Amy Chau wrote a great book on this: The Triple Package.
This is institutional racism designed to suppress one group and lift up another.
What is the difference?
Asian Americans had to put up with (among other things):
* Being ineligible to become citizens of the United States well after the passage of the 13th Amendment. There was a time in this country when both the white and black man could enjoy citizenship and voting but neither the brown nor yellow man could.
* A good portion of Asian Americans (the Japanese) who were American citizens were enslaved by the government for three years, after having all their land and businesses taken away. This was in the 1940s.
* Being victims of hate crimes. There was an entire gang in New Jersey in the 80s dedicated to beating up and murdering Indians (dotbusters). This is not a new phenomenon. The labor movement in Seattle also organized a mob to rid Washington state of cheap Indian labor in the early 1900s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingham_riots)
* The stereotype that Asians prevent 'real American' people from achieving their wealth goals is oddly persistent. It is highly reminiscent of the blame that Hitler laid upon the Jews as preventing real Germans from achieving their potential. The Asiatic Exclusion League in the United States had its first meeting in 1907.
* Moreso than black people, Asian Americans are constantly cast as being perpetual foreigners. Americans whose families have been in this country decades are still treated as Asians, rather than 'full' Americans.
I think it is especially telling that the organizations in favor of affirmative action are also the ones that started the Asian exclusion leagues. The labor movement in this country spearheaded affirmative action. Affirmative action discriminates against asians. This continues a long line of labor movement participation in Asian Exclusion Leagues, and it needs to end now.
What are you even talking about? https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
Basically all post-slavery discrimination against blacks happened to Asians. Can you please cite anything that can support the opposite claim? It's typically better to argue with facts than making shit up, or worse, misrepresenting the facts due to a systematic removal of history from history books.
> your own admission if Asian American's "basically own the United States" -- do they actually need help?
Yes. Asians owned a significant portion of the Western United States before they were put in internment too. Simply having ownership of various assets means nothing if the government is not representative of the population -- after all, it is the threat of government force that maintains every individual's property rights. The fact is that Asians may have money, but have little political power.
> Basically all post-slavery discrimination against blacks happened to Asians. Can you please cite anything that can support the opposite claim?
I'm not arguing that point. I'm saying that the thing you are excluding from your argument -- hundreds of years of slavery -- has a legacy that goes beyond the discriminatory practices you highlight and likely requires a larger corrective action to fix.
You are using Asian's relative success against African Americans to argue that they must therefore not have experienced discrimination. This reasoning is backwards. You ought to first quantify the discrimination (you'll have to figure how to do that yourself) and then see if there's a correlation. Otherwise, you're arguing a fallacy -- a form of affirming the consequent.
If we were to accept your explanation, then we would be forced to conclude that other groups (such as the Hmong or Bangladeshi) who are doing as bad (or perhaps worse) than African Americans must have faced even worse discrimination in America in the past, which I think you'd agree is not true.
Different discrimination. I'll elaborate.
> You ought to first quantify the discrimination (you'll have to figure how to do that yourself)
Sure. Slavery is worse. Multi-generational race based slavery is worse still. That on top of pulling people from multiple distinct ethno linguistic groups, separating their families, destroying their culture and language, and killing them, is worse still. That's the history of blacks in America. Its not just discrimination (which is bad). Its the wiping out of culture that's the problem. When you put discrimination on top of it, you get what we have today. That's what I believe to be true based on what I know so far. To tie that back in, I think it makes sense that it would take generations of affirmative action like repairs to fix the problem. Its not that I don't think Asians (etc) were not discriminated against. Its just that I think it was a (much) larger, more severe scale, that warrants an independent reparation. Its perhaps comparable to Native Americans. I bet they fare similarly in modern America (I don't know the stats).
> we would be forced to conclude that other groups
No. I don't know much about those other groups. It could be any number of extrinsic factors that put them into a similar position (as measured by, e.g. poverty?).
Most affirmative action beneficiaries are middle and upper class. Their class standing shields them from the effects of past discrimination.
In the case of African Americans, they are less oppressed than Asian (and all other races) applicants that come from immigrant families. African Americans had access to first world education and infrastructure throughout the 1940s-1980s. Compared with immigrants from previously communistic or 3rd world countries, African Americans have been very privileged. It also helps that African Americans don't have a language barrier in America.
I see the good intentions here, but I get the impression that well meaning rule oriented people are being used to further the very injustices they mean to solve.
Such as being 1/1024 Native American, that technique is known to work at Harvard
Inherited family wealth nominally does this. There wouldn't be a need for reparations after a generation or two of a 100% inheritance tax.