Next up on YOLO Court: affirmative action in reverse

 July 5, 2022

Obligatory statement: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice. But I retain my right to rage against the machine about the bottom-barrel headliners this YOLO Court is looking at for the next session. 

They’re going to look at affirmative action, but on the opposite side. This is the case not about giving minorities a boost, but on not handicapping Asian applicants, etc. for “being smart, normally.” 

Strangely, I can’t stop thinking about this story today: There was a former British intel officer who blew the whistle on the financial penetration of the Gaddafi family’s money into Western markets. He had to go into a quasi-state-of-hiding after blowing the whistle. He wrote a book and all that, but he also got so paranoid he started wearing women’s clothes and hiding out in a quasi-millenarian cult setting, while claiming to be a reincarnation of Jesus. 

This is what I think about as an illustration of what is really meant by sayin it is a “trans moment” in history. I’ve got nothing against trans folks, but why not instead of straining to believe that this guy is both trans and Jesus, rather just believe that he was telling the truth about the Gaddafi conspiracy?

This is not unlike this entirely botched conversation on affirmative action. Why look so hard at the shallow reasons this guy is interesting rather than the deeper reasons?

There’s cases where race is a shallow reason for interest in somebody, and there’s cases where it’s a deep reason for interest in somebody. 

This affirmative action case is stuff I’ve heard a lot of talk about. It might be new for the white folks, but not for someone considered to be a minority by the System (whether they want to be seen that way or not). The suit is in bad faith, and Harvard is likely to defend it on bad faith reasons too. The suit is trying to unseat affirmative action on the reacharound, and Harvard is going to defend it on the basis that if they don’t handicap, there might not be so many white legacies - etc. etc. As someone part Asian, I’d like to be left out of that farce. You’re trying to get us on the “side” of white legacies and so on, but that’s laughable because ya’ll don’t see us as white. Ya’ll don’t see us as equal. And I have more solidarity with the oppression of other minorities than you might think - because I/we/etc. have felt more of it than your standard white/rich guy. We’ve got casualties from this system of racism, while to white folks racism is only theoretical. But not only that, this category of “Asian American” is whitewashing actual ethnic differences that matter - because they are differences of language and culture too. 

We’re all living together in one America, and like it or not, we’re all going to have to get along. That means that white folks have to take a step back. And minorities who’ve gotten some privilege have to stop wanting to equate their privilege with whiteness.