Modern racists like to justify their racism by invoking “diversity,” but their schemes are as sordid and complicated as their rationales are sanctimonious and phony.
In higher education, Asian-Americans often bear the brunt of the racial discrimination committed in the name of diversity. A lawsuit filed by Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit group, against Harvard University recently revealed just how egregious the offense is.
Yet even when diversity practices are meant to benefit Asian-Americans, they are problematic and undesirable just the same. These practices take many forms across America’s corporate entities and elite institutions, but tokenism and absurdity are the common byproducts.
Years ago, when I was practicing law at a Wall Street firm, I saw firsthand just how insidious and ludicrous these efforts were.
As a law student, I interviewed to become a summer associate at the firm. The recruiting department set up a half day of meetings for me with different partners and associates. The firm also made sure that one of the associates I met with was an Asian woman, and that the two people who took me out to lunch were Asian.
I didn’t think much about it, until I showed up for work as a summer associate. The firm, which had about 700 attorneys in its office, assigned to me an associate mentor for the summer. She, too, was an Asian female.
Then after I graduated from law school, when I finally joined the firm’s New York office as a full-time attorney, I was assigned another associate to take me out to lunch on my first day on the job. Once again, she was an Asian female.
My former law firm boasts among its clients Fortune 500 companies, high-flying hedge funds, big banks, and notable private equity shops. On any given day, the firm expected its attorneys to work on multi-billion dollar transactions. And yet it didn’t think that I was competent enough to find my way around without some hand-holding from another Asian person.
What made it more unsettling was that my former law firm had a penchant for asking Korean female attorneys to come hold my hand, even though I am of Chinese descent. It was clear that did not matter. The category of tokenism that I fit into was Asian, and for the purposes of racial diversity, all Asians looked alike.
One day, the diversity czars gathered the firm’s Asian associates together and asked them for suggestions recruiting more Asian attorneys. In the spirit of offering constructive feedback, I advised that the firm could start by ending the ghetto-ization of its existing Asian lawyers. Asian people really were capable of getting along with non-Asian people, I observed.
Just when I thought I had persuaded the diversity folks to change their ways, another Asian girl piped up, “I would like to counter what was just said.” And she proceeded to insist, looking very hurt, that she didn’t want the right of being grouped together with other Asian people to be taken away from her.
This former colleague of mine graduated from a respectable law school, and managed to get hired by one of the top law firms in the country, but she didn’t think that she could get by without being patronized based on her race.
I was astounded by the stupidity, but perhaps I should not have been.
The patronization at my former law firm is just the flip side of the active discrimination at Harvard and around the country. In both cases, the diversity rationale has led to farcical, if not illegal, racial practices and outcomes.
But the diversity mindset and rationale is so insidious that it has convinced minorities who are both victims and supposed beneficiaries that they cannot get ahead without special preferences or coddling. This was the case with the Asian girl at my former law firm who asked the firm to please, please not stop coddling her because of her race. It is also often the case for so-called underrepresented minorities who defend diversity practices that benefit them while directly discriminating against Asian-Americans, for instance, at institutions like Harvard.
Ward Connerly, who has led a revolution against racial quotas and preferences via state ballot initiatives, once said: “Diversity [is] a legalized way of discriminating against different people. … It is a great intrusion on individual freedom and individual liberty.”
Those words remain resoundingly true today. SFFA’s lawsuit against Harvard and revelations of the absurdity of diversity practices remind us that this legalized form of racial discrimination needs to end immediately.
Ying Ma (@GZtoGhetto) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential Blog. She is the author of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto, which has just been released in audiobook. During the 2016 election, she served as the deputy director of the Committee for American Sovereignty, a pro-Trump super PAC, and the deputy policy director and deputy communications director of the Ben Carson presidential campaign.
