With the November midterms looming, Asian voters are at a crossroads. In recent decades, the Asian American community has voted overwhelmingly left of center, with 63% of Asian voters supporting Biden in 2020 and only 31 % supporting Trump.
How does this make sense now? The increasingly woke Democratic party privileges race, gender and ethnic identity, and feeds divisiveness by pitting identity groups against one another. It particularly punishes Asian American immigrants for the hard work and merit they believe in for academic and economic success. (RELATED: Asian-Americans Are Bolting From The Democratic Party, And They Might Never Look Back)
It’s time for Asian Americans voters to support candidates who reject racialism and who want Asian Americans — and Americans of every group — to succeed by hard work and merit.
Asian Americans should realize that when Democrats talk about diversity, they don’t mean Asians. In a variant of the Chinese Cultural Revolution which makes many Asian Americans shudder, public school systems hold training sessions on bias with staff divided by race, run struggle sessions in school systems where white staff members must self-criticize and separate students from each other by oppressor or victim group.
School systems target groups, based not on the abilities or merit of the student, but on the race of students. And this relentless, hate-filled purge, dressed up in the language of racial revenge instead of class revenge, ends up targeting Asians directly.
Meritocratic admission to the best schools from New York City to San Francisco so highly valued by Asians, is now White Supremacist. Advocacy for equal treatment in admissions was attacked as racist in Washington state in 2019 and California in 2020. The Left wants to change merit-based policies to favor preferred groups — without doing the hard work of improving the abilities of the preferred groups — and just punish Asians, because of race.
Over the last 20 years, the Asian American population has grown 87% and now exceeds 22 million. Once known for low voter turnout, the Asian American community is starting to realize the power of its vote, and turnout in the 2018 midterm elections was 40%, rising to over 45% in 2020, while the projected 13 million eligible voters increased 9% from 2018 to 2022. The recent attacks against Asians in education has activated many to register to vote, attend school board meetings, join school boards, organize protests, support political candidates and even run for city council and higher office.
Activation was critical. Education has always been important to Asian Americans, and the attacks were also against their children’s hard-earned merit. When top high schools around the country use merit-based testing for acceptances, the Asian student population is routinely above 50% and can go as high as nearly 70%.
In New York City, Chinese Americans led the organization of a multi-pronged defense of the renowned specialized high schools, including Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, and their single criterion objective admissions test that was attacked for admitting “too many Asians.” With the success of forestalling the elimination of the test, Chinese Americans became activated with other Asians and raced to lobby for education, hold candidate forums and endorse and contribute time and funds to winning candidates.
In Virginia, Asian parents, many Indian Asians in this case, fighting for Thomas Jefferson High School later joined non-Asian parents in Loudoun County, Virginia, to fight for basic parents’ rights in their children’s education. In the process, they also became supportive of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s stunning underdog victory in his gubernatorial race.
In San Francisco, Chinese American and like-minded parents fought for Lowell High School, overturned the school board whose 3 Rs were renaming schools, race, and resentment, then led the successful recall of the city’s left-wing district attorney.
Likewise in Washington state and California, where Asian Americans are in the minority, Chinese Americans successfully worked throughout Washington to get Referendum 88 passed to stop Initiative 1000, and throughout California to stop Proposition 16, to stop the return of racial discrimination. In both cases, Chinese Americans worked with other Asians and races, while opposing Woke Asian Americans who misguidedly supported racial preferences as an integral part of the Woke package.
Asian Americans have been voting Democrat, not out of support for its newer left-wing radical thinking but out of habit. This complex, varied group includes over 20 national origins, and different languages, religions, histories and even races, with Chinese and Indian Americans forming the largest numbers.
It is becoming more active in its interests and will support legislation and candidates accordingly. In education, progressive Democrats have avoided going against the powerful teachers’ unions in matters of meritocracy, standards, and school choice, preferring not to improve education but to lower standards and scapegoat Asians.
While Asian American victories in Washington state, California and Virginia are encouraging: the Asian American vote is now in play. Growing numbers thinking through issues voted Republican over the last few elections.
Is it too much to ask for a just society that judges people by their individual accomplishments and contributions, not by collective judgement and hatred?
Voting is powerful and Asian American voters need to reassess this power. Asian Americans need to vote for candidates that support everyone, of every group, to flourish and succeed by their merit.
Wai Wah Chin, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the founding president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York, an all-volunteer organization advocating for equal rights for New Yorkers, especially in education.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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