An observation after reading this article in The Atlantic today about Asian American students: I am starting to see more and more the suggestion that Asian Americans ought to be more accepting of racial preferences in university admissions, because while it is true that schools may now generally consider Asian Americans as a whole to be “overrepresented” — and thus on the wrong end of “diversity” policies — this would not be so if schools started to look at Asian American subgroups that are “underrepresented.” Thus, the continued use of racial and ethnic preferences would be a good thing for those of Hmong ethnicity even it is is a bad thing for those of Chinese ancestry.
Now, it is certainly true that it is wrong for schools to make generalizations about Asian Americans, and indeed conservatives have long pointed out the bureaucrat-led artificiality of the the Latino/Hispanic category, which includes lots of subgroups that have little in common. But the same thing is true of whites and blacks as well.
What’s more, the same thing will be true within all these subgroups: You can’t make valid generalizations about all German Americans or all Vietnamese Americans, just as you can’t make valid generalizations about all African Americans (by the way, to make just one point regarding the latter, most in this group who get into the more selective schools do not come from lower SES backgrounds).
So the conclusion that ought to be drawn is that schools should consider applicants as individuals, and make no generalizations about what they will add to the campus just because they belong to this or that racial or ethnic group or subgroup. And that is what conservatives have been saying for a long time.