More on Affirmative Action

(Letters)

13 May 2014

Dear WV,

The article “Supreme Court Knifes Affirmative Action” (Workers Vanguard No. 1045) shows once again that it takes communists to defend even the smallest advances in the civil rights of black Americans.

One aspect of the recent attacks on Affirmative Action and related programs has been the attempts by the ruling class to pit Asian Americans against blacks and Latinos. In California, a mobilization of Chinese voters joined right-wing politicians to kill Senate Constitutional Amendment No. 5, which was aimed at reviving the state’s Affirmative Action programs at public universities and colleges. Republicans and Democrats alike were able to convince Asian American parents that their children would lose opportunities to attend college if the amendment were to pass. The truth is that it’s the capitalists’ wholesale attacks on public education that deny all working people—black, Latino, Asian, and white—any real chance at a quality education.

As Professor Ellen Wu has pointed out, the myth of the Asian ‘model minority’ has been used as an ideological weapon in both the Cold War machinations of US imperialism as well as the divide-and-conquer strategy of suppressing the American working class. In the midst of the Civil Rights movement, Democratic Senator Patrick Moynihan published an infamous report for the Labor Department blaming black oppression on a lack of family values and contrasted this with the “singularly stable, cohesive and enlightened family life” of Chinese and Japanese Americans. Fast forward 50 years and Donald Sterling, the racist owner of the LA Clippers basketball franchise used his patronizing “affection” for Koreans as a smokescreen for discriminating against the black and Latino would-be tenants of his Los Angeles apartment buildings.

Appeals to the ‘model minority’—these days often in reference to relatively educated and well-to-do Chinese and Indian immigrants—also provide cover for the oppression of other sectors of Asian America. While “respectful” Asian students are praised by school administrators for their supposed achievements, Hmong and Khmer students, for example, have some of the lowest college attendance rates in the country.

As your article rightly pointed out, only open university admissions and free tuition will resolve the struggle over limited educational resources. And even such a modest achievement will take the overthrow of a capitalist system founded on racial oppression.

Brad D.