[_wt8k]

Thank you for your support. I do not know where you live, but one issue that I am concerned about is California's ACA-5, which seeks to bring back racial preferences to public universities and will be on the ballot this November. It is being framed as being pro-equality, but I am concerned that it will also enable universities to discriminate against Asian-American high schoolers.

One idea I've heard proposed is to instead ask a yes-or-no question, "Are you black?", so that universities can help increase black representation, but the important part is that they should not be able to find out whether or not you're Asian-American. At the very least, universities should not be able to distinguish between Asian-Americans and the white majority. The understanding I've heard is that WASP elites aren't necessarily concerned about other minority groups eating away at their influence, but they know that in a meritocratic system, Asian-Americans will outperform them, and therefore they use the "holistic admissions" system to keep Asian-Americans out of top universities (e.g. Ivy League schools) and therefore prevent Asian-Americans from reaching leadership positions and endangering their influence.

Furthermore, college applications ask where you were born and where your parents went to university. Although there is an option to select "prefer not to disclose" for race, my parents were educated in China, and I was born in Japan (despite not even being Japanese anyway!), and I couldn't hide this information. Colleges should not ask this, as it allows them to discriminate against immigrant families, namely Asian immigrant families. China-related xenophobia may make such discrimination worse.

Right now, I'm in college. My dream in HS was to study programming language theory, and I wanted to get into a good university strong in type theory and constructive math. However, the admissions officers were laypeople who wouldn't have even heard of PL theory, and furthermore they negatively stereotype Asian-Americans who are interested in math or programming, or who have an academic focus. I want to make sure that other Asian-Americans in the same position that I was will get a fair shot at a good education.