced Placement credits.

The white parents are agonizing about all the stress on their kids, and the school superintendent, David Aderhold, is responding to them, dialing back the program in what the Asian-American parents tend to see as "dumbing down" and "anti-intellectual."  Aderhold puts his reforms in terms of prevention of mental illness and suicide. He speaks of "a holistic, 'whole child' approach... that respects 'social-emotional development' and 'deep and meaningful learning.'"

Both Asian-American and white families say the tension between the two groups has grown steadily over the past few years, as the number of Asian families has risen. But the division has become more obvious in recent months as Dr. Aderhold has made changes, including no-homework nights, an end to high school midterms and finals, and a “right to squeak” initiative that made it easier to participate in the music program.

So the white people are not the majority nor are they arguing for meritocracy... and yet they seem to be winning. They are winning with the argument that it's not good to have too much winning when they are not the ones doing the winning.

This story made me want to reread Malcolm Gladwell's 2005 article "Getting In/The social logic of Ivy League admissions":