Harvard Says Asians Have "Bad Personalities"....Because They Outperform Whites

[McCamy Taylor]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/harvard-asian-american-racism.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region

I guess Harvard is also the business of protecting white privilege.

Xenophobia is not very enlightened, dudes. And embracing the No-nothing American myth is downright stupid. There is no such thing as "too smart." No wonder so many of our nation's brightest young people are being drawn to Asian culture.

[get the red out]

1. Well

I guess to the white upper classes, if a minority isn't taking everything away from them because they are undocumented, they are taking everything away from them by being too smart.

Racism, hard to excuse away.

[BumRushDaShow]

2. The problem with this stereotyping is

that they will highlight one population's cream of the crop (top 10%) and then try to compare them to our "average", pronouncing some sort of "superiority" of one over the other to continue to set up false divisions and stoke FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt). This extends to certain Asian countries, from China to Japan to South Korea to SE Asia's India. How you can really tell is if you look at other, almost "hidden" Asians, like those from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, who are also here, and who wouldn't fit the manufactured stereotype that is being promoted.

[malaise]

3. That's not an American myth

It's Western thinking - the so called white man's burden.
Anyone who shatters that myth has a bad personality.
These days, universities across our planet are more interested in making money than they are in the pursuit of knowledge.

[WhiteTara]

4. I had a professor tell me that it was better to be

a B student; they had more friends.

I was striving for a 4 point, but in order to progress in my degree plan (he was in charge) I took a b so I would look more sociable in his class and ended summa instead of magna--many years later, neither matters.

[DFW]

5. My younger daughter found out, too, that neither matters

It matters that some law firms look at the name of the university on law degrees rather than finding out what the graduating student is like. Smart law firms look at the person they're hiring.

My daughter opted for magna instead of summa, and indeed the two students in her law school class that made summa are now teaching, whereas she is the youngest (at 31) partner ever in a big international law firm. The head office (they are in NYC, she is in Frankfurt) sends her interns all the time, some of whom are Harvard Law and Yale Law grads. They often leave her office in tears after she dresses them down. They show up with their "prestigious (in their eyes, anyway)" degrees, a lousy work ethic (they think it's OK to leave at 4:59 PM whether they have completed the day's tasks or not), insufficient preparation, poor English grammar, and worse German grammar. She has no patience for the lazy ones who show up whining, "but I have a law degree from Harvard." They think that having a Harvard degree means they automatically have ability and wisdom, instead of meaning they are assumed to have the capacity to acquire ability and wisdom. The ones who understand the latter are the ones with a future.

[WhiteTara]

6. I ended up owning my own manufacturing company

with 30 or so employees and we sold the business and retired a couple of years ago. The basis of my degree work has been immeasuralbly helpful, but it didn't matter if I was first or second in my class. The awards I won were fun at the time, but they too mean nothing in this world I live in. I think more than anything, the fact that I completed all the steps to success gave me a leg up in the real world, even when I didn't work in my chosen career field.

[DFW]

7. In other words,

Like my daughter, your success depended on your own abilities and your own confidence in them. The name and the level of your degree did not have any influence on any of that.

[WhiteTara]

8. Exactly.