Discussion
Stuyvesant admitted 534 Asian students and only 3 Black students. Cue all the wrong conversations about affirmative action and model minorities.🤷🏿♂️
Or, consider this:
Being raided by ICE, is traumatic. An Asian student having a parent killed or falsely imprisoned, causes their grades suffer.
@mekkaokereke absolutely. And replace Asians looks like nerds with Asians look like criminals. So many times I’ve been given the benefit of the doubt that I would be good at math and .. actually I’m really bad at math..
The model minority myth hurts everyone.
During the pandemic, I worked to help Asian American businesses in San Francisco deal with the slowdown, to help their employees. The demographic with the longest unemployment during the pandemic, was not Black people. It was Asian Americans.🤷🏿♂️
Because restaurants and bars shut down. And in the city of San Francisco, that has had a significant Chinese American population since the 1800s, and is today 37% Asian, a disproportionate number of food service workers are Asian American. So pandemic slowdowns and associated layoffs in the service sector, hit them hard.
Rough number estimates: for every 2 Asian people in the Bay Area working in tech, there is 1 making delicious Ramen, Yakitori, or serving Negronis or milk tea boba, or busing tables or working an egg line. When the 2 tech workers started working from home or working remotely from another city, the 1 service worker got laid off.
No one cared enough about these service workers, because with a few Jensen Huang's to skew the average, people believe that "Asians are rich!🤡" And "startup owners are rich!🤡" and so most pandemic help was focused on Black and Hispanic populations.
Imagine the following hypothetical. Increase the number of ICE agents in NYC, and tell them specifically to target Asian students, until the probability of being ICE raided and stopped by armed agents while innocent, was 2X greater for Asian school kids than Black ones.
This would be very racist and xenophobic.
Then in our hypothetical, add more ICE agents and tell them to target Asian students, until Asian students are 5X more likely to be raided at gunpoint than Black students.
Then add more agents.
Now in this hypothetical hell world, Asian high school students would be 10X more likely to be raided. Asian graduation rates across the city would decrease.
Add more ICE agents. Tell them to go after Asian students even harder. Deploy ICE agents that hate Asian people inside middle schools.
Asian students would now be 20X more likely to be stopped at gunpoint than Black students. 49% of all Asian New Yorkers would now be detained behind bars before they turn 23.
Half.
And in our hypothetical, make that ICE detention on Rikers island, the most dangerous jail in America.
In a city of only 1.7 million Asian people, some years would have 600,000+ reported ICE raids on them at gunpoint, and more non-reported.
That much hate concentrated on that few people, is not conducive to academic performance.
Asian students would now have the worst academic performance in NYC.
Some Asian students would be lucky, and would not get ICE raided ever. But some Asian students would be ICE raided *hundreds of times*.
Think about how annoying it would be as an Asian parent or student, to hear people debate endlessly on if there should be affirmative action to correct *historic*🤡 injustice, when you are still being ICE raided on the way to school today.
@mekkaokereke like Giresign theartre.
Gey sidearms.
Instead of 534, there might only be 3 Asian students accepted to Stuyvesant. It would be less about focus on academics, and more about survivorship bias.
Imagine trying to explain to people that if we unwound the racist ICE raids, that there would be hundreds of Asian students admitted.
And yes, I'm talking about racist over-policing and pretrial detention of innocent Black students.
There are ~2 million Black people in NYC, and at the peak of "stop and frisk" there were 600,000+ stops by armed cops, over 85% of which targeted Black and Afro Latino New Yorkers.
In my dystopian example, if I said that you could increase Asian academic performance, decrease chronic absenteeism, and increase Asian college attendance, by removing the ICE agents we have posted in middle schools, it would make sense.
IRL, cops in middle schools, decrease Black graduation rates🤷🏿♂️
Suppose that ICE scaled up their anti-Asian efforts, to the point that half of all Asian New Yorkers spent time in an immigration detention center *while innocent* before they reached their 23rd birthday.
Do you think that this would have an impact on Asian academic performance?
Or no impact?
London and NYC are similar cities with some important differences:
London does not have nearly the same level of anti-Black racism that NYC does. It's not close.
Asian students in both London and NYC excel in school. How would you guess that Black students in London perform relative to white ones?
Americans love to talk about ending affirmative action, and being anti-DEI and anti-woke, and to talk about objective academic performance.🤷🏿♂️
Americans don't like to talk about the fact that if you reduce the racism enough, that Black students outperform white ones.
Not even zero racism! Reduced.
And no, Black students don't start to over-perform because Black students are "genetically smarter🤡" That's not a real thing. Race isn't even real. Racism is real.
Black students start to over-perform for exactly the same reason that girls do, Jewish people do, and immigrants from everywhere do.
When you can understand why girls have better academic performance than boys, and why Nigerian, Polish, Irish, and Indian immigrants get better grades? You'll be one step closer to de-programming racism and sexism from your mind.
@mekkaokereke Perhaps mark your hypothetical more clearly as a hypothetical, lest its gets included as true in all the big AI training corpora. I had to read the thread twice before I got it.
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
