Asians The Victims of Affirmative Action

Jonah Goldberg reports:

"Theoretically, affirmative action is supposed to take spots away from white applicants and redistribute them to underrepresented minorities," Li told the Daily Princetonian. "What's happening is one segment of the minority population is losing places to another segment of minorities, namely Asians to underrepresented minorities."

Li points to a study conducted by two Princeton academics last year that concluded if you got rid of racial preferences in higher education, the number of whites admitted to schools would remain fairly constant. However, without racial preferences, Asians would take roughly 80 percent of the positions now allotted to Hispanic and black students. In other words, there is a quota--though none dare call it that--keeping Asians out of elite schools in numbers disproportionate to their merit. This is the same sort of quota once used to keep Jews out of the Ivy League--not because of their lack of qualifications, but because having too many Jews would change the "feel" of, say, Harvard or Yale. Today, it's the same thing, only we've given that feeling a name: diversity.

Some of America's most powerful racists are tenured professors who happen to be white.