Eighty years ago this month, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the internment of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese American citizens from the West Coast. This anniversary is a vivid reminder that it has always been and will always be evil to judge individuals based on the color of their skin. Yet sadly, it seems to be a lesson that far too many people have forgotten.
My paternal grandparents met in Manzanar, one of the euphemistically named “relocation centers” built by the federal government in the California desert. Prior to Manzanar, my grandmother’s family briefly stayed at the Santa Anita Assembly Center, housed in a racetrack’s converted (and still fragrant) horse stalls. In 1942, families were given mere days to sell their property and possessions, often for pennies on the dollar.
In hindsight, the cruelty and barbarity of locking Japanese Americans in internment camps is obvious. Less acknowledged is the fact that the same identity politics that made FDR’s actions possible still permeate the country’s political discourse, albeit in a less conspicuous way.
According to FBI data, anti-Asian hate crimes rose 73% between 2019 and 2020. New York City saw a 361% increase. Without a doubt, COVID has contributed to this spike, yet it cannot be blamed as the sole factor. After all, bias against Asians didn’t just spontaneously return in the spring of 2020.
The discrimination that Asians face today may be tougher to detect, but it still exists, particularly in areas such as education.
Consider, for instance, the affirmative action lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina headed for the Supreme Court in the October 2022 term. These lawsuits laid bare a deep anti-Asian bias in academia. For example, admissions officers at Harvard consistently gave Asian applicants a lower personality score than non-Asian applicants, while researchers from Princeton found that Asians needed to score an average of 140 points higher on the SAT to gain admission than students of other races.
Unfortunately, these discriminatory practices aren’t limited just to higher education either. In Virginia, Fairfax County Public Schools is currently embroiled in a federal lawsuit over changes to the admissions policy of a top-performing high school, the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Admissions appear to have been conducted with the express intention of reducing the number of students of Asian descent. Documents obtained through discovery included a text exchange between school board members asserting “an anti asian feel underlying some of this, hate to say it lol” and discussing how the policy changes “will whiten our schools and kick [out] Asians.”
Officials in other K-12 districts have taken similar steps that disproportionately affect Asian students. In 2021, New York City Schools Chancellor Meisha Ross-Porter called for the abolition of a standardized entrance exam for the city’s specialized schools, arguing that “the continued use of the Specialized High School Admissions Test will produce the same unacceptable results over and over again.” Given that Asian students comprise 53.7% of those admitted to the specialized schools, it’s not difficult to ascertain what Ross-Porter considered “unacceptable.”
Schools and officials also manipulate student numbers to fit narratives about racism and achievement. A November 2021 presentation by University of Maryland President Darryll Pines separated students into two categories — “students of color, minus Asians” and “white or Asian students.” Similarly, school officials in Washington State separated the data of Asian students from other students of color. Asian students have been told that they “benefit from white supremacy” and “proximity to white privilege,” inconvenient historical facts like internment be damned.
Although these may seem like small transgressions, they reveal a deep hypocrisy among societal elites. They proudly proclaim their desire to “stop AAPI hate,” yet they perpetuate the very injustices they claim to oppose. And the fact that these policies are being used against schoolchildren by government officials, using taxpayer resources, adds insult to the injury.
When these actions are sanctioned by the state, it signals tacit approval to individuals to engage in similarly destructive discrimination.
Eighty years ago, it was wrong for the U.S. government to relocate Japanese and Japanese American citizens forcibly on the basis of race. In 2022, it is wrong for school administrators and officials to treat Asian students differently on the basis of race. America’s students deserve to be treated as individuals based on their own merits — not on immutable characteristics.
Nicole Neily is the president of Parents Defending Education.
