EDIT: If you're an Asian-American you get used to this kind of "model minority" discrimination / racism. It just is what it is. My guess is it is similar for Jewish people.
I'm trying to be earnest here because if that's the term that should be used I will use it, but I'd like to know its genesis. It feels wrong to refer to entire, disparate groups of people (indigenous peoples and Latinos in the Dakotas probably have very little in common) by an acronym that seemingly double-counts a particular group seems odd.
If I would immigrate to the US I would count as white, even though I would be a clueless foreign stranger and would have difficulty connecting culturally with many. Still I wouldn't count as "diverse".
Of course, there are still plenty of people who don't see white immigrants through the prism of Woke ideology so you'd likely find some sympathetic to considering you as a diverse hire, despite not checking any boxes on the Woke identity list. It would be an unofficial acknowledgement though.
I do wonder occasionally, when did institutional racism become the only flavor of racism?
Essentially, Woke ideologists believe that identity groups are in a constant struggle for power, and they describe two main classes: the oppressed, and the oppressors. They are also rooted in Marxist ideology, believing in the emancipation of the oppressed by seizing the means of production - except where Marxists strictly focused on economic means, critical theorists focus on narrative and cultural means.
In terms of economics, trade and industry, Asians are considered part of the oppressor group along with Whites and Jews. Asians are part of a narrative where they are known to be high earners and hold powerful positions in a wide array of industries. That's why they don't care about your ethnicity, because it's irrelevant to their stated goals of emancipating the oppressed.
That being said, you really have to download some actual coursework from critical race programs at modern universities and actually read through it. And then go on a wikipedia spree to understand the cultural evolution of them and where they came from.
Modern economic Marxists may or may not like these ideas, but certainly the original leaders of critical race theory were Marxists, the same academic language and ideas used by Marxists are ubiquitous in critical race texts. It's in the DNA.
It's not about blaming Marxism, casting some kind of cold war boogey-man, it's just...a strange or somewhat alien or foreign type of thought to many people in the year 2020 but it is a big part of the intellectual underpinnings of this branch of education/academia that is growing in cultural importance.
Oh yes, with a similar side-dish of people claiming we're spies who control the world.
Instead of an all-expense paid visit spanning from Thurs-Sun and including sitting in on lectures, I was allowed to come for a single Sunday-only event. I spent more money on that trip than I had ever spent on anything in my life, except for my college computer. I was pretty ticked that the school was treating different minorities differently, and that for all the money I spent I couldn't even visit a class in session (since I was only allowed on Sunday). I remember meeting a half-Chinese / half-Vietnamese guy there, who regaled me with tales of the wining and dining that the favored-minority students had enjoyed.
I should note that this was way after Prop 209 (barring affirmative action at the UCs) was passed. I ended up attending the UC, and I asked an administrator about how recruiting trips like this were legal (he happened to be a lawyer). He gave some hand-wavey answer about federal pre-emption that, if true, would have completely gutted Prop 209.
There's a very large Vietnamese population in Houston. Probably other cities.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_large...
But, in the very specific context of what I was saying regarding university admissions in 2017, I don't think there was a lot that a Taiwanese-American person could do to distinguish themselves from being labeled or otherwise considered Chinese-American.
Average household income, Chinese American, excluding Taiwanese, 2018: $91,944
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
People immigrate for different reasons at different times. The causes combine with changing US immigration policies and the dynamics of preferential attachment to diaspora clusters to create distinct cohorts that have similar socioeconomic outcomes.
Note that Vietnamese here is good, because in other situations, it ain't good. The college admissions context is a confounder that flips the desirability of being a particular ethnicity.
Chinese Americans: 2.5M[2]
It's almost double, but is it really on a rare pokemon level?
1 - https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/vietnamese-immigrant...
2 - https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/chinese-immigrants-u...
My guess is there's much more ethnically Chinese applicants (which includes international students).
I believe certain government universities are not permitted to do this (the UC system?)
EDIT: Found it. The UC system can't do it because Prop 209 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_California_Proposition_20...
This is outrageous. Inasmuch many people do not fall neatly into these idiotic "buckets". Moreover, people with exceptional academic records and belonging to the categories that are biased positively have legitimate reasons to be incensed by this. How on earth anybody thought it to be a sensible policy?
This is not a statement that accurately represents current American politics, and that is....
Astonishing.
Yes
>What is the reasoning behind that?
Affirmative action requirements. Students can check the box for "prefer not to answer" if they wish. Though I don't know if that gives you better results than admitting to be white or asian.
Do you see the term "Asian" as having the same weirdness? It's even more geographically & ethnically overbroad than the word it replaced, as well as compared to 'white/european/caucasian'.
To my recollection, a big part of the reason the former term was shunned is because it verbally homogenized distinct ethnicities from south-east asia that would prefer to identify distinctly... only to now double down in literally including the entirety of the largest continent in the world! (which I guess just returns to the more historical use of the former term, but whatever) :)
Weird in its own way. White is a skin tone, Asian is a geographic location.
Defending either definition would be an exercise in absurdity and I'm not even going to try.
Asian is also a skin tone: the Middle East is in Asia, but counts as White for the US Census.
This was the point I was ham-handedly trying to make earlier; White is broad, European is broader but neither are as broad as Asian in terms of population or even geographically.
Nowhere near as weird as "black". Not only is there more genetic diversity within Africa than anywhere else, anyone who has a single drop of black in their lineage is considered black, unless they have completely white skin. It's a ridiculously broad bucket.
Also, portions of Africa have white populations. South Africa, for example. And North Africa is Arab.
Ethnicity ≠ geography.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...
No, it's not. There aren't “technically” multiple light-skinned races. While there are a few different models of race, they tend to descend from the old three-race (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid) model and tend to have only a few more categories than those old models, which are now more commonly labelled White, Asian, and Black, with Native American typically added and, in the case of the US Census, “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander” also added as a distinct category. (Both of the latter would generally have previously been considered part of the Mongoloid category.)
> The OMB defines Hispanic or Latino as “a person of Cuban, Mexican,Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.
This is the definition generally used by all US federal agencies.
Yet I would probably have made the same classification you did without knowing them.
Hispanic is something related to Spain. Spaniards are definitely Hispanic, Colombians, Argentines, etc. are (in a more distant sense) Hispanic.
I know many South Americans, Brazilians in particular, don't like the label as used by the US government. I also know native Spaniards who have embraced it.
Latino/Latina/Latinx is it's own brand of controversial in the communities it is applied to. Regardless, in the US it has never been applied to people unless their heritage traces back to the Iberian peninsula.
On almost all my applications I identified as Asian (better chance of acceptance and scholarships!).
The only exceptions were Ivy and California schools which even in the late 90's were obviously discriminating against Asians. You know it's bad when you identify as white to get a diversity edge.
Even today at work,I regularly get ignored for diversity metrics. Being an Asian American is so weird.