FW: Excessive Asians - Fire on Your own Position

["Arthur Hu(comcast)" <arthurhu@comcast.net>]

To the Editor, National Review.
re: Derbyshire: March 04, 2004
Calling Down Fire On Your Own Position"

I'd like to thank Derbyshire for illuminating some of the silliness among us
Asian Americans. But I'd like to take credit for providing the table which
takes the student's diversity numbers and compare them to the 2000 state
population. For all her complaints about "unacceptable" levels of diversity,
every under-represented minority is in fact within a few points of
politically correct in a state with fewer than 4 percent blacks. The biggest
disparity is in fact between whites, who are only 4 points away from
becoming
a minority, and Asians who are approaching one-third of freshmen, a
situation
California reached a decade ago. Sooner or
later, somebody is going to notice that "acceptable" diversity means far
more blacks and hispanics than parity, one-third Asians, and relatively
few whites.

Arthur Hu
12422 107th pl ne
Kirkland WA 98034
425-891-2619

ps: now you folks owe me a column on standards based testing madness.

March 04, 2004, 8:12 a.m.
Calling Down Fire On Your Own Position
News of the bizarre.



Here is a storm in a teacup for you, reported at great length on page
one of the New York Times business section, February 7. The actual
teacup is Dewey Ballantine, a law firm of the kind known around New
York as "white shoe," which is to say, old (founded 1909), very
expensive, and very respectable. Don't even think of taking that
dispute with your auto mechanic to Dewey Ballantine. That's not the
kind of law they do. To quote from their website: "Dewey Ballantine's
New York client base includes such companies as The Walt Disney
Company, General Electric Company, Credit Suisse First Boston, UBS
Warburg, Sony Corporation, Novartis AG, Citigroup and Travelers
Property Casualty Corp." These guys' shoes are so white you use them
as night lights.



Not so Dewey Ballantine's workforce, which is of course "diverse."
Firms like this ? firms, that is, which strive to maintain the highest
standards of respectability ? go to infinite pains to prove their
"commitment to diversity." Not only infinite pains, but a great deal
of expense, too, like those Wall Street trading firms I have written
about in this space. Dewey Ballantine, according to the New York Times
story, puts all employees through twice-yearly firm-wide sensitivity
training. After all that sensitivity training, you would think that
Dewey Ballantine's employees must be as sensitive as mimosas. You
would be right, as we shall see.

Dewey Ballantine is especially desperate to recruit non-white people
into the firm's senior ranks. Their efforts in this regard seem to
have been quite successful, at least in regard to Asian Americans. The
Times piece informs us that: "Of 572 lawyers at Dewey Ballantine, 41
are Asian-Americans." That is 7.2 percent. By way of comparison,
according to the U.S. Census Bureau's "Current Population Survey" for
March 2002, only 12.5 million of our country's 282.1 million
inhabitants declared themselves to be "Asian or Pacific Islander."
That's 4.4 percent. You might want to keep those two percentages in
mind while reading what follows.

A few weeks ago there was a general-circulation message on the
company's e-mail system seeking someone willing to adopt a puppy. One
of Dewey Ballantine's partners in the London office sent back an
e-mail suggesting that whoever did adopt the puppy in question would
be wise to stay away from Chinese restaurants.

Shock! Horror! There is a common impression among us knuckle-dragging
racist white bigots, you see, that Chinese people have a fondness for
dog meat.* Asian-American employees of Dewey Ballantine rose up in
protest at this outrage to their nursed and petted "sensitivity."
There followed one of those unpleasant spectacles ? all right, I'm
going to come right out and say what I think here: one of those
disgusting spectacles ? in which guilty white liberals retreat in
gibbering terror before the righteous hosts of racial
self-consciousness. Just listen. (All these extracts are taken from
the New York Times report.)

"Somebody made a mistake, and they've apologized," said Morton A.
Pierce, a cochairman at the firm, who added that the partner would be
disciplined. "And we keep apologizing."

Apologized? Disciplined? You think that will suffice, Mr. Pierce?
These folk don't want any of your measly apologies. They want that
partner gibbeted outside your corporate headquarters, and his head
stuck on a pike.

"[A] group of Asian-American bar associations and 36 Asian-American
law student organizations ... sent a letter to the firm asking "what
proactive steps you intend to take to prevent the occurrence of such a
racial incident at your firm."

May I make a suggestion? Since twice-yearly "sensitivity training"
seminars are obviously not getting the job done, why not increase the
frequency to monthly? Or how about weekly? Come to think of it, is it
really not possible to find a couple of spare hours in the ordinary
working day at Dewey Ballantine for some intensive "sensitivity
training"?

"It is not clear, Mr. Pierce said, what the firm should do other than
keep apologizing."

See above, Mr. Pierce. Though so far as apologizing goes, your
implication is correct: You will be apologizing about this for ever.
No quantity of apologizing will ever expunge this stain. Your
opponents in this matter are unappeasable.

"'What scares the rest of us is, is it pervasive at law firms
generally or corporations generally that Asians can be mocked with
impunity?' said Andrew Thomas Hahn...president of the Asian American
Bar Association of New York."

"What scares us"? I wonder if this person has ever been really scared?
Ever been rock-climbing? Jumped out of a plane? Fought in combat?
Faced a criminal with a loaded gun? What scares me is the stranglehold
that moronic race-ideologues increasingly have on what we Americans
may say and do, and on whom we may freely associate with, and on how
business corporations should allocate their employees' time, and on
what proportion of our fast-shrinking liberties we may preserve from
their assaults.

The key thing to note is that this indignant, self-righteous,
humorless blather is from cum laude graduates of elite universities
earning six-figure salaries at tony law firms. Ah, but that only makes
it worse, you see.

"People say, 'Oh, you're just being oversensitive,' but I think it's a
symptom of something underlying, said Karen Y. Tu, a second-year law
student at Columbia who is co-chairwoman of the Asian-Pacific American
Law Students Association. She later said: 'What is going to change
this environment? What is going to make it easier? What is going to
make Asian-Americans comfortable about going back to Dewey?'"

Permit me to hazard a guess. What is going to make them more
"comfortable" is for Mr. Pierce and his non-Asian colleagues to rend
their garments, lacerate their flesh, smear ashes on their faces, and
crawl on their hands and knees down Fifth Avenue flagellating
themselves and wailing: "We are guilty! Guilty of insensitivity! We
are nothing but worthless racist scum! We are garbage! A disgrace to
humanity! And guilty, guilty, GUILTY!"

A friend (middle-aged white American) with whom I discussed this issue
had the following thing to say: "Do any staff at a white-shoe law firm
ever serve in the military these days? Or do a laboring job after
college? I worked on a snow-plow crew for four years after I got my
degree. The crew was rough, a lot of swearing, and sometimes you'd get
some prejudice. Most served during WWII. They were also generous and
quick reacting too ... Is it possible that the law crowd is PC'd to
the gills and cannot cope with anything outside of the purdah imposed
on them? It is, after all, an imperfect world out there. Too bad they
show no sense of proportion in dealing with it."

I think he's right. If you tracked back through the life history of
the average young white-shoe lawyer, you would not find military or
National Guard or police service; you would not find stints of work in
a logging camp, or on snowplow crews, or on construction sites or
Atlantic fishing vesselsThese are the pampered darlings of our
educational meritocracy. George Orwell described the English boys'
boarding-school education of his time as "five years in a lukewarm
bath of snobbery." Here, in the sputterings of these whining brats,
you see the end result of 20 years' immersion in a lukewarm bath of
political correctness ? a process that leaves one so exquisitely
sensitive, one's skin bruises at a touch. Possibly this effect is
magnified among Americans whose family roots are in China's Mandarin
culture, where the horror of manual work runs strong and deep.

Such a sheltered, pampered background, as well as rendering the skin
as thin and tender as a newborn babe's, causes the human personality
to lose touch with reality. I refer you back to those percentage
figures for (a) Asian-Americans in the general population, versus (b)
Asian Americans at Dewey Ballantine. This is "discrimination"? Well,
perhaps it is, but not in exactly the way these activists are talking
about.

An even weirder specimen of this same separation from reality,
unrelated to the Dewey Ballantine flap in particulars but betraying
the same unhinged mentality, appeared in the February 14 Seattle
Times. In a box titled "Opinion from the next generation," the heading
of the piece is: "Acting affirmatively: Legislature must follow
through on bill supporting academic diversity." The article begins: "A
state Senate bill would allow race to be considered as a factor in
admissions again in Washington's public universities. It's about time
..."

A little background here: Back in November 1998, the voters of
Washington State passed, by a majority of nearly 60 percent,
Initiative 200, which declares that: "The state shall not discriminate
against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group
on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the
operation of public employment, public education, or public
contracting." It is not very surprising that Washington State voters
passed the initiative: Modern Americans dislike state-sponsored racial
discrimination, and vote it down every chance they get. This, however,
is very distressing to the "diversity" ideologues, who derive psychic
satisfaction ? not to mention, in many cases, their actual living ?
from picking away at minuscule racial grievances.

Well, Washington State Governor Gary Locke, who is one of those
ideologues (and of Chinese ancestry himself), sought to get a bill
through his state legislature, permitting overt racial discrimination
in college admissions. The effort seems to have failed, but Anne Kim,
in that Seattle Times article, is arguing in favor of the bill.
Extrudes Ms. Kim: "Through this direct mechanism of affirmative
action, our racially unequal social structure can begin to be
deconstructed."

So far, so boilerplate "diversity" cant. But then Ms. Kim wanders off
into a statistical breakdown of enrolled freshmen at the University of
Washington last fall. You can read her numbers in the link I gave a
couple of paragraphs ago. I am going to reproduce them below, but with
the corresponding proportions of each racial group in Washington State
set alongside, by way of comparison. (And with "Pacific Islanders"
lumped in with "Asians" to conform to U.S. census categories.)

Race UW% State%
African Americans 2.85 3.20
American Indians 0.92 0.92
Hispanics/Latinos 4.34 7.50
Asians & Pacific Islandera 30.24 6.00
Caucasians 54.01 78.90
(Unclassified) 7.64 2.80

Notice anything? What comes to mind here is a term from the military
arts: "Calling down fire on your own position."

But there, perhaps, you have the roots of this bizarre phenomenon. A
group that, for whatever reasons, attains disproportionate success,
will build up a lot of guilt about that success. And as anyone who has
lived much in the U.S.A. this past 40 years can tell you, there is
nothing so destructive of tolerance and humanity, nothing more
corrosive to honesty, humor, and good sense, no bigger threat to the
ideals of fairness, equality, and justice on which this great republic
was founded, than guilt.