KENNY XU: Hate-filled far-left punishes thousands of student workers of the ‘wrong’ race

kenny xu is the author of ‘An inconvenient minority’, the president of Color Us United and a board member of Students for Fair Admissions

Make America stupid again.

This is the mantra of America’s progressive left.

The latest nauseating case in question is an explosive academic scandal in Virginia that first reared its ugly head at Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology.

The state-chartered magnet school is regularly ranked as the best math and science school in America. It has produced Nobel laureates, nuclear scientists, chess grandmasters, you name it.

Every math-smart kid in America knows the excellence of TJ. But apparently, TJ’s awakened administrators don’t want her students to know the truth about themselves.

High school bureaucrats in TJ and at least 16 other schools in Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William counties have admitted withholding National Merit Mentioned Students awards from their children.

The awards are among the most prestigious honors high school students can receive and look great on a college application. But these educators claim they simply “forgot” to notify their children.

Virginia’s governor and attorney general suspect something else, much more sinister, is going on.

Attorney General Jason Miyares launched a civil rights investigation into TJ, then expanded it as the scandal grew.

“My office will investigate the entire Fairfax County Public Schools system to find out if any student was discriminated against and if their rights were violated,” he wrote.

Governor Glenn Youngkin believes the left’s “maniacal focus on equal outcomes for all students at all costs” is behind this.

He is correct.

The American left is obsessed with making everything equal, regardless of merit, and regardless of the harm it may cause to innocent people.

The not-so-secret truth about TJ is that the student body is 70% Asian-American. Its admissions process is generally based on merit, and the children of recent Asian immigrants are filling its classrooms.

Some of these kids take college-level math courses in middle school to prepare for TJ. This competence and the strong will that many Asian children bring to the table have helped make TJ a jewel in the crown in the United States.

This is something that the so-called anti-racist progressive uprising cannot tolerate.

How can I know? Because recent reports show that just across the county line in Arlington County and the city of Alexandria, where there are far fewer Asian students, merit awards were handed out on time.

The stomach-churning truth is that the progressive left hates Asian academic dominance, especially in one of the best schools in America, because it proves the country is not racist.

Asian Americans are ‘the inconvenient minority’. They are a minority who disapprove of the leftist “rule” of a structurally oppressive culture of white supremacy.

The success of Asian Americans in education demonstrates that cultures of excellence are the real ingredients of success in America, not race. This is devastating for the ideology of victimhood and powerlessness on the left.

The national data reveals that Asian American students study an average of 110 minutes a day; whites study an average of 55; black children study an average of 35.

Math and science expertise is developed primarily through study and concentration, habits that Asian-American family culture encourages through intolerance of laziness and an emphasis on practice after school.

Unfortunately, ‘hard work’ is a foreign phrase to America’s progressive left.

Atif Qarni, the Fairfax County secretary of state, said Asian kids studying for the TJ entrance exam are comparable to those taking “performance-enhancing drugs.” Yes, he compared studying for a test to cheating.

Ibram X. Kendi, author of the social justice text How to Be Anti-Racist, complains that the tests are racist. He writes that “the use of standardized tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised to demean black minds.”

Kendi tries to mask a cultural phenomenon in the United States: Asian-American children, on average, study more than non-Asian children.

For example, in 2014, The College Board, the largest developer of standardized tests in the US, invited 1,075,000 US students to sign up for free test prep from America’s favorite test prep guru. United States, Salman Khan of Khan Academy.

Kids who did at least 20 hours of Khan Academy test preparation scored an average of 110 points better on the SAT, and this result was consistent across demographic groups.

The test was not racist. So why do black children on average score lower than whites, who in turn score lower than Asians?

The reason is because they just didn’t study enough.

Journalist Paul Tough found that “Asian students spent almost twice as much time in the [Khan Academy] site as black or Latino students did.’ But Tough took this as a bad thing.

Tough called the Asian high performance a consequence of “privilege” rather than the deserved fruit of his efforts.

Of course, there are a multitude of factors that influence a student’s ability to concentrate and study. These factors must be addressed by parents, educators, and policy makers to help each child reach her potential. But it’s wrong to attack Asian-American accomplishments and denigrate the people who did the job.

When framed in this way, leftist solutions become irrelevant.

Why give repair money to ‘majority black schools’ when the left doesn’t recognize that study is the key to high achievement?

Why install ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ training when inequitable results are not about racism but about culture?

The left’s response to Asian-American achievements is not to hold them up as examples and reward them, but to despise them.

Leftists are zealous to defend their racist narrative with everything they’ve got, even if it comes at the cost of ‘making America stupid again’.

Sadly, Asian-American children receive no benefit from the left’s supposed fight for ‘racial equity’. Rather, they only receive their heel.