Keep on riding, would have says. We continue to broadcast the balance and to defend the discourse from the hip hop weekly studios. Welcome back to Civic Cipher. I'm your host, Ramsy's job. He is Ramsy's job. I am q Ward.
You are tuned into Civic Sigpher, Yes you are, and we are in a good space this week, again off of the high of being outside in our nation's capital on the other side of the country, Washington, d C. For the Congressional Black Caucus, we brought back some energy, some opportunities, and some optimism that you know, hopefully you
will hear in our voices today. It's not often that we get charged up, but we're definitely charged up, and we're asking to stick around because we are going to be talking about how our Asian American brothers and sisters have fared without affirmative action. And I think the results they're definitely mixed results, but they're definitely interesting, especially considering that that group was one of the groups really fighting for firm inaction. So we're going to see how it looks.
But before we get there, it's time to discuss Baba becoming a better allied. Baba Today's BABA is sponsored by Friends of the Movement. You can sign up for the free voter wilet from fotemglobal dot com to support black businesses and allied businesses as well as make an impact with your spending. Again, that's fotmglobal dot com Today. We want to teach you about Jack and Jill of America. Jack and Jil bost two hundred and seventy one chapters nationwide,
representing more than fifty thousand family members. Each chapter plans annual programming activities guided under a general five point programmatic thrust cultural awareness, educational development, health, education and advocacy, civic
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Dot org. You can make a donation and of course learn more about what it is they do and why. All right, how have Asian Americans fared without affirmative action? Okay, before we get into this, first thing I want to say is not all Asian Americans have been fans of affirmative action. Okay, many of them saw this coming, Many
of them understood the thrust of affirmative action. And this is not something that I want for those people to feel is pointed in their direction, nor is it pointed in the direction of those Asian American individuals who legitimately felt that affirmative action worked against them. It is okay, to be wrong. It is not okay to stay wrong, but it's okay to be wrong. And on this show, Q and I both have firm continually that no one
is simply the worst thing that they've done in their life. Right, people should have a road back from their worst moments. I certainly would appreciate that if I was in my worst moment. So we do our best to extend that as often as we can.
And it's it's important to help provide that road back because the alternative is people deciding, well, I can't go back over there, so I may as well double triple quadruple down where I.
Am right on their wrongness, on their wrongness. Yes, but what we have now, and I want to shout out the Emancipator it's for those familiar with the Boston Globe. It's a it's a newspaper obviously in Boston, Massachusetts. They have a division or a separate, you know paper under their you know, corporate umbrella called the Emancipator. And uh, this is a source for a lot of our content. We use the Root, we use Atlanta Black Star, we use you know, a lot of the Chicago Defender, of course,
and many others around the country. The Arizona Informant comes to mind. But the Emancipator originally brought this to our attention, and the way they did that caused us to really think, Okay, so, now that affirmative action has been repealed, is this what people wanted? Now? We're going to do our best to tell both sides of the story. We're journalists and we
have to do that. But I want you to listen to some key things here, because for folks who really thought affirmative action was keeping Asian Americans from slots in schools that they well deserved, I think that this introduces some new elements for you to consider if that's what you thought was happening. First, I'm going to share from the NBC News and then we'll get to what the Emancer paper has shared with us. All right, this from
NBC News. In the first college admissions process since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action last year, Asian American enrollment at the most prestigious US schools paints a mixed uneven picture. Some Ivy League schools, including Colombia and Brown Universities, showed an increase in Asian Americans for the class of
twenty twenty eight, which is good. That is good. While others like Yale and Princeton, oh, seem a little bit more prestigious even than you know, Brown and Colombia, Others like Yale and Princeton showed a decrease. About that. Harvard, the most selective of the group, didn't see a change at all, according to enrollment numbers released on Wednesday by the school. So if we just taket Harvard by itself
with no change, did affirmative action ultimately help Asian American students? Well, the answer, if you're looking at indeed the most prestigious institutions, is meh okay. But this is only part of what we're talking about here. Experts say that it may take years to see the definitive impact of the decision, which restricted the consideration of race and college admissions but didn't have the effect many who opposed the policy had expected. They said, now I want to read this first part again.
Experts say that it may take years to see the definitive impact of the decision. I think that's true. I think that a lot of times we talk about the scale and the timeline of a country, it takes a long time to indeed know what the effects of policy change will be. Right, it'd be nice if everything we can we would see everything immediately in the immediate impact
of it, but sometimes it takes a while. But one thing that's irrefutable is that affirmative action did indeed over time, because we did have time with affirmative action when it was the law of the land. It did bolster African American enrollment at these prestigious institutions, and if I'm not mistaken, all institutions that were under serving minority communities. And it
also benefited women. Women were the biggest benefitters, white white women especially, but they were the ones beneficiaries is the word I'm looking for of affirmative action. So this is something that we know we did it, and then we learned, Wow, these groups that have historically been subjected our benefiting. OK. And then with the Supreme Court, many of the people who voted on this were put in position because of
Donald Trump. So for those that either didn't vote or voted for Donald Trump, this is kind of an extension of your doing when you cast your ballot. It has now been repealed and we're looking for the positives for all of us Americans in affirmative action being repealed, and so far we can't see any We don't see any change with Asian Americans at Harvard, with Yale and Princeton, enrollment dropped and enrollment increased at Colombia and Brown. Okay, So.
There's this masterful thing that has happened throughout the hist story of our nation, in particular where misogyny, capitalism, racism, and the patriarchy have combined to form oppressive vota ron. And the reason that this has been able to sustain as long as it has and continues to because you speak about progress in the time that it takes. It's not because that's the requirement. It does not have to take a long time. There's just so much resistance to it.
We chip away with it or at it a little bit at a time. It doesn't have to take a long time for progress. Decisions could be made right now and implement it right now, and implement it right now. That would affect everyone, everyone, almost everyone in a positive way right now. And when I say almost everyone, I don't mean like seventy percent of people. I mean like nine percent of people. However, that one percent are the ones with the power and the influence and the money,
and they're also racist. It's important to keep saying that part out loud, because almost everything that's wrong or in almost every area that we as a collective nation fall short, tied back to racism. The reason we don't have universal health care, the reason why there is a requirement that in an entire segment of our population go without everything they need, not just health care, but food, money, resources, et cetera. It's all based in racism.
The environment, yes, environment, the denial of climate change also based in racism. Right, So this is not our opinion, by the way, No, No, this is easily verifiable data to support this argument.
This is not an hypothesis that I'm coming up with in real time. This has been proven by scholars who are not black, over and over again. Is even the conversation about critical race theory, which we won't have right now, was snatched from the area of academicia where it exists and placed into the textbook of children in their minds. It's never actually happened, but just based on racism and not wanting to make people feel guilty for being racist.
This thing where imagine this cartoon that I'm drawing in a comic book or on your television. Name the resource. Make it milk and honey, make it gold, make it money, make it, make it wheat, make it corn, make it whatever you'd like. And there's a person in charge of producing said resource, or farming said resource, or guarding said resource, or making said resource available. And this person has an unlimited amount of said resource. And then take you and
your neighbor and set you both at a table. Now, in this picture, I want you to see that this person has an unlimited supply of that resource. I'll use clean water because it's an easy one to picture. And that person takes a single glass of clean water and places it in front of one of you. The important part of this illustration is that you can see that this person has unlimited clean water. It's not in some storage facility somewhere where you don't actually see what's going on. No,
you see it. This person's actually sitting in front of it. There's three chairs in this picture. He's sitting in front of an unlimited amount of clean water, and you and your neighbor are sitting at the same table with him. He places a single glass on the table. One of you grabs it because you're thirsty. He then tells the other one, the reason you don't have clean water is because of your neighbor.
That's a masterful analogy.
And then you not blinded, you can see it. You then hate your neighbor for drinking that glass of water, and he has now created your enemy and made sure that it was not him. And that is plainly how this system of hate rhetoric and othering and racism. And I could go on with all of the words that fit this argument, but this is how they sustain and continue to thrive. Make enemies of each other, and those that exploit us get to continue to do so and
laugh at us for fighting each other. So in these cases where those who are oppressed fight each other at the behest of the oppressor, the oppressor doesn't then say good job to the one that helped right Asian American people were in with the legal precedent that got rid of affirmative action. The racist white person who headed those efforts did not reach out to remember the Asian American community because they helped him be a white supremacist, because
you're also not white. Unfortunately, so for those of us who continue to march, organize, vote, legislate, and speak out against our own best interest. When the one that you help successfully oppress you gets what he wants, he is not going to remember to make room for you. He's going to laugh at you. And unfortunately some of the people in your community that you help depress will laugh
at you too. And there's some humble pie and some apologies that you're going to have to eat and make in the wake of that, and that part is really sad.
I think to your point, I'm going to continue with the article. Quote. The big takeaway is that folks who supported the lawsuit were saying this would be such a big win for Asian Americans, that race based emissions was some type of barrier to our upward mobility. Unquote said I believe this is Kean pun or Ean Poon, maybe faculty affiliate at the University of Illinois Urbana Champagne, Office
of Community College Research and Leadership. This person goes on to say, what we're seeing is that that's not really bearing out. Poon added. Columbia University, which unlike the other IVS groups specific islanders with Asian Americans, saw an increase of nine percentage in points in its enrollment of Asian American applicants, while Brown saw an increase of four percentage points. Right, so that sounds good. At Yale, the racial group dropped
by six points. Imagine the percentage of Asian people at Yale dropping by six points. And at Princeton it decreased by two two point two percentage points. It also decreased at Dartmouth by one point five percentage points. Asian Americans remained thirty seven percent of Harvard's freshman class, and that's Dartmouth. Dartmouth. Sorry, I'm just reading this really quick. All right, So now let's give you some notes from the emancipator. Some of this will sound familiar, but this is kind of what
inspired this segment. New enrollment data from Yale shows Asian Americans numbers decreased from six percent, while there's a four percent increase in the share of white students. So this is sense affirmative action. We're seeing Yale Asian Americans drop, white students increase. Okay, that's without affirmative action, which again we had forty plus years of affirmative action something like that that told us that it was benefiting. As you mentioned white women women in general, Asia, it.
Was actually benefiting everyone.
Everyone, Thank you, But we had that we could break that down.
There's data that shows that not just affirmative action, but DEI affects everyone and business across every sector positively.
Absolutely, dude, this is why I show like this is so important. All right. White leaders and plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Harvard and UNC bamboozled a number of Asian Americans into believing that affirmative action and anti racist policy was bad for them and without it, Asian Americans wouldn't be the big winners, and that just wasn't true. Early outcomes of the Supreme Court ruling increases in the percentage of white students, mixed outcomes for Asian Americans, significant declines
in Black, Latino and Indigenous students, with some exceptions. And the source of this is public reports by Harvard, Amherst, Brown, MI I, T. Princeton, Duke, U N c U v A, b U N yale AAPI, civil rights leaders and over one hundred and twenty one researchers warned the end of affirmative action would not benefit Asian Americans, rejecting evidence. Asian Americans who supported ending affirmative action leaned into anti black and anti Latino stereotypes, believing hard work alone could save
them from systemic racism. And the source of this is the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. And then the final note here ending race conscious admission was not a win for Asian Americans. It was always by and for white supremacy. We knew that, and we said that moving forward, enrollment leadership must find new approaches to affirm and recognized talent among students from marginalized groups. Now here's the reason why this connected to me, and I felt bad.
My heart was broken at the height of the stop Asian hate moment in our nation's history, when they were there were attacks on Asian American people, Asian people just walking around, random attacks, violent attacks against old women, old men. Oftentimes they were from black people.
So you've said that before, and I have to correct you. Okay, there were absolutely times from black people, but often makes it seem like more than not, and that's just by the numbers, not correct.
Yeah, but I want to acknowledge that black.
People acknowledge it. But we've now on our show said that it was more from black people, and that's not true.
No, No, that wasn't what I intended, and thank you for that. But I say that to say that this show exists to affirm what is right, if it's right, regardless of color. Yes, right, So acknowledging that black people indeed were taking place in these attacks, I think is the responsible thing for me to say.
Yes.
As a result of that moment in time, I started subscribing to some let's say, pro Asian activist groups, right, some social media accounts, etc. Next Shark comes to mind, Asians with Attitudes comes to mind, on and on right, And I remember the moment when this Supreme Court thing was being argued, and I remember seeing a lot of those accounts looking at this like it would be a
big win for the Asian American community. And to know now that it wasn't, it's like my heart breaks because I know that these advocacy groups, I believe they're doing their best, but the people on the ground that actually suffer from it are the kids who end.
Up getting it. Doesn't break my heart because in far too many cases they're able to make black people the enemy of everyone else and as another repressed group, you shouldn't fall for that.
That's a good point. Well, this is a much longer conversation than we have time for today, so we're going to leave it right there. As always, i'd like to thank you for tuning in to Civic Cipher. I've been your host, Rams's job.
He is Ramsy's jah I am q ward. Thank you once again for continuing to tune in to Civic Cipher and for spending time with us, making us a part of your week or your day. It means more than we could possibly express in the amount of time that we have.
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of those two ways. I've been your host, Rams's jaw I am steel qward. And until next week, y'all. Peace,