DEI Movement under Fire after California Superintendent’s Divisive Comments on Asians

When Stan Jin came to the U.S. from China 25 years ago, he had little more than the suitcase in his hand and a little money in his pocket. He struggled with English, he said, and knew no one.

Jin was raised in a typically poor household in a small Chinese city. At 22, he scraped together money for a plane ticket and moved to the U.S., where he worked hard and earned a Ph.D. in chemistry. The 47-year-old has since co-founded a biotech company with a focus on discovering new medicines, building wealth for his family along the way.

“I realized my American dream,” said Jin, who is trying to instill the values that made him successful — a focus on hard work, education, and initiative — in his eighth-grade son.

That is why Jin said he was saddened to hear comments that he believes were dismissive of those values from the superintendent of the local San Dieguito Union High School District, in San Diego County, Calif., during a diversity, equity, and inclusion training session last week.

During the training, Superintendent Cheryl James-Ward perpetuated the “rich Asian” trope, suggesting a reason Asian-American kids in the district tend to perform so well academically is because of money. An influx of wealthy Chinese immigrants moving into “our homes” have financial capital to invest in their kids, she said, while “some of our Latinx communities, they don’t have that type of money.” A clip of the meeting has almost 13,000 views on YouTube.

The comments have created an uproar in this largely wealthy California suburb north of San Diego. For three hours Wednesday night, a parade of mostly angry parents spoke at a board of trustees meeting, saying they were “hurt” by James-Ward’s comments, many calling for her resignation. “Please fire her,” one parent told the board.

For her part, James-Ward has been on a week-long apology tour, issuing at least two written apologies, apologizing in an interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, and apologizing again before the public-comment portion of Wednesday’s meeting. “I understand why my comments caused so much pain,” she said. The board voted 3–1 to place James-Ward on administrative leave. The vote was taken in a closed-door session after midnight, according to local media.

But as much as the dustup in San Dieguito has been about James-Ward’s comments, it’s also more broadly about the growth of the DEI movement, in the district and around the country.

To many San Dieguito parents, the division their community is experiencing is a feature, not a bug, of the DEI movement. At Wednesday’s meeting, one man complained that an excessive focus on “tribal race-based data” inevitably leads to racial profiling. Others expressed concerns about centering group identity over individualism, and about the diminishment of meritocracy.

In her various apologies, James-Ward has expressed no concerns about DEI. Instead, she has repeatedly doubled down on it. “My words, even though taken out of context, indicate that as a district I, we, need to spend more time training our staff around diversity and inclusion,” she wrote in her first apology last week.

Jin said James-Ward has done a lot of good for the Asian-American community during her short tenure as superintendent, and she has shown genuine affection for Chinese culture. He said she should be treated with grace. “Personally, I hate the cancel culture,” he told National Review. “We all put our foot in our mouth at times.”

It’s James-Ward’s embrace of the DEI movement that has Jin calling for her resignation. To Jin, DEI is synonymous with identity politics, the abolition of meritocracy, and recycled Marxist class warfare. Jin worries that the path he took — a path that rewards hard work, education, and initiative — is under attack by people hellbent on achieving equal outcomes based on race. If James-Ward insists on pushing that ideology, she should go, he said.

“If we allow these things to be implemented, our schools, and broadly speaking our country, will be irreversibly harmed,” he said. “This ideology is simply incompatible with the educational values and philosophies of this community.”

Money or Culture

James-Ward’s controversial comments about Asian-American students came at the tail end of a DEI training session on April 11. By most measures, the hour-and-a-half-long session was boilerplate DEI, with talk about identity and justice, and simplistic cartoons demonstrating the difference between equality and equity.

At the end of the meeting, a Power Point slide broke down the percentage of students getting D and F grades by racial group. The district average was 12 percent, but it was lower — sometimes much lower — for students from most Asian nationalities: Asian Indians (4.7 percent), Chinese (3.4 percent), Japanese (7.1 percent), Korean (4 percent), and Vietnamese (6.2 percent).

Asians make up about 4 percent of the population of Encinitas, the majority-white city where the San Dieguito Union High School District is based, according to U.S. Census data. Hispanics make up about 16 percent of the population, and blacks are less than 1 percent. The median household income is $120,488, significantly above the state average of $78,672.

Looking at the D and F grade data, one school-board trustee asked a simple, seemingly obvious question: “Do we know why Asian students do so well in school?”

“I can tell you part of that reason,” replied James-Ward, who describes herself as an Afro Latina. “So here in San Dieguito, we have an influx of Asians from China. And the people who are able to make that journey are wealthy. You cannot come to America and buy a house for $2 million unless you have money.”

Students from those Chinese immigrant families have an abundance of financial capital, one of “four capitals” — emotional, financial, educational, and social — that she said breed success.

The board’s president, Maureen Muir, pushed back. “I have to tell you, Dr. Ward, I don’t think that’s correct,” she said. Muir suggested that cultural issues may be more important, including an intense focus on family, and powerful support groups, including live-in grandparents.

But James-Ward continued to focus on socioeconomic explanations for Asian-American success.

“We look at where our kids live,” she said. “In my community, Carmel Valley, I have, not so much today, but up until a couple years ago, we had a large influx of Chinese families moving in sight unseen into our homes, into the community, and that requires money.”

“The whole family comes, grandparents, parents,” she continued, “and the grandparents are there to support the kids at home, whereas in some of our Latinx communities, they don’t have that type of money. Parents are working two jobs. They’re working from sunup to sundown. So you’re correct that they are not having the same conversations, because the parents aren’t home. They have to work.”

A video clip of the exchange was posted on YouTube the next day, and the uproar ensued.

In her first written apology on April 13, James-Ward said her words had been “taken out of context,” and she suggested the video may have been posted in an effort to “deceive our community.” She also highlighted her diverse group of friends, and she noted that she had once considered moving her family to China to immerse her children in the language and culture.

“I have a great affinity for people and am deeply sorry if I offended anyone,” she wrote.

‘Education Is the Most Important Thing’

Charlie Zhao, a 49-year-old software engineer whose son is a senior in the San Dieguito school district, is a Chinese immigrant, but he doesn’t consider himself wealthy. He describes his family as working middle-class. Zhao spoke at Wednesday night’s meeting and asked James-Ward to resign because of her comments, which he called offensive.

“Her understanding of the academic success is just money. This is really simple-minded,” he said, adding that he doesn’t believe wealth is the primary reason why Asian-American students in the area are performing well in school. “The wealth is the result of the hard working.”

Zhao said the question was about the success of Asian-American students generally, and James-Ward homed in only on Chinese immigrants. There are some wealthy Chinese families who have moved recently to the area, he acknowledged, “but definitely not the majority of the Chinese families here or the Asian-Americans here.”

Zhao said most of the Asian-Americans he knows have been living in the area for a long time. Many work for Qualcomm, the technology corporation nearby. Others own small businesses. Many of the immigrants he knows came to the U.S. with little money.

He said the reason so many Asian-American students are successful academically is because they come from cultures that focus on education and family. “India, China, Japan, Korea, we treat education as the most important thing within our families,” Zhao said. “It doesn’t matter how much resources you have.”

He believes anti-merit efforts in California and elsewhere are hurting high-performing Asian-American students like his straight-A son, who hasn’t been accepted into any University of California schools. The UC system announced last year that schools would no longer consider SAT or ACT scores in their admissions, part of a legal settlement with advocacy groups who argued that the tests are biased against poor students, and blacks and Hispanics.

“This is ridiculous,” Zhao said. “This is definitely something going on here against Asian-American students.”

DEI: ‘Almost Like a Cult’

Wenyuan Wu, executive director of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, a nonprofit focused on safeguarding the principle of merit and combatting race-based discrimination, said that James-Ward’s comments have driven a wedge through the community.

“I can understand if it’s coming from a private person who has little understanding of the Asian community, or education,” Wu said. “For someone who occupies a key position in a school district that sizeable, for her to say that, first of all, that’s divisive, and then it’s inaccurate. And it’s also stereotyping.”

And, of course, more DEI is always the answer. “It’s almost like a cult,” Wu said. “The problem is, DEI and that kind of thinking behind DEI is the reason why she said these things.”

Although Wednesday’s meeting was dominated by parents who were angered by James-Ward’s comments, a handful of advocates showed up to dutifully defend DEI and its proponents. Advocates sell DEI as simply a commitment to provide each student with what he or she needs to develop to their full academic potential.

One man who spoke Wednesday described diversity, equity, and inclusion as “three lovely words,” and accused organizations like Californians for Equal Rights of engaging in a deliberate strategy to cling to power. Another woman complained about white supremacy. A representative for the NAACP said that “DEI was not the problem” and that “we need more DEI training, not less.”  Another DEI advocate with the group Encinitas 4 Equality pointed the blame for the community division at the conservative trustee who dared to ask why Asians were performing so well academically. She also castigated Muir for crediting Asian-American parents for creating positive, family-oriented household environments, accusing her of implying that parents from other racial and ethnic backgrounds don’t do the same.

“Race does matter, and racism is alive and murderous,” she said. “This is why DEI matters, and this is why we must do this work even when it is uncomfortable and messy.”

But for parents like Jin, the constant drumbeat focus on race, wealth, and victimhood is troubling, and not just in San Dieguito. He said he doesn’t minimize the hardships many people face in the U.S., but his story shows the opportunities available in this country.

“If a poor boy from a different country who could barely speak English and didn’t know anybody could come to the U.S.,” Jin said, “and he’s a minority by the way as well, and if he can create a good life for himself through hard work and the grace of God, anybody can in this country.”