by James A. Bacon
Do you have an 8th grader who wants to go to college? Does he or she fall into one of several marginalized groups, including Black or Hispanic racial/ethnic identity? If so, Fairfax County has a special College Partnership Program to help.
Although the program apparently allows Whites and Asian students to participate if they qualify as an English learner, first-in-family to attend college, economically disadvantaged, or having a learning disability, only Blacks and Hispanics are entitled on the basis of their race to participate.
Enterprising journalist/crusader Asra Nomani has the story here. Nomani engages in slight overreach by stating that Asian-American students are “excluded.” But the Fairfax County criteria are clearly racist. Blacks and Hispanics are granted a race-based privilege not given Whites and Asians.
I expect the usual suspects will seek to obfuscate what this program so clearly is: government discrimination on the basis of race/ethnicity.
It’s all so unnecessary. If the Fairfax school system had opened up the program to English learners, first-in-family students, economically disadvantaged and those with learning disabilities, it would have captured the Black and Hispanic students most in need of help. But Fairfax public school leaders cannot help themselves. They are adherents of the Ibram X. Kendi philosophy of “anti-racism” — the idea that the only remedy for past discrimination is reverse discrimination.
Nomani can hardly be blamed for viewing the program in the worst possible light. As the mother of a former Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology student, she was in the front line of the fight to preserve the merit-based admissions system for the elite public high school. She witnessed the anti-Asian animus among Northern Virginia “progressives” close up.
Asians just don’t behave properly, it seems. Insisting upon excelling academically, they refuse to act like oppressed “people of color.” They are labeled as “White-adjacent,” which makes them as much the enemy of the left as White people.
So much for judging people by the content of their character. With their hard work and striving, these first- and second-generation immigrants better reflect the spirit of America than most Americans do these days.
