Even in the midst of war, racism never rests

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International coalition files United Nations appeal over reports of racism at border of Ukraine

By

 

Maya Brown 

© WOJTEK RADWANSKI/AFP/Getty Images Refugees from many different countries - from Africa, Middle East and India - mostly students of Ukrainian universities are seen at the Medyka pedestrian border crossing fleeing the conflict in Ukraine, in eastern Poland on February 27, 2022.

An international coalition of activists and human rights attorneys on Wednesday announced they filed an appeal to the United Nations on behalf of African refugees facing racial discrimination in Ukraine and Poland.

The filing follows numerous reports from Black refugees who said they faced segregation, racism and abuse as they tried to flee for safety from war-torn Ukraine to Poland.

Coalition members said during a news conference Wednesday they have also heard reports of segregated lines for white and Black people at the Polish border and Black mothers and children have been thrown off trains. Videos shared on social media have shown groups of Black people stranded at the border not being allowed in and various threats against Black people who attempt to cross.

"They face one war waged by Russia, and they face a second war waged by racism because of the color of their skin. We are here today because Black Lives Matter in times of war, and in times of peace," civil rights attorney Jasmine Rand said during the conference.

The appeal asks the United Nations to support the coalition's call for the Ukrainian and Polish state and local governments to issue executive orders directing all governmental agencies to treat people of African descent -- and other racial minorities -- with equity and to stop using violent means. The coalition also wants Ukraine and Poland "to admit persons of African descent and racial minorities at rates equal to other persons."

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump said the coalition is asking for basic humanity.

"When you think about what we're seeing in those videos and those images, it is heartbreaking because as Russia bombs the Ukraine, and it's utter devastation, you think if there were a time for all of us to be together, it will be at this urgent moment," Crump said during the conference. "However, not only are they fighting for freedom, they are fighting for common decency in humanity."

International leaders like Yetunde Asika, a Nigeria-based international human rights attorney, and Rosalea Hamilton, the founding director of the Institute of Law and Economics in Jamaica, also shared stories regarding what they have been hearing from Black students trying to flee Ukraine.

Asika said there are about 5,000 Nigerians who live in Ukraine —most of whom are students. She shared the story of a medical student who had walked about 11 hours overnight to the border and was then told she couldn't cross until the Ukrainians had been evacuated first.

"We as a nation are doing as much as possible as we can to evacuate our citizens, but it's not enough. We need the EU [European Union]to pay attention to what is going on," Asika said during the conference.

The African Union said it is "disturbed" by the reports of racial discrimination against Africans in Ukraine, which they described as "shockingly racist," according to a statement released on Monday.

"Reports that Africans are singled out for unacceptable dissimilar treatment would be shockingly racist and in breach of international law," the statement said. It also urged countries to "show the same empathy and support to all people fleeing war notwithstanding their racial identity."

Officials from several African countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and Gabon have also condemned the reports of racism.

Coalition members believe the conduct they are seeing at the borders is consistent with war crimes. According to the United Nations, its definition of a war crime includes violations of international humanitarian law taking place during an armed conflict.

During Wednesday's news conference, coalition members also brought up the bias and stereotypes they are seeing in media coverage through comparisons of conflict.

Ronald Sullivan, of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, called it "offensive" and said the media is comparing pain and suffering of different communities.

"It is grotesquely ahistorical as well. Europe certainly cannot claim that it has been immune from the pillages of war," Sullivan said Wednesday. "It cannot stand as it's somehow superior in that regard to the Middle East and parts of Africa. So, they're [the media] not only getting the history wrong, but they're perpetrating a very ugly form of racial stereotyping."

Donald Deya, CEO of the Pan African Lawyers Association, also agreed and said the media is showing another "attitude of racism."

The coalition also submitted the appeal to the UN's Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and their Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent.

They also plan to circulate this appeal to embassies and other international organizations that have the power to put a stop to these forms of discrimination.

Rand said she hopes the United Nations will release statements and directives to Ukraine and Poland regarding the reported acts of racism seen at their borders.

"This is our day, and we have to go on record to say that these atrocities were taken place and that we stood up and gave the descendants of Africa that were being devastated in Ukraine a voice, when nobody else would give them a voice," Crump said."

Even in the midst of war, racism never rests

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Opinion | Open Letter to President Biden From a Dispirited Black Voter - The New York Times

Open Letter to President Biden From a Dispirited Black Voter

March 2, 2022, 9:00 p.m. ET

By Charles M. Blow

Opinion Columnist

Shuran Huang for The New York Times

Dear President Biden,

What a difference 300 days makes.

On April 28, 2021, you marked your first 100 days in office by delivering a speech to a joint session of Congress.

In it, you made an impassioned moral case for police reform, invoking the words of Gianna Floyd, George Floyd’s daughter, when she told you, “My daddy changed the world.” You told the country — in one of the most eloquent passages you have ever delivered, I might add — that: “We’ve all seen the knee of injustice on the neck of Black Americans. Now is our opportunity to make some real progress.”

As you put it: “My fellow Americans, we have to come together to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the people they serve, to root out systemic racism in our criminal justice system and enact police reform in George Floyd’s name that passed the House already.”

In that same speech, you pointed out that the intelligence community saw white supremacy terrorism as the “most lethal terrorist threat” facing the country.

You noted that the United States had a real opening to promote real equality and “real opportunities in the lives of more Americans — Black, white, Latino, Asian Americans, Native Americans.”

Well, in the 307 days between that speech and your State of the Union on Tuesday, you performed a political pirouette and ended up facing the opposite direction.

On Tuesday, you invoked the families of two New York City police officers tragically slain in the line of duty to make this plea:

“We should all agree: The answer is not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with resources and training. Resources and training they need to protect their communities. I ask Democrats and Republicans alike to pass my budget and keep our neighborhoods safe.”

This feels like a callous attempt to appease the law-and-order crowd. Policing has not fundamentally changed over the past year. According to The Washington Post, there were a record number of fatal police shootings in 2021. Flooding a police system in desperate need of reform with more cash, before demanding those reforms, would only serve to buttress the brokenness. Maybe policing shouldn’t be starved, but it definitely shouldn’t be fattened.

There was no mention of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act in the State of the Union. Talks on that bill collapsed in September, but you said you would continue to work with members of Congress who were “serious about meaningful police reform” and you focused on drafting an executive order that included many of the original bill’s proposed reforms. 

When it leaked in January, The New York Times reported that law enforcement groups were so enraged by “the tenor of the order’s policy preamble, which spoke of ‘systemic racism’ in the criminal justice system,” that Susan Rice, the White House domestic policy adviser, was forced “to make conciliatory phone calls with an eye toward more substantive discussions.”

Mr. President, it’s March. We are still waiting for you to issue that executive order.

In the State of the Union you didn’t once say the words Black or African-American, white or Hispanic.

Race, as a word, magically disappeared from your rhetorical repertoire. Why? I assume because the political winds have shifted. What polled well last spring isn’t polling well this spring.

Even when you mentioned increasing support for historically Black colleges and universities, you used the acronym, H.B.C.U.s. Minor? Yes. But I noticed. By the way, the best way to help the graduates of H.B.C.U.s would be to use your executive authority to cancel more student loan debt, since, according to the Education Data Initiative, Black college graduates owe an average of $25,000 more in student loan debt than white graduates.

Student loans were not mentioned in your speech.

You did hail your Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, even if you didn’t point publicly to the historical significance of her being the first Black woman nominated. Her blackness — and the history of exclusion on the court — was left unsaid in the grand chamber.

Minor? Maybe. But again, I noticed.

Some might say that simply because Jackson is Black, it was enough to mention her name, without directly addressing Black people and their interests in the speech. But it doesn’t work that way. Symbols, representation and inclusion are important to me, sure, but they are no substitute for policy and legislation.

This is not to disparage Judge Jackson’s nomination in any way. It is exhilarating. She is qualified and should be confirmed, and she will be an inspiration for many as well as a needed voice for another perspective on the court. Thank you for nominating her.

It is simply to say that for ordinary Americans, symbols can’t pay the rent, fill the tank or shield you from a bullet. They can’t stop the relentless assault on Black voting rights and voting power, reverse the panic over critical race theory that threatens to outlaw the comprehensive teaching of American history, particularly America’s racial history, or to protect the rights of protesters.

In the speech, you used just a few short sentences to call for the passage of the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

When that voting legislation failed in the Senate in January, you said this in a statement:

“My administration will never stop fighting to ensure that the heart and soul of our democracy — the right to vote — is protected at all costs. We will continue to work with allies to advance necessary legislation to protect the right to vote. And to push for Senate procedural changes that will protect the fundamental right to vote.”

As far as I can tell, Tuesday’s brief comments were the first public statements you have made about passing voting rights legislation since January, and that’s from my search of the White House’s own collection of your comments published on the White House site.

Is that what “never stop fighting” looks like to you? Where did you learn to fight, in a pillow factory?

Symbols cannot be used as shields to deflect criticism of wrongheaded reversals on policies, reversals that could do generational harm to Black people.

People might defend you by saying you have the most diverse cabinet in history.

Well, I’m old enough to remember another Democratic president who took a tough stance on issues the public heavily, if not completely fairly, associated with Black people — crime and welfare — for political reasons, doing tremendous harm to the Black community even as he made symbolic appointments of Black people to prominent positions within his administration as a way of demonstrating his love of the Black community: Bill Clinton.

When Clinton took his tough-on-crime stance and advanced the disastrous 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, he held the record for the most diverse cabinet ever. You helped write that bill. President Barack Obama praised you for it when he introduced you as his running mate in 2008, saying:

“Fifteen years ago, too many American communities were plagued by violence and insecurity. So Joe Biden brought Democrats and Republicans together to pass the 1994 crime bill, putting 100,000 cops on the streets, and starting an eight-year drop in crime across the country.”

In so many ways, it feels like we are experiencing a déjà vu moment.

Your comments Tuesday highlighted how many Democrats are retreating from the very idea of police reform and the pursuit of racial justice in the criminal justice system.

These kinds of actions harden the sentiment among many Black voters like me that politicians have fair-weather fealties, that when the polling shifts, so will their priorities, that their allegiance to Black people on Black issues is bound by little more than used rubber bands.

The truly frustrating thing is that in a two-party system, Black people are stuck. You, Mr. President, are the best and only option when the Republicans have declared war on truth, Black history and Black voters and sworn allegiance to Donald Trump.

But Black people are weary of this political dance, of being drawn near and then pushed away, of having individuals elevated but the collective damaged, of having sweet nothings whispered in our ears only to be denied in public.

Mr. President, do better.

Signed,

A Dispirited Black Voter

Opinion | Open Letter to President Biden From a Dispirited Black Voter - The New York Times

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Opinion | Will Asian Americans Bolt From the Democratic Party? - The New York Times

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Will Asian Americans Bolt From the Democratic Party?

By

 

Thomas B. Edsall 

The New York Times

Credit...Frederick Brown/AFP via GettyImages

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.

Over the past three decades, Asian American voters — according to Pew, the fastest growing group in the country — have shifted from decisively supporting Republicans to becoming a reliably Democratic bloc, anchored by firmly liberal views on key national issues.

The question now is whether this party loyalty will withstand politically divisive developments that appear to pit Asian Americans against other key Democratic constituencies — as controversies emerge, for example, over progressive education policies that show signs of decreasing access to top schools for Asian Americans in order to increase access for Black and Hispanic students.

There is little question of the depth of liberal commitments among Asian Americans.

“Do Asian Americans, a group marked by crosscutting demographic cleavages and distinct settlement histories, constitute a meaningful political category with shared policy views?” ask Janelle Wong, a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, and Sono Shah, a computer scientist at the Pew Research Center, in their 2021 paper “Convergence Across Difference: Understanding the Political Ties That Bind with the 2016 National Asian American Survey.”

Their answer: “Political differences within the Asian American community are between those who are progressive and those who are even more so.”

Wong and Shah cite a 2016 New York Times article by my news-side colleague Jeremy W. Peters, “Donald Trump Is Seen as Helping Push Asian Americans Into Democratic Arms”:

In 1992, the year national exit polls started reporting Asian American sentiment, the group leaned Republican, supporting George Bush over Bill Clinton 55 percent to 31 percent. But by 2012, that had reversed. Asian Americans overwhelmingly supported President Obama over Mitt Romney — 73 percent to 26 percent.

In their paper, Wong and Shah note that “despite critical differences in national origin, generation, class, and even partisanship, Asian Americans demonstrate a surprising degree of political commonality.”

With regard to taxes, for example, “More than 75 percent of both Asian American Democrats and Republicans support increasing taxes on the rich to provide a tax cut for the middle class.”

Or take support for strong emissions regulations to address environmental concerns. This has 78.3 percent support among Asian American Democrats and 76.9 percent among Asian American Republicans.

In a 2021 paper, “Fault Lines Among Asian Americans,” Sunmin Kim — a sociologist at Dartmouth — found that Asian Americans took decisively liberal stands on Obamacare, admission of Syrian refugees, free college tuition, opposition to the Muslim immigration ban, environmental restrictions on power plants and government assistance to Black Americans. The only exception was legalization of marijuana, which received less support from Asian Americans than from any other group.

In an email, Kim cited the declining importance of communism as a key factor in the changing partisan allegiance of Asian American voters. In the 1970s and 80s, he said, “Taiwanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese chose the party that had a reputation of being tougher on communism. Obviously, it was the Republican Party. Chinese immigrants, many of whom retained the memory of the Cultural Revolution, were not too different.” After the 1990s, he continued, “the children of immigrants who grew up and received education in the United States replace the first generation, and their outlook on politics is much different from their parents. They see themselves as a racial minority, and their high education level pushes them towards liberalism on many issues.”

In short, Kim wrote: “the Cold War ended and a generational shift occurred.”

Despite many shared values, there are divergences of opinion among Asian Americans on a number of issues, in part depending on the country of origin. These differences are clear in the results of the 2020 Asian American Voter Survey, which was released in September 2020.

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Asked for their preference for Joe Biden or Donald Trump, 54 percent of all Asian Americans chose Biden to 30 percent for Trump. Biden had majority support from Indian (65-28), Japanese (61-24), Korean (57-26), Chinese (56-20) and Filipino Americans (52-34). Vietnamese Americans were the lone exception, supporting Trump 48-36.

At the moment, affirmative action admissions policies are a key issue testing Asian American support for the Democratic Party. In educational institutions as diverse as Harvard, San Francisco’s Lowell High School, Loudon County’s Thomas Jefferson High School and the most prestigious selective high schools in New York and Boston, conflict over educational resources between Asian American students and parents on one side and Black and Hispanic students and parents on the other has become endemic. Policies designed to increase Black and Hispanic access to high quality schools often result in a reduction in the number of Asian American students admitted.

Despite this, the 2020 Asian American Voter Survey cited above found that 70 percent of Asian Americans said they “favor affirmative action programs designed to help Blacks, women and other minorities,” with 16 percent opposed. Indian Americans were strongest in their support, 86-9, while Chinese Americans were lowest, 56-25.

These numbers appear to mask considerable ambivalence over affirmative action among Asian Americans when the question was posed not in the abstract but in the real world. In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209 prohibiting government from implementing affirmative action policies, declaring that “The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.”

In 2020, California voters were asked to support or oppose repeal of the anti-affirmative action measure — that is, to restore affirmative action. 36 percent of all Asian American voters said they would support restoration of affirmative action, 22 percent were opposed and 36 percent were undecided. A plurality of Chinese Americans, 38 percent, on the other hand, opposed restoration of affirmative action, 30 percent were in favor, and 28 percent were undecided.

The debate over affirmative action admission policies has deep roots. In 2009, Thomas J. Espenshade, a sociologist at Princeton, and Alexandria Walton Radford, of the Center for Applied Research in Postsecondary Education, wrote in their paper. “A New Manhattan Project” that

Compared to white applicants at selective private colleges and universities, black applicants receive an admission boost that is equivalent to 310 SAT points, measured on an all-other-things-equal basis. The boost for Hispanic candidates is equal on average to 130 SAT points. Asian applicants face a 140 point SAT disadvantage.

In 2018, the Harvard Crimson studied the average SAT scores of students admitted to Harvard from 1995 to 2013. It found that Asian Americans admitted to Harvard earned an average SAT score of 767 across all sections, while whites averaged 745 across all sections, Hispanic American 718, Native-American and Native-Hawaiian 712 and African-American 704.

Scholars of Asian American politics have found that Asian American voters have remained relatively strong supporters of affirmative action policies, with one exception: Chinese Americans, who constitute nearly a quarter of all Asian Americans.

In “Asian Americans and Race-Conscious Admissions: Understanding the Conservative Opposition’s Strategy of Misinformation, Intimidation & Racial Division,” Liliana M. Garces and OiYan Poon, professors of educational leadership at the University of Texas-Austin and Colorado State University, give the following reasons for the concentration of anti-affirmative action sentiment among Chinese Americans.

Garces and Poon write that 1990 changes in the U.S. Immigration Act “increased by threefold the number of visas for highly skilled, professional-class immigrants, privileging highly educated and skilled immigrants” while “migration policy changes in China advantaged more structurally-privileged Chinese to emigrate.”

Second, “growing up in mainland China, many of these more recent Chinese American immigrants were systemically and culturally socialized to strongly believe that a single examination is a valid measure of merit for elite college access.”

Third, “The residential and employment patterns among more recent immigrants suggest that their social lives remain limited to middle and upper-middle class Chinese American immigrants and whites.”

And finally,

The social media platform, WeChat, plays an important role in fostering opposition to affirmative action among some Chinese American immigrants. Some studies have found that WeChat plays a central role in the distribution of information among the Chinese diasporic community, including fake news, to politically motivate and organize Chinese immigrants for conservative causes, especially against affirmative action and ethnic data disaggregation.

Another issue with the potential to push Asian American voters to the right is crime.

The 2018 Crime Victimization report issued in September 2019 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Department of Justice found that a total of 182,230 violent crimes were committed against Asian Americans in 2018. 27.5 percent were committed by African Americans, 24.1 percent by whites, 24.1 percent by Asian Americans, 7.0 percent by Hispanics, and the rest undetermined.

The New York City police report on 2021 hate crime arrestees shows that 30 of the 56 men and women charged with hate crimes against Asian Americans were Black, 14 were Hispanic, 7 were white and five were Asian American/Pacific Islanders.

While most of the experts on Asian American politics I contacted voiced confidence in the continued commitment of Asian Americans to the Democratic Party and its candidates, there were some danger signals — for example, in the 2021 New York City mayoral election.

That year, Eric Adams, the Democrat, decisively beat Curtis Sliwa, the Republican, 65.5 to 27.1, but support for Sliwa — an anti-crime stalwart who pledged to take on “the spineless politicians who vote to defund police” — shot up to 44 percent “in precincts where more than half of residents are Asian,” according to The City.

The story was headlined “Chinese voters came out in force for the GOP in NYC, shaking up politics” and the subhead read “From Sunset Park in Brooklyn to Elmhurst and Flushing in Queens, frustrations over Democratic stances on schools and crime helped mobilize votes for Republican Curtis Sliwa for mayor and conservative Council candidates.”

A crucial catalyst in the surge of support for Sliwa, according to The City, was his “proposed reforms to specialized high school admissions and gifted and talented programs” — ignoring the fact that Adams had also pledged to do this. More generally, the City reported,

A wave of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans during the pandemic has heightened a sense of urgency about public safety and law enforcement. Asian anger and frustration have, for the first time, left a visible dent in a city election.

Grace Ming, a Democratic congresswoman from Queens, tweeted on Nov. 4, 2021:

Pending paper ballot counts, the assembly districts of @nily, @edbraunstein, @Barnwell30, @Rontkim and @Stacey23AD all went Republican. Our party better start giving more of a sh*t about #aapi (Asian American-Pacific Island) voters and communities. No other community turned out at a faster pace than AAPIs in 2020.

Similarly, Asian Americans led the drive to oust three San Francisco School Board members — all progressive Democrats — last month. As Times colleague Amelia Nierenberg wrote on Feb. 16:

The recall also appeared to be a demonstration of Asian American electoral power. In echoes of debates in other cities, many Chinese voters were incensed when the school board changed the admission system for the district’s most prestigious institution, Lowell High School. It abolished requirements based primarily on grades and test scores, instead implementing a lottery system.

In their March 2021 paper, “Why the trope of Black-Asian conflict in the face of anti-Asian violence dismisses solidarity,” Jennifer Lee and Tiffany Huang, sociologists at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, point out that “there have been over 3,000 self-reported incidents of anti-Asian violence from 47 states and the District of Columbia, ranging from stabbings and beatings, to verbal harassment and bullying, to being spit on and shunned.”

While “these senseless acts of anti-Asian violence have finally garnered the national attention they deserve,” Lee and Huang continue, “they have also invoked anti-Black sentiment and reignited the trope of Black-Asian conflict. Because some of the videotaped perpetrators appear to have been Black, some observers immediately reduced anti-Asian violence to Black-Asian conflict.”

Working against such Black-Asian conflict, the two authors argue, is a besieged but “real-world solidarity” demonstrated in

studies showing that Black Americans are more likely than white or Hispanic Americans to recognize racism toward Asian Americans, and that Asian Americans who experience discrimination are more likely to recognize political commonality with Black Americans. Covid-related anti-Asian bias is not inevitable. While “China virus” rhetoric has been linked to violence and hostility, new research shows that priming Americans about the coronavirus did not increase anger among the majority of Americans toward Asian Americans.

Lee and Huang warn, however, that “anger among a minority has invoked fear among the majority of Asian Americans.”

In “Asian Americans, Affirmative Action & the Rise in Anti-Asian Hate,” published in the Spring 2021 issue of Daedalus, a journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Lee makes the case that Asian American are at a political tipping point. She argues that:

The changing selectivity of contemporary U.S. Asian immigration has recast Asian Americans from ‘unassimilable to exceptional,’ resulting in their rapid racial mobility. This mobility combined with their minoritized status places them in a unique group position in the U.S. racial hierarchy, conveniently wedged between underrepresented minorities who stand to gain most from the policy (affirmative action) and the advantaged majority who stands to lose most because of it. It also marks Asians as compelling victims of affirmative action who are penalized because of their race.

In recent years, “a new brand of Asian immigrants has entered the political sphere whose attitudes depart from the Asian American college student activists of the 1960s,” Lee writes. “This faction of politically conservative Asian immigrants has no intention of following their liberal-leaning predecessors, nor do they intend to stay silent.”

The issue is “whether more Asian Americans will choose to side with conservatives,” Lee writes, “or whether they will choose to forge a collective Asian American alliance will depend on whether U.S. Asians recognize and embrace their ethnic and class diversity. Will they forge a sense of linked fate akin to that which has guided the political attitudes and voting behavior of Black Americans?”

The outcome may well have a major impact on the balance of power between Democrats and Republicans.

Catalyst, the liberal voter analysis firm, found that from 2016 to 2020, Asian Americans increased their voter turnout by 39 percent, more than any other racial or ethnic constituency, including Hispanic Americans (up 31 percent) and African Americans (up 14 percent). This turnout increase worked decisively in favor of the Democratic Party as Asian Americans voted two to one for the party in both elections.

The April 2021 Pew Research report cited above found that from 2000 to 2019, “The Asian population in the U.S. grew 81 percent from roughly 10.5 million to a record 18.9 million, surpassing the 70 percent growth rate of the nation’s Hispanic population. Furthermore, by 2060, the number of U.S. Asians is projected to rise to 35.8 million, more than triple their 2000 population.”

What this means is that Republicans are certain to intensify their use affirmative action, crime, especially hate crime, and the movement away from merit testing to lotteries for admission to high caliber public schools as wedge issues to try to pry Asian American voters away from the Democratic Party. Indeed, they are already at it. For its part, the Democratic Party will need to add significant muscle to Jennifer Lee’s call for a “linked fate” among Asian and African Americans to fend off the challenge.

The strong commitment of Asian Americans to education has been a source of allegiance to a Democratic Party that has become the preferred home for voters with college and advanced degrees. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party is, at the same time, testing the strength of that allegiance by supporting education policies that reduce opportunities for Asian Americans at elite schools while increasing opportunity for two larger Democratic constituencies, made up of Black and Hispanic voters. This is the kind of problem inherent in a diverse coalition comprising a segmented electorate with competing agendas. For the foreseeable future, the ability of the party to manage these conflicts will be a key factor in its success or failure."

Opinion | Will Asian Americans Bolt From the Democratic Party? - The New York Times