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July 5, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
26:52
"An Inconvenient Minority" and The ATTACK on Asian Americans | Kenny Xu

Kenny XU joins the show to discuss his new book "An Inconvenient Minority" to discuss the disgusting ideas foisted on us by Identity politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome back to the Michael Knowles Show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
I recently sat down with my friend Kenny Zhu.
Kenny has a book out on an inconvenient minority.
You know, the left wants to blame white people for every problem in the world, and they blame white supremacy and whiteness, and we need to abolish it, and we need affirmative action to disadvantage the white people.
But what about...
What about the Asians?
You know, affirmative action harms Asians as well.
They just don't seem to fit the left's racial narrative.
So I sat down with Kenny, who's got a tremendous new book out on what this means for the left's racial views.
Every ill of society, from inequality, injustice in the prison system, in the workforce, in the universities, probably your sickness and diseases, is caused by one thing.
White supremacy.
That's what we are told.
White supremacy is the cause of all the evil.
We are in a systematically racist country and that is why we need certain policies that will disadvantage whites and give advantages to other racial groups.
Okay, you know, you probably don't agree with that assessment of everything, but you will agree that is what is going on.
But there's this really strange fact about this regime of affirmative action and legal racial discrimination.
Namely, everything is allegedly, all the terrible things are caused by white supremacy.
And yet, Asians get punished as well.
Asians, I guess, became white somehow.
So in order to attack white supremacy, you're going to disadvantage Asians in university admissions, most notably, but in other institutions and in the workplace as well.
I can't...
I can't wrap my head really around any of it, but certainly not around that aspect.
So here to help me make some sense of it is Kenny Hsu.
You may have read his writing in The Federalist, in Quillette.
He is the president of Color Us United, and he is the author of a really terrific upcoming book, An Inconvenient Minority, The Attack on Asian American Excellence, and The Fight for Meritocracy.
Kenny, thank you for coming on.
Thank you, Michael, for having me.
So, Kenny, look, as a swarthy American, there's a hyphen between the Y and the A. As a swarthy American, I understand the aspects of whiteness, and I understand the aspects of non-whiteness, and I know the supremacy and whatever.
How the hell did Asians get lumped in with all of this?
Because we were too successful.
Yeah.
That's what happened.
There's really no other way to explain it.
Asian Americans came to this country.
They were heavily discriminated against.
You know, Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment.
You know, in California, California was actually a state where a lot of black Americans went to seek emancipation and freedom.
And yet at the same time in California, Asian Americans were often treated cruelly and very viciously.
And so that was actually an example of a time and a place where Asian Americans were actually treated even crueler and relegated even lower on the racial hierarchy than black Americans in California at the time.
So look, you know, Asian Americans have experienced discrimination, but they've still managed to succeed in this country.
And actually they're doing quite well.
They have higher socioeconomic indicators, higher rates of education than even white Americans in this country.
They show that this country cannot still be a country that's founded upon white supremacy, because if it was founded upon white supremacy, why did it let all of these Asian Americans get ahead of them?
Because I guess the theory of white supremacy is that the social structure of the United States is now and has always been constructed such that Really, only whites can succeed, and every other racial group that is not white is kept down in terms of social flourishing, personal flourishing, in terms of professional accomplishment, in terms of academics, and so on.
And yet, the Asians, on most of those markers, if not all of those markers, do better than anyone else in the country.
So then I have to ask you, you've demolished the white supremacy argument, I think, unless white people are just under the misapprehension that Asians are white as well, and so they sort of let them in.
But even that wouldn't make sense, because the Asians do better a lot of the time.
So if it's not the social white supremacist structure that we're all told about, What is it?
Is it something in the water, in the ancestral lands of East Asia?
Why is it that Asians are doing better?
I talk about this in my book, An Inconvenient Minority.
First of all, it's not IQ. That's another thing that needs to be clarified.
Because actually, studies show that Asian Americans with lower IQs than white Americans still end up performing better socioeconomically.
So you're not saying, because I never get into the IQ stuff, because I'm not particularly expert in it.
I find it to be something of a distraction.
But you're not saying that IQ tests don't show that Asians have higher IQ. Because I've seen plenty of reports and things that say that Asians have higher IQs.
What you're saying is...
The high IQ is not the determining factor.
No, it's not the determining factor.
Asian success in this nation stems more from the cultural values of what Asian Americans bring to the table in this country.
And I'll touch on that a little bit later.
But basically, you cannot substitute for studying.
And Asian Americans study twice as many hours per week as the average American.
They study 15 hours a week.
The average American study is about seven.
They have stronger two-parent structures, which limits the rate of crime, which limits drug use, and which just generally raises a better educated child.
And this is something that transcends just IQ, just genetics, that kind of thing.
Asian American culture really informs their ability to succeed in this nation.
That's why You have Vietnamese Americans who come to this country, literally 80% of them don't even speak English well.
And within one generation, their kids graduate from college at a higher rate than even white Americans.
Well, I've seen it happen, and having been in college not all that long ago, I do remember Asians are extraordinarily well represented, including at the top colleges in the country.
So much so, in fact, that these elite, prestigious universities...
Have effectively quota systems for Asians.
I suppose it's not quite quota systems.
It's that they hold Asians to a much, much higher standard.
And this came out not that long ago at Harvard and at Yale.
And look, this is the downside of Asian success in this nation.
Asians have come on into this country so strong.
This is the thesis of my book, An Inconvenient Minority.
Asian Americans have come onto this country so strong and so quick that it actually incites resentment from the American elite.
Because if you're an American elite, you know, a member of the liberal elite class, and you want your kid to get into the prestigious colleges, the prestigious jobs, that kind of thing, your main competition is not black Americans, it's not Hispanic Americans, it's actually Asian Americans at the top for those high achieving intellectual And what happens is Asian Americans who largely keep their head down and they work don't have the political capital to fight back.
So now you have Harvard University in the name of diversity and inclusion saying, hey, we want more people of black and Hispanic races, but who tends to get cut?
Actually, Asian Americans tend to get cut.
And now you have top gifted and talented programs like Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax, Virginia, which used to be 70% Asian.
The district board, after Ibram Kendi came and spoke, created a new admissions program that says, hey, admissions is going to be a lottery.
And what happened then is that they actually cut the percentage of Asians in that school by half.
Now, what is the solution?
Because...
When you make these arguments against affirmative action on the basis that you're discriminating against white people, it falls on deaf ears.
I don't think it should.
I don't think that it's any more just to discriminate against white people than it is to discriminate against any other race of people.
But that's the way it works.
However, when you mention the...
I think we're good to go.
You say it right here.
What happens is that students of other races, notably black students, will be given preferential treatment and the people paying the price will be white students and especially Asian students.
So what is the solution?
Is the solution here to tell these universities, sorry, you can't do that.
Everyone's going to have their SATs weighted exactly the same way.
If they're even still going to look at the SATs, everyone's going to have their GPA weighted exactly the same way.
And if the university ends up being overwhelmingly or almost entirely Asian and white, then that's just the way things are going to happen.
Is anyone really going to go for that, even in theory, given how much we value diversity in this country?
So there are two things that you say that are really important.
I want to touch on the latter thing that you say, which is, hey, what happens if your university just becomes 50% Asian?
First of all, you have to ask your question.
Actually, it's funny because there is a very conservative guy, a very conservative gentleman who I've been talking about this issue, who brings up this point, and he leads a great think tank.
And he brings up this point.
He says, well, would America tolerate a country where the 100% of the people at the top are of a certain race and 100% of the people at the bottom are of a certain race?
And you have to bring up the idea of the American dream.
And the American dream says, when you come to this country and when you decide to become an American...
You say, we will be treated on the content of our character, not the color of our skin.
And so what that insinuates...
Sorry, not insinuates.
What that creates is that creates the notion of equal opportunity.
Everybody here should be given equal opportunities to succeed.
They should be given a good education.
They should be given an equal chance in terms of healthcare and everything like that.
But some people...
Regardless of whatever initiatives that you have, will naturally rise to the top academically.
Asian Americans disproportionately naturally rise to the top academically.
And they do that because they work hard.
And so that should be a wake-up call to the rest of the nation that says, hey, you know, that is incentive for you to work hard, too.
And I think that that's a big thing that we need to touch on in terms of this book as well.
Kenny, I cannot believe you would use such a vile and offensive and bigoted phrase as hard work.
We were told within the last few years by places like the Smithsonian Institution that terms like hard work, objective truth, diligence are their white supremacist dog whistles.
It's not a joke.
I mean, this has been out here in the mainstream.
The radical left would say.
But what I think they would say in their stronger argument is, look, Kenny, it's true.
A lot of Asian immigrants come here and they don't have a lot of money and some of them really don't have two nickels to rub together.
And they work hard and that's great.
But they are not saddled with the legacy of slavery whereby not all, but many black Americans' ancestors came over in slave ships.
They were discriminated against.
There was a system whereby anti-black racism was tolerated and encouraged.
And then after slavery, you had Jim Crow.
You had redlining.
You had all sorts of things.
And then, frankly, even many of the welfare programs intended to help the black families actually ended up hurting the black families anymore.
So no matter what kind of destitution Asians come from to this country, they will never have had it as bad as black people did today.
And so you say equal opportunity.
What equal opportunity?
Blacks in this country simply don't have it.
And I think this is where you hear this talk from people like Kamala Harris and others of equity.
We don't want equality of opportunity.
We want equity whereby some people get preferential treatment and inevitably others are disadvantaged.
Yeah, you know, well now we're comparing discrimination narratives.
And, you know, let's just take that at face value that black Americans have a higher order discrimination narrative than Asian Americans.
Let's just take that at face value.
The problem is that the affirmative action policies that Harvard uses don't even necessarily benefit, say, the generations of slavery.
That the black Americans had actually been trapped in generations of slavery.
Actually, Harvard, 40% of Harvard's black class is actually black immigrant class.
And a lot of people don't realize that.
And then the other thing is, we mentioned before that you would want that a policy of affirmative action would Would benefit blacks and Hispanics at the expense of whites and Asians.
Well, it would also...
Harvard's policy of affirmative action actually also benefits a certain strata of elite society, of elite blacks and elite whites that are legacies, that are children of donors.
In fact, Harvard's own admission system is nearly 10% children of donors.
Nearly 10% of Harvard's class...
Are children of donors, you know?
And when I say admissions should be a meritocracy, when I say that hiring promotion should be a race-blind meritocracy, this is what I'm meaning.
I'm meaning we should eliminate the facets of admission and the facets of hiring that are irrelevant to a person's merit.
And I think that that's not just going to benefit Asian Americans.
That's not just going to benefit white Americans, but that is going to benefit Deserving black Americans and deserving Latino Americans as well.
Now, you're calling for what I think a lot of people would prefer, which is a more meritocratic system that does not pay a ton of attention to people's race and considers race as a very low-end factor and focuses on things that are more important.
And yet, at the same time, we're seeing the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
You're seeing, on the very fringes of the right, some more identitarian impulses among white people.
And you're seeing, notably, and Pew Research put out this survey some years ago, what seems to be a rise in racial consciousness.
So I remember Pew Research asked different respondents to a survey, is your race somewhat or very important to your identity?
And for white people, the number was very low.
It was about 15%.
Very low racial consciousness.
For every other racial group, Asians, Hispanics, and blacks, the number was greater than 50%.
And for black respondents, it was over 70%.
So very, very high racial consciousness.
for everyone except for whites.
And then on the left right now, we're being told that race is the essential part of our identity, and we need a much higher racial consciousness.
And of course, many conservative commentators who really detest the idea of racial consciousness pointed out years ago, they said, if everyone else is going to have more of a racial consciousness, then eventually that's going to have to come to white people as well.
You can't have a system where...
Where you're told there's no such thing as white people and race doesn't matter for you, but we hate you because you're white people and we all value our race very, very much.
That's just a very unstable system.
So are we going to get the Kenny Hsu version where people get what they deserve and it's meritocratic?
Or are the forces of racial identity politics just too strong?
Racial identity politics is always going to be strong, but this is the work that I'm doing with Colorist United, coloristunited.org.
It is true.
Actually, 75% of black Americans believe that their race is important or very important.
We need to acknowledge that.
50% of Asian Americans believe the same.
15% of white Americans believe the same.
But what we also know is that fixating on race actually psychologically tends to produce worse self-confidence, worse life outcomes, higher rates of depression, everything like that.
There is a survey.
And also, it actually even skews your reality.
When you fixate on race, because there is a professor named Dr.
Eric Kaufman who released a study that showed that a substantial majority of black Americans who voted for Biden, when asked the question, what kills more black Americans every year, car crashes or police shootings?
A substantial majority of black Americans chose police shootings.
And who voted for Biden.
And the reality is, no, car crashes killed black Americans higher over 10 times more than police shootings.
And so when you fixate on race, when you make race your identity, it actually skews your reality and it skews you away from being able to engage in the fruits of society.
I totally agree with you.
I have noticed that race does make people crazy.
I think I know why.
I think I have some idea.
But I would be curious to hear your thoughts.
I mean, everybody you see seems to be retreating right now into these bizarre identities.
You know, I suppose mostly race, but also sexual identities, whether it's one's sexual preferences or one's gender identity or, you know, men who think that they're women or the 7,000 new genders that people can pretend to have.
Yeah.
Why is that?
Why does identity seem to be multiplying in all these really bizarre ways?
Because people want to feel like they belong.
People want to feel like they belong.
I got a lot of flack recently for a tweet that I wrote where I said, when I was growing up in my community I mean, I lived in a very diverse community, a lot of Chinese people, Indian people, black Americans, white Americans.
I grew up in Virginia and Richmond.
I did not have a racial sense or a racial sensibility.
Sure, did I think that people looked different?
Yeah, but it did not occur to me whatsoever that I would need to treat another person differently.
Or that I am subconsciously treating a person differently because of how they look.
I looked at all of the other things that a person brought to the table.
But we are being molded into a mental reality where we find that your race is mattering more important in your life and it's going to cause people to look at people in a racialized way.
And so this, I think, is the new reality that we are being threatened to live in by leftist ideologues who want to preserve this reality.
I think that's a very good point.
And this sense of belonging reminds me of a line that a priest friend of mine mentioned some years ago where he said, you know, when you find your identity in I am that I am, which is the name that God gives to Moses.
Moses says, who are you?
He says, tell them I am that I am.
And Christ says this too.
He says, before Abraham was, I am.
am, when you find your identity in being himself, the very essence of being, then you can know who you are.
And when you don't, when you turn away from that, then you are left with this very pathetic question, who am I?
It's like a teenager who goes through a goth period and then he goes through a punk period and then he goes, whatever, you know.
You just try on all these identities and they multiply and they get very, very silly.
The Christian culture that shaped the West created, you know, maybe for the first time in the history of the world, anti-racism.
I I know that's a loaded term now.
But it created a culture where race really did not matter at all.
And it strikes me that this is basically the first time in human history, the last, I don't know, 70 years or so, that race hasn't been all that big of a deal.
Everywhere else in the world, it remains a very big deal.
Now in the United States, if the left gets their way, then it's going to become a big deal.
So is that...
Are we just going back to the old normal?
The old...
Pre-Christian, I don't know, non-Christian?
Is this inevitable because of the forces of history and human nature, or is there some hope on this question?
Tribalism has always been here.
It's not the fact that tribalism exists that we should be surprised.
It's the fact that we've been able to transcend tribalism to some extent.
That should surprise us.
That should shock us.
And a lot of that does have to do with the Christian foundations.
All men are created equal.
Martin Luther King Articulated those foundations so well when he said, I have a dream that my four children will be treated on the content of their character, not in the color of their skin.
We have a resurgence of tribalism once more.
People will say that it is anti-racist, but the roots of it are actually anti-Christian.
Anti-Christian and anti-spiritual.
They're trying to create a new spirituality with a new source of meaning.
And that meaning is you are guilty because you are white and you are innocent because you are black.
And, of course, that is not true.
The truth is, regardless of whether you're white or black or Asian or Native American or anything, we all sin.
And we all are under the wrath of God.
And so that is a truth that is being quickly decapitated by critical race theory.
This raises a strange observation at the moment, which is we are told on the one hand, our race just is who we are.
That is our identity, white, bad, you know, anyone else good, I guess except for Asian, you're kind of in this strange middle ground, this inconvenient minority, as you might say.
So on the one hand, we're just meat puppets, right?
We're just our bodies.
And yet at the same time, we are told that actually our bodies have nothing to do with who we are, and if I'm a man, maybe I'm a woman.
If I think in some way that I'm a woman, then really I am a woman.
You can become a transgender, but whenever people try to become transracial, which many have, Rachel Dolezal, an NYU professor, a number of high-profile cases of this, That's considered somehow off-limits.
But what is it?
Are we our bodies, or are we nothing to do with our bodies?
How are these two things simultaneously being pushed by the left?
Yeah, this is why the Harvard admissions process, and just bringing it all back, this is why the Harvard admissions process is so interesting, because race...
Really is a collection of stereotypes.
That's what it is.
It's really a collection.
Otherwise, why would you even care that somebody else looks different than you unless you ascribe something, some trait to the fact that someone looks different than you, you know?
And the trait that Harvard assigns Asian Americans, the stereotype that Harvard puts Asian Americans in is that we are test-taking, overachieving robots with no personality.
And how do I know this?
Because Harvard rates Asian Americans lowest on the personality score.
Right, right.
I mean, just 30 seconds or a minute, for people who don't know what the personality score is, this is an actual facet of the Harvard admissions, and I don't know what it is, Kenny.
You seem like an amiable chap to me, but Harvard apparently doesn't think that you have much of a personality.
This is the absurdity of it all, because...
There is a glaring piece in all of this where if you are going to have so-called race-conscious admissions or extending it further, a race-conscious curriculum or critical race theory curriculum, then you necessarily have to stereotype.
That's exactly what you're doing.
You're actually looking at another race and you're saying the people of your race have this certain trait.
That's what you're doing and that's what Harvard has been doing.
This is why this admissions system that has been going on for 30 years, discriminating against Asian Americans, is such a valuable resource for anybody that actually wants to understand what the left is doing with race.
Absolutely.
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