The Michael Knowles Show - "An Inconvenient Minority" and The ATTACK on Asian Americans | Kenny Xu

Episode Date: July 5, 2021

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 the Asians? You know, affirmative action harms Asians as well. Asian, 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. The 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 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 Schu, 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 them? of this. Because we were too successful. That's what happened. There's really no other way to explain it. Asian Americans came this country. They were heavily discriminated against, you know, Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment. 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 just... doing quite well. They have higher socioeconomic indicators, higher rates of education than even white Americans in this country. They show that this, how 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? Right, because I guess the

theory of white supremacy is that the social structure of the United States, 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? Well, because, and I talk about this in my book, an inconvenient minority, Asian Americans, 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 just, 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-American study twice as many hours per week as the average American. They study 15 hours a week. The average American studies 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 home. Harvard and at Yale.

Mm-hmm. And look, this is the downside of, this is the downside of Asian success in this nation. Asians have come on to this 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 power. 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 to be. 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,

the district board 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, you know, 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 when you mention the, Asian students, some of whom are recent immigrants, some of whom come from very, very low, you know, socioeconomic circumstances. Then it starts to raise this issue a little bit more, at least in the public consciousness. There are these high-profile cases at Harvard. The DOJ under President Trump looked into what Yale was doing exactly the same thing.

However, 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 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, first of all, you have to ask your question. Actually, it's funny because there's a very conservative guy, a very conservative gentleman who have to. been talking about this issue who brings up this point and he's he leads a great think tank but and he brings up this point he says well would America tolerate a country no where the 100% of the people at the top are of a certain race and you know 100% of the people at the bottom are of a certain race and and you have to bring you have to bring up the idea of of the

American dream and 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, what that creates is that creates the notion of equal opportunity, right? 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 health care and everything like that. But you know, that does 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. 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.

And so I don't want to strawman what 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. 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, 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 let's just take, let's just take that at face value that black Americans have a higher order discrimination narrative than 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 that actually have 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, that, that that you would want a that that and 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 ten percent children of donors. Nearly 10% of Harvard's class. I thought it would be higher. Are children of donors, you know? And when I say admissions should be a meritocracy, when I say that hiring promotions 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, 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, 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, you know, 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 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 Shoe version where people get what they deserve and it's merit-eastern?

or are the forces of racial identity politics just too strong? Racial identity politics is always going to be strong, but I mean, this is the work that I'm doing with colorist united, coloristunited, 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 was that fixating on race, at 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 who got what what what 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 killed black Americans hired over 10 times more than than police shootings and 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. 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. Why is that? I mean, 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 you know I got a lot of flack recently for a tweet that I

wrote where I said I when I was growing up in my community and 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 I did not have a racial sense or a racial sensibility. I, sure, did I think that people look different? Yeah, but that 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 your life and it's going to cause people to look at people in a racialized way. And so this, this I think is the new reality that we are being threatened to live in by leftist iologs who want to preserve this racial ideology usually for their own gain. I think that's a very good point. And this sense of belonging reminds me of a line that a priest, 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 were you? He says, tell them I am that I am. And Christ says this too. He says before Abraham was, I 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 got 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 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. in 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-crist, 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. 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 the character, not in the color of their skin.

We have a resurgence of tribalism once more. That is not based, that is actually, it's actually 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 that is a truth that 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, any anyone else good, I guess except for Asian, you're kind of in the 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

transgender. But whenever people try to become transracial, which many have, Rachel Dahlizal, 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 bring 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 to, you know, 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. It's it's this is I mean and this is this is this is the absurdity of it all because Yeah. There's there's 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. And so this is why this admissions system that has been going on for 30 years discriminating against Asian Americans is so, such a valuable resource for anybody that actually wants to understand what the left is doing with race to look at. It's a great little key. I think it really in this very direct way, it's subtle, but it's direct, just dismantles the whole crazy racial theory. The book is called an Indian

convenient minority. The author is Kenny Schew. Kenny, best of luck with the book. I really recommend people go read it. I read it. I really enjoyed it. So go check that out. Everybody and Kenny, thank you for being with us. Absolutely. Thank you, Michael.