"Anti-racism", which in American academia usually comes about in the form of blacks and latinos receiving preferential treatment at the cost of whites and asians, is indeed racism.
Racism is not acceptable, no matter how benevolent the intent or goal.
And while we're here, since it's part of the bigger, main discussion anyway:
"Equity" is the anti-thesis of equality, because "equity" mandates that all individuals arrive (and stay!) at the same place in life no matter who they are. It throws out individual ambitions and efforts towards obtaining a better silver plate in lieu of society handing everyone the same steel plate.
The articles in sep deal with the origins of these in depth
Naturally, lots of non-native people considered that racist.
Except it was done to try to correct a very real problem - that the native people have disproportionately worse outcomes in our health system. And likewise, due to about 150 years of deliberate policy that marginalised the native people, they were disproportionately less likely to enter medical school.
And there's now, after some years of this policy, an emerging body of evidence that this "racist" policy around medical school spots is making a difference around health system outcomes for native people.
So yes, the policy is, on the surface racist, but it's slowly combating a systemic racism that was baked into all of our government institutions by previous racist policies. (E.g., native people experience a higher conviction rate and harsher sentencing for the same crimes as white people)
There's still a long way to go for us, but yeah, it gets damn complicated when you're trying to undo the damage of previous racism by introducing positive discrimination.
The consequences of this are easy to illustrate in orchestras. Orchestras have always been heavily dominated by white and Asian musicians. When it was argued that this was due to discrimination in hiring, the solution was quite simple and tasteful - swap to blind auditions. And that is something few would oppose. So they did.
The problem is that not only did it fail to create more diverse orchestras, in many cases they became even less diverse than they were prior. So now the 'anti-racist' view is that orchestras need to begin being racist against white and Asian applicants, and start biasing selection by race. [1] Groups that disproportionately overperform become acceptable targets for racism.
Incidentally this is not entirely different than the motivation for some of the darkest moments in our history. Alas people never seem to appreciate that the "evil" groups in times past never saw themselves as evil, but simply as people engaging in temporarily distasteful action for a greater future. That greater future never comes, but the distasteful actions certainly do. Of course, "this time it'll be different."
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
Then yeah, when someone fired up some anti-Semitic hyperbole, well, great way to get out of that debt you owed, right?
IIRC Edward I of England expelled the Jews primarily to confiscate their property after years of taxing them superhard, but it also gave the Crown ownership of debts owed to the Jews, so he was playing the populist hand, and getting funds at the same time.
But a) wouldn't that apply to other demographics too? and b) All Asians? Are Hmong, for example, over-represented in college enrollments?
I'm just trying to understand why it's specifically anti-Asian.
A bunch of pro-diversity people see white people do well and get successful. They see the same in Asians. They see the opposite for black and latino. They conclude "we must give black and latino preferential treatment to catch up". It is a bit more elaborate, but not much more than that.
>All Asians?
Yes. Despite their fronts, diversity initiatives don't look much further beyond sex, gender and skin color. You're already one level deeper than most of these politics go.