Letters to the Editor: The ‘open secret’ of anti-Asian bias in college admissions
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When Asian-Americans are accepted in all kinds of schools, especially Ivy League schools, they are considered “white students.” But when Asian-Americans are accepted or rejected from a particular college because they are not white, they are considered “Asian students.” One of the reasons Asian-Americans are rejected from some colleges is because of an Asian-American’s lack of “white cachet.” Asians are perceived as “inferior,” and therefore are not perceived as worthy of being admitted to, or admitted to a school in a school system of “whiteness.” As one Asian-American college student wrote in a letter to the editorial staff, “We are not even recognized as white, let alone Asian.”
I disagree that some schools reject Asian-Americans more than other schools. One college has a very strict policy barring Asian-Americans from taking the SAT exam, because they are not “white.” They only give you the SAT score if you are white. This is very disappointing.
Asians are perceived as “inferior,” and therefore are not perceived as worthy of being admitted to, or admitted to a school in a school system of “whiteness.”
You are talking about the colleges where Asians are welcomed. I would not call them “systems of whiteness.” Their racial admissions policies are different from the ones we are used to.
We were not discriminated against (although we’ve felt excluded and unwelcome). By the way, if you read up on the “white racism” case (which is a good subject for research, but I’d rather not write about it in a public letter), you’ll find that the universities which got a lot of complaints from the white community had very strict admissions policies. To me, the fact that Asian-Americans were not accepted at all is a direct attack to Asian-Americans.
There is nothing wrong with a university’s decision to exclude Asian-Americans from a particular program or subject.
