"Antiracist" is anti-Asian
How the push for equity at Lowell High unfairly targets Asians
In 1998, my friend J missed the Lowell High admissions cutoff score for Chinese students by a single point. If she hadn’t been Chinese, she would have gotten in. Before Brown v. Board of Education mandated school desegregation, children were barred from schools due to race. Ironically, the same ruling would be the underlying reason J was excluded from Lowell.
In 1983, the SFUSD entered a consent decree with the NAACP to desegregate schools. This agreement set an enrollment cap per ethnicity at every school. To keep the percentage of Chinese admits under this limit, the cutoff score for Chinese applicants at Lowell kept rising until, in 1995, 94 students were denied entry just for being Chinese.
The argument for “diversity” was that the SFUSD perpetuates segregation and exacerbates racial inequality by allowing Lowell to have merit-based admissions. Board Resolution 212-2A1, which permanently changed Lowell admissions to a lottery, erases over a millennium of Chinese history by incorrectly crediting the creation of standardized tests to an American eugenicist in order to paint them as racist tools of segregation and white supremacy. In fact, standardized tests have been used for over a thousand years in China to elevate the most qualified candidates to coveted government positions, instead of allowing nepotism to flourish. Today, standardized tests are still the best tool we have to help those without power, wealth, or connections get spots at selective schools like Lowell.
Contrary to the resolution’s claims about “segregation and exclusion of Black and Latinx students at Lowell,” Lowell’s only racially discriminatory admissions policy benefited those groups at the expense of Asians. Zero SFUSD high schools match the demographics of the SFUSD, and Lowell is average on the diversity index. Furthermore, racial balancing does not improve educational outcomes: the 1996-1997 Civil Grand Jury found that while the consent decree had succeeded in desegregating the schools, "African American and Hispanic students still face devastating levels of educational failure." Why would policy that failed to improve educational outcomes in 1992 succeed today?
Against the backdrop of today’s unprecedented rise of violent unprovoked attacks against Asians, the school board rammed through their plan to decrease Asian enrollment at Lowell. Don’t be fooled by language about diversity: if the board wants a larger proportion of their favored races at Lowell, that means fewer Asians are welcome.
Why should San Franciscans stand for discrimination against Asians? The resolution faults Lowell’s enrollment system for “the culture of white supremacy and racial abuse towards Black and Latinx students” but how can a school that is 82% minority perpetuate white supremacy? To answer this, we need look no further than the words of Commissioner Alison Collins, who claims that Asian Americans “use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead'.” The only path that I have ever seen Asian Americans urge their children to use to get ahead is education. Is Collins claiming that valuing education is now considered “white supremacist thinking”?
Though the racist Padlet incident was used as pretext to change admissions, it was never linked to any member of the Lowell community, nor can it be attributed to merit-based admissions. A simple search for “racist zoombombing school” returns more than 3000 news results from locations throughout the country. It’s a phenomenon that has more to do with inadequate security measures and nothing to do with merit-based admissions.
Why target Lowell? If the issue is truly “white supremacy,” there is a top SFUSD school with merit-based admissions which is over 2.5x overrepresented in white students while serving about half the proportion of economically disadvantaged students that Lowell does: Ruth Asawa School of the Arts. The glaring difference is that Asians are as underrepresented at RASOTA as black students are at Lowell. Where is the concern that RASOTA doesn’t “reflect the diversity of SFUSD”? Why target a majority Asian school to battle “white supremacy” rather than a whiter and wealthier school? It’s hard not to see anti-Asian bias when the board’s response to Asian underrepresentation at RASOTA is silence. Could it be related to the fact that Commissioner Collins sends her daughters to RASOTA and doesn’t want standards there to be dragged down to the lowest common denominator?
In its haste to punish Asian students for academic excellence and earning “too many” seats at Lowell, the board has implemented a policy that reduces Lowell High to nothing more than another district school. Unashamedly, the board continues a history of blatant discrimination against Asians. It’s long past time to reject the harmful and false ideology that Asians are lacking in “diversity” or inherently less valuable just for being born the wrong race. Only anti-Asian bias could make someone believe there are too many Asians at Lowell. Don’t be fooled by the flowery rhetoric on antiracism and equity -- what motivates the board is called anti-Asian racism.
Even if you think the School Board's decision to use a lottery for admission to Lowell is a thoughtless solution to a complex problem, you should acknowledge that there is value in having racial diversity in schools, and there is value in a society that tries to help hard working and motivated kids to break out of long cycles of poverty and oppression. Colleges and workplaces don't select applicants purely on scores and grades, and neither should Lowell.
I suppose merit is defined by some as the highest test scores and grades. End of story. However, if you ever want to change inequities that exist in society, you have to challenge these deceptively simple assumptions of fairness. The fact that some students can achieve higher grades or higher scores on a test does not necessarily mean that they have merited admission to Lowell. For starters, who said that anyone deserves entrance to Lowell based solely on those two criteria? Of course we want students who are up to the task of succeeding in the most academically rigorous classes at Lowell, but we also want to consider what obstacles that student may have faced and the qualities that make him or her exceptional.
As the New Yorker recently reported, "Blacks are much more likely than whites, Latinos, or Asian Americans to live in ethnically segregated neighborhoods. Black students are much more likely than white students to attend segregated schools and schools with a high percentage of students from poor families, even though Black students perform better, on average, in integrated schools—largely because those schools usually have better resources. Black neighborhoods have far less access to employment. They are often less safe, and subject to police violence. Because homeownership is the main asset for most Americans and real-estate values in Black neighborhoods are low, residential segregation is a major factor in the substantial Black-white wealth gap."
When we speak about having a level playing field for admissions to Lowell or Harvard, we need to consider that there was never an even playing field to begin with in the United States. This country was built on slavery, which was protected in the original Constitution. While slavery is a thing of the past, unfortunately racial oppression and vast inequality of condition and wealth are still with us. The United Nations Human Rights Council condemned the United States as having the most economic inequality of any nation in the Western world.
There is benefit in having diversity on campus. Numerous studies have supported this claim. "In 2004 Anthony Lising Antonio, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, collaborated with five colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, and other institutions to examine the influence of racial and opinion composition in small group discussions. More than 350 students from three universities participated in the study. Group members were asked to discuss a prevailing social issue (either child labor practices or the death penalty) for 15 minutes. The researchers wrote dissenting opinions and had both Black and white members deliver them to their groups. When a Black person presented a dissenting perspective to a group of white people, the perspective was perceived as more novel and led to broader thinking and consideration of alternatives than when a white person introduced that same dissenting perspective. The lesson: when we hear dissent from someone who is different from us, it provokes more thought than when it comes from someone who looks like us."
Lowell should continue to have a multi-tier system of admissions, but those tiers should be modified, so that fewer students are admitted solely on grades and test scores and more students are admitted based on potential that is exhibited in other ways. We don't want to stop Lowell from being a serious place for academic study, but we do want to make it more welcoming to people from different backgrounds in San Francisco.