A thousand Asian Americans rallied in New York earlier this month, says William McGurn. They
were protesting against plans by Mayor Bill de Blasio to impose “de facto racial quotas” on the
city’s elite public schools. De Blasio’s move is designed to help minorities, but it will have an adverse
impact on Asian Americans, who do very well under the current merit-based admissions system: they
account for 72.9% of the student body of the best-known of these schools, Stuyvesant, against 2.8%
for Latinos and 0.7% for blacks. A similar row is raging at Harvard, where a group is suing the
university for unlawfully discriminating against Asian Americans in the same way the Ivy League
once limited the admission of Jews. It notes that Harvard has limited its intake of Asian Americans
to roughly 20% for the past 25 years, despite a booming Asian-American population. “In theory,
only the white patriarchy loses” from the affirmative action schemes beloved of progressives. But
Asian Americans are now aware that, in practice, “one minority’s floor is another’s ceiling” – and
they’re not happy about what “the last acceptable racial discrimination is doing to their children”.
