Real racism isn't in Trump's Twitter feed, it's in America's elite universities

Real racism isn't in Trump's Twitter feed, it's in America's elite universities

by Ying Ma

 | June 11, 2018 01:23 PM

Harvard is being sued for discriminating against Asian American students, while the Justice Department is conducting an investigation into the school’s possible discriminatory practices.

(Elise Amendola/AP)

There is real racism in America. It resides at elite institutions like Harvard, not President Trump’s twitter feed.
It has become commonplace for the mainstream media and Trump haters to accuse the president of being racist. Just recently, they found more fodder when President Trump commented on the firing of ABC star Roseanne Barr without condemning Barr’s racist tweet that started the controversy.
Instead, the president griped about ABC’s biased media coverage against him. Trump haters wasted no time to work up their outrage, accusing the president of stooping to a new low, and normalizing racism.

Since Trump declared his candidacy for president in June 2015, he has regularly said things that typical politicians do not say and believe they should not say. As a result, allegations of racism have followed him everywhere.Amid Trump’s bombast, and at times less-than-dignified public commentary, the real racists have gotten a free pass from those foaming at the mouth against the president.During the 2016 presidential election, I wrote the following.[T]he Left is in fact the hotbed of real racism in modern America. Leftists are the ones who have systematically discriminated against students by race in university admissions. They call it affirmative action. They are the ones who insist that every black, Asian, Hispanic, Native American, or other person of color play a role as a token to provide a distinctly ethnic or racial perspective—and that perspective is inherently a liberal one. They call this diversity.

A few weeks ago, the Center for Equal Opportunity, a nonprofit research and educational organization, released a report detailing precisely this type of racism.
Written by Dr. Althea Nagai and titled “Too Many Asian Americans: Affirmative Discrimination in Elite College Admissions,” the report shows that two elite universities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, have an effective “ceiling” on the number of Asian American applicants that are to be admitted.
Both universities consider race in student admissions. At MIT, the percentage of Asian American students has stayed steady at around 26 percent since the 1990s. At Harvard, that percentage is 17.
By contrast, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), which does not use race as a factor in admissions, has a 43 percent Asian-American undergraduate population.
MIT and Harvard are hardly the only practitioners of racial discrimination. Nagai reminds readers that in Not Yet Separate, Not Yet Equal, authors Thomas J. Espendshade and Alexandria Walton Radford found that elite universities admitted Asian Americans at lower rates than other racial groups.
Whereas the admissions rates were 31, 27, and 26 percent for African Americans, Hispanics, and Whites, respectively, Asian Americans were admitted at 18 percent.
The same study showed the Asian American applicants needed to score significantly higher on the SATs to gain admittance: 140 points higher than whites, 270 points higher than Hispanics, and 450 points higher than blacks.
Of course, all of this affirmative discrimination is done in the name of diversity, to make sure that Asian Americans are not “overrepresented” relative to their numbers in the national population.
As Nagai points out, “certain elite schools will only admit some Asian American applicants, but not too many. And indeed, not as many as their academic achievements would suggest.”
Trump, the man widely berated as a racist occupying the White House, could have never concocted or perpetrated anything remotely as complicated and sordid as the racist admissions systems in place at our nation’s top universities.
Not surprisingly, his politically incorrect and intemperate remarks on race have been considered an affront to the racist paradigm carefully constructed by these elite institutions and defended by the graduates they churn out.
But the noise surrounding Trump’s so-called racism cannot drown out the injustice committed by the real racists. Currently, Harvard is being sued for discriminating against Asian American students, while the Justice Department is conducting an investigation into the school’s possible discriminatory practices.

Let us hope the lawsuit and the DOJ investigation are enough to spur Harvard and other elite universities to admit their racism and end their discriminatory policies.