Category: Posts in English

source: February 6, 2018 Evan Lips

Opponents of an Asian-American data collection proposal packed Gardner Auditorium during a Jan. 30 hearing. (Contributed)

BOSTON — Massachusetts lawmakers considering a bill that would direct state agencies to demand more specific nation-of-origin information from Asian-Americans will be running afoul of the United States Constitution’s Equal Protection clause, opponents of the proposal tell New Boston Post.

State Representative Tackey Chan’s (D-Quincy) legislation calls for “all state agencies, quasi-state agencies, entities created by state statute and sub-divisions of state agencies” to “identify Asian-American and Pacific Islanders as defined by the United States Census Bureau in all data collected,” in addition to gathering personal data on “the five largest Asian-American and Pacific Islander ethnic groups residing in the commonwealth.”

“I’m not a lawyer but I understand the Constitution,” George Shen, a Newton resident who specializes in data and analytics for IBM, said in an interview Monday. “The bill selectively collects data from racial group, one minority group, and you can’t just single out us Asians.”

Lei Zhao, a Newton-based attorney originally from China who has lived in the United States since 1994, said the proposal could lead to Fair Housing Act anti-discrimination complaints. She pointed to a Massachusetts Appeals Court decision that upheld a Superior Court ruling awarding a Venezuelan couple a lofty settlement after they filed a complaint with the Boston Fair Housing Commission after a real estate broker asked about the couple’s country-of-origin.

“This bill even calls for quasi-state agencies to collect that data,” she said. “That scares me.”

Chan, in testimony delivered to the State Administration and Regulatory Oversight Committee last week, was quoted by State House News Service saying that Asians “should be able to identify ourselves to you as who we are, as opposed to having other people identify for us.”

“I promise you — not an Asian person, not a Chinese person, not a Japanese person — no one created the concept of Asian, it was kind of like created around us. I never heard it before in my childhood and into adulthood,” Chan said.

Backers of Chan’s bill have argued that census-style individualized boxes where Asians are separated, such as Chinese-Americans from Indian-Americans, would provide improved data sets. At last week’s hearing, which drew large crowds to the State House, Dr. Elisa Choi of Harvard Medical School  testified that breaking down the data by country would improve the health screening process.

Shen, however, argued that new disparate sets of data — collected by multiple state and quasi-state agencies — will lead to chaos.

“The U.S. Census Bureau gathers data under one agency, at one given time, and once every ten years,” he said. “They use one data entry point.

“If all these agencies start collecting data from many entry points it will result in a data overlap — triple-counting, tabulation problems — this is an unscientific and imprudent way of collecting very sensitive data.”

Swan Lee of Brookline agrees, and in an interview she added that the proposal could also create a “Southeast Asia versus East Asia narrative” in addition to fueling other divisions.
“What they [supporters of Chan’s legislation] really want is data with no privacy protection,” she added.

Shin said the proposal also serves as a reminder of old wounds, such as World War II-era Japanese internment camps and efforts to limit Chinese immigration.

Angie Tso of Acton told New Boston Post that while the bill “may have good intentions, it is still unconstitutional.”

“It treats one party different from the other parties,” she added. “That’s the very definition of discrimination.

“If I am Latino, or any other non-Asian-American, how would I feel if this were happening to me?”

According to the State House News Service account of last week’s packed hearing inside Gardner Auditorium, opponents of Chan’s legislation, toting signs denouncing the bill, vastly outnumbered supporters. The report noted that opponents teamed up to conduct loud coughing fits while Chan was testifying.

The bill has yet to receive a recommendation from the committee.

source: JR Minkel on March 30, 2007

Government documents show that the agency handed over names and addresses to the Secret Service

Despite decades of denials, government records confirm that the U.S. Census Bureau provided the U.S. Secret Service with names and addresses of Japanese-Americans during World War II.The Census Bureau surveys the population every decade with detailed questionnaires but is barred by law from revealing data that could be linked to specific individuals. The Second War Powers Act of 1942 temporarily repealed that protection to assist in the roundup of Japanese-Americans for imprisonment in internment camps in California and six other states during the war. The Bureau previously has acknowledged that it provided neighborhood information on Japanese-Americans for that purpose, but it has maintained that it never provided “microdata,” meaning names and specific information about them, to other agencies.

A new study of U.S. Department of Commerce documents now shows that the Census Bureau complied with an August 4, 1943, request by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau for the names and locations of all people of Japanese ancestry in the Washington, D.C., area, according to historian Margo Anderson of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and statistician William Seltzer of Fordham University in New York City. The records, however, do not indicate that the Bureau was asked for or divulged such information for Japanese-Americans in other parts of the country.

Anderson and Seltzer discovered in 2000 that the Census Bureau released block-by-block data during WW II that alerted officials to neighborhoods in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho and Arkansas where Japanese-Americans were living. “We had suggestive but not very conclusive evidence that they had also provided microdata for surveillance,” Anderson says.

The Census Bureau had no records of such action, so the researchers turned to the records of the chief clerk of the Commerce Department, which received and had the authority to authorize interagency requests for census data under the Second War Powers Act. Anderson and Seltzer discovered copies of a memo from the secretary of the treasury (of which the Secret Service is part) to the secretary of commerce (who oversees the Census Bureau) requesting the data, and memos documenting that the Bureau had provided it [see image below].

The memos from the Bureau bear the initials “JC,” which the researchers identified as those of then-director, J.C. Capt.

“What it suggests is that the statistical information was used at the microlevel for surveillance of civilian populations,” Anderson says. She adds that she and Seltzer are reviewing Secret Service records to try to determine whether anyone on the list was actually under surveillance, which is still unclear.

“The [new] evidence is convincing,” says Kenneth Prewitt, Census Bureau director from 1998 to 2000 and now a professor of public policy at Columbia University, who issued a public apology in 2000 for the Bureau’s release of neighborhood data during the war. “At the time, available evidence (and Bureau lore) held that there had been no … release of microdata,” he says. “That can no longer be said.”

The newly revealed documents show that census officials released the information just seven days after it was requested. Given the red tape for which bureaucracies are famous, “it leads us to believe this was a well-established path,” Seltzer says, meaning such disclosure may have occurred repeatedly between March 1942, when legal protection of confidentiality was suspended, and the August 1943 request.

Anderson says that microdata would have been useful for what officials called the “mopping up” of potential Japanese-Americans who had eluded internment.

The researchers turned up references to five subsequent disclosure requests made by law enforcement or surveillance agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, none of which dealt with Japanese-Americans.

Lawmakers restored the confidentiality of census data in 1947.

Officially, Seltzer notes, the Secret Service made the 1943 request based on concerns of presidential safety stemming from an alleged March 1942 incident during which an American man of Japanese ancestry, while on a train from Los Angeles to the Manzanar internment camp in Owens Valley, Calif., told another passenger that they should have the “guts” to kill President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The incident occurred 17 months before the Secret Service request, during which time the man was hospitalized for schizophrenia and was therefore not an imminent threat, Seltzer says.

The disclosure, while legal at the time, was ethically dubious and may have implications for the 2010 census, the researchers write in a paper presented today at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America held in New York City. The U.S. has separate agencies for collecting statistical information about what people and businesses do, and for so-called administrative functions—taxation, regulation and investigation of those activities.

“There has to be a firewall in some sense between those systems,” Anderson says. If a company submits information ostensibly for documenting national economic growth but the data ends up in the antitrust division, “the next time that census comes they’re not going to get that information,” she says.

Census data is routinely used to enforce the National Voting Rights Act and other policies, but not in a form that could be used to identify a particular person’s race, sex, age, address or other information, says former director Prewitt. The legal confidentiality of census information dates to 1910, and in 1954 it became part of Title 13 of the U.S. Code, which specifies the scope and frequency of censuses.

“The law is very different today” than it was in 1943, says Christa Jones, chief of the Census Bureau’s Office of Analysis and Executive Support. “Anything that we release to any federal agency or any organization … all of those data are reviewed,” she says, to prevent disclosures of individual information.

The Census Bureau provided neighborhood data on Arab-Americans to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2002, but the information was already publicly available, Jones says. A provision in the controversial Patriot Act—passed after the 9/11 attacks and derided by critics as an erosion of privacy—gives agencies access to individualized survey data collected by colleges, including flight training programs.

The Census Bureau has improved its confidentiality practices considerably in the last six decades, former director Prewitt says. He notes that census data is an increasingly poor source of surveillance data compared with more detailed information available from credit card companies and even electronic tollbooths.

Nevertheless, he says, “I think the Census Bureau has to bend over backwards to maintain the confidence and the trust of the public.” Public suspicion—well-founded or not—could undermine the collection accurate census data, which is used by sociologists, economists and public health researchers, he says.

“I’m sad to learn it,” he says of the new discovery. “It would be sadder yet to continue to deny that it happened, if, as now seems clear, it did happen. You cannot learn from and correct past mistakes unless you know about them.”

source: Mike Gonzalez / @Gundisalvus / January 28, 2018

source: 2018-01-22 Lin Yang CtViewPoints

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamt of a day when Americans would “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Remembering his wise words on the day dedicated to his memory inspired me to address a current issue that most have never heard about: The Asian Registry.

Under names such as “All Students Count” or “Data Disaggregation,” a few states have passed a law requiring Asian American students to register their ancestral nation of origin or ethnic background. Advocates claim that this will expose the disparity among various Asian nationalities and break the myth of the “model minority.”

The Asian Registry is usually proposed by legislators with an Asian heritage and backed by advocacy groups meant to help Asian Americans. However, if you talk to these legislators and the organization leaders in a private setting, they explain that it is really all about money. Advocacy groups for the Asian-American community have a hard time getting government funding due to the perception that Asians are a well-off minority. By dissecting the small Asian population (about 5 percent nationwide) into finely defined groups, the stories of inequality become more credible.

Rep. Tackey Chan, who proposed the Massachusetts version of Asian Registry, actually wrote an Op-Ed in the most popular Chinese American Newspaper boldly titled: “Asian Registry is a Big Stride Forward towards Better Welfare.”

This title alone seems an insult to many Asian Americans, who value hardwork and financial independence, and did not come to America for handouts — not hundreds of years ago when they first arrived, and not now.

Although this law applies to all Asian Americans, Chinese Americans have most actively opposed it. Ordinary people who never paid much attention to politics are suddenly organizing street protests, distributing flyers, and talking to their legislators. Many are first generation immigrants from mainland China.

I often wonder whether the shared experience in Communist-era China is the cause of the opposition. Growing up there, my brothers and I had to register at school as “small business owners,” though the business belonged to our grandparents and had long before been confiscated by the government. We grew up knowing that no matter how hard we worked or how talented we are, our chance of achievement was much less than those who could proudly fill in “peasant” or “laborer” as their family background.

That preferential treatment carried over to our opportunity for higher education or a desirable career — even prospects for marriage could be affected by family background established generations before, and nothing we could do would erase it. Only the good fortune of coming to America freed us from such categorization.

The Asian Registry, which would require my American-born and raised children to fill in school forms regarding their ancestry, leaves me wondering how this information might affect their educational career. I believe that America is a land of equal opportunity and equal protection, regardless of national origin. To me, the Asian Registry is a cruel mockery of the ideals this nation stands for.

This is not just an Asian American issue. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau now requires both Hispanic and Asian Americans to fill in their nation of origin when applying for a mortgage. Common app, a student application “warehouse” for colleges, also demands that applicants of all races fill in their nation of origin.

This is indeed an American issue. Can we ever become a nation where people are judged by the content of their character if educational opportunity depends on our national origin?

I wish that one day the citizens of this nation need only fill in one box to identify themselves: American.

source:Nov 08, 2017, 21:30 ET  Asian American Coalition for Education

source: Linda Bentley – September 5, 2017

CAVE CREEK – It’s been 10 years since we met with Ward Connerly, who founded the American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI) with Dusty Rhodes (president of National Review) in 1996, when he announced plans to have the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative (AzCRI) placed on the 2008 ballot.

It was modeled after the California Civil Rights Initiative, which passed with 54 percent of the vote, to end the practice of government-sponsored race and gender preferences in public employment, public education and public contracting.

Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick, who, at the time, was director of the Goldwater Institute for Constitutional Litigation and the initiative’s legal advisor, stated, “It’s time for Arizona to stop increasing the number of people who are given preferences because of race.”

Bolick said, “Racial preferences don’t work and harm the very people claimed to benefit from them.”

However, in September 2008, the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office (SOS) issued its official determination that the AzCRI did not qualify for the ballot and sent the ballots and publicity pamphlets off to be printed without Proposition 104, as the initiative was officially known, which AzCRI Executive Director Max McPhail claimed violated state statute.

State statute allows all petition filers 10 days to challenge the SOS’s signature count.

Although Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Edward O. Burke granted a temporary restraining order to halt the printing of ballots and publicity pamphlets, he found himself in a quandary of having to infringe the rights of those submitting petitions or hold up the printing of ballots and pamphlets, which, according to Maricopa County Elections Director Karen Osborne’s testimony, would delay voting by an equal number of days printing were to be delayed.

Burke was left to only question how the legislature managed to create such a situation.

Because the time allotted to verify over 330,000 signatures was deemed inadequate, Connerly withdrew the challenge and Proposition 104 was never placed on the ballot in Arizona.

A disappointed McPhail said the AzCRI would have made Arizona a place of equal opportunity for all instead of one that uses discrimination as a tool to create “diversity.”

He said, “Achieving diversity should never be an excuse to discriminate.”

Back in 2007, Connerly, as a dedicated champion for a colorblind America, stated, “Getting our nation to a point of applying a single standard to all Americans is one of the most crucial issues of our time … we must start by getting our government out of the business of privileging some citizens over others. Real lives are radically affected, and great social and economic injustice is done when decisions are made about individuals based on the color of their skin or the origin of their ancestors.”

The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia stated government can never have a “compelling interest in discriminating on the basis of race to ‘make up’ for past racial discrimination in the opposite direction. Under the Constitution there can be no such thing as either a creditor or debtor race. We are just one race in the eyes of government – the American race.”

Connerly continues to press on with his fight and issued a statement last month in which he points out, “As a nation, our flight to a better society has entered a patch of very severe turbulence; and, as is all-too-often the case, the matter of race is a major factor. Most significantly, it appears that hysteria has overwhelmed reason, a fact that is enabling a form of mob rule, with historical monuments being destroyed, and political demagogues exploiting our circumstances for their own benefit.”

Connerly goes on to note while our nation is most in need of bold and decisive leadership, “the man we have elected to lead us has been politically gelded by those who reject his presidency and who are determined to defeat him.”

Connerly pondered what must happen in our beloved country before we realize that “subdividing Americans into numerous tribes and then distributing benefits on the basis of tribal affiliation is a recipe for social and civic disaster.”

He concluded, “The evidence is compelling that for the sake of our national sanity, we need to alter course and squeeze race from American life. It is truly poisonous to the body politic!”

Believing all affirmative action programs should be ended and all government forms soliciting information about race should be shredded, Connerly stated, “If President Trump wants to make America ‘great again,’ that mission won’t be fulfilled until all that matters about a citizen’s identity is that he or she is American.”

Mychal Massie, an ordained minister and chairman of the Racial Policy Center, a think tank he founded in September 2015, is also an advocate for a colorblind society.

Last week Massie penned an article, “Black is a color: Not a race” in which he states, “Being black is not a human condition, albeit that is what many today treat it as … being recognized as a skin color is the antithesis of unifying the fabric of the United States.”

Massie goes on to say, “The overwhelming majority of those who possess large amounts of melanin, i.e., blacks, do not live in America as Americans; they live in America as a color. They demand to be identified by their melanin content and yet they are offended for being recognized by same.”

Believing it is the “hyper-fixation upon melanin content” that divides us as a nation, not some “orchestrated evil perpetrated by malevolent white men,” Massie states, “The word minority is insulting and stigmatizing. I am an American. There are 330 plus million Americans, how can I be a minority if I am an American? Why would I want to be portrayed as something less than the whole of America?”

Massie finds the African-American title ludicrous as it is perpetrated upon children because an ancestor came over on a boat 400 years ago and says it forces them to be what they are not.

He said, “They are Americans, not Africans.”

Massie concludes, “To that end the idea of ‘hyphenated Americanism’ is a trick of the cultural Marxists intended to divide America against itself for the purposes of weakening our autonomy and anesthetizing us to globalism.”

As far as the census goes, Massie believes it should only ask “American: yes or no; and male or female.”

ACRI is a national civil rights nonprofit organization created to educate the public on the harms of racial and gender preferences.

The organization’s website states “ACRI also seeks to affect a cultural change by challenging the ‘race matters’ mentality embraced by many of today’s so-called ‘civil rights leaders.’ ACRI’s leaders and supporters believe that civil rights are individual rights and that government policies should not advocate group rights over individual rights.”

Source:  Townhall.com ^ | Septemeber 1, 2017 | Michael Barone

When a policy has been vigorously followed by venerable institutions for more than a generation without getting any closer to producing the desired results, perhaps there is some problem with the goal.

That thought was prompted by a New York Times story headlined “Even With Affirmative Action, Blacks and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented at Top Colleges Than 35 Years Ago.” It presented enrollment data from 100 selective colleges and universities — the eight Ivy League schools, nine University of California campuses, 20 “top” liberal arts colleges, 14 “other top universities” and 50 “flagship” state universities. (They total 100 because UC Berkeley appears in two categories.)

The numbers showed some variation — as one might expect, given states’ different ethnic compositions — but the bottom line was similar. In 2015 — as in 1980, when these statistics were first gathered — blacks and Hispanics were, in the words of the Times headline, “underrepresented.”

In that single awkward word is embedded an important assumption: that in a fair society, the ethnic balance in every institution should resemble that of the larger society. This assumption is behind the “affirmative action” policies that college and university admissions offices have been following with something resembling religious devotion since well before 1980.

That inevitably means violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ban on racial discrimination. Unchallengeable data make clear that schools regularly admit blacks and Hispanics with much lower test scores than those classified as whites and, particularly, Asians.

The Supreme Court left an opening for such discrimination in its 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke and 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decisions, supposedly to encourage “diversity.” But Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in the Grutter decision, “25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.” That’s 11 years from today.

This discrimination is harmful — not least to university administrators, many of whom feel obliged to lie systematically about what they are doing. Its harm to those who are discriminated against is real but not overwhelming; most will find places in other selective schools.

The greatest harm — as Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor’s 2012 book, “Mismatch,” makes clear — is to the intended beneficiaries. It casts a pall of illegitimacy over their legitimate achievements. They are dismissed, as liberals have dismissed Justice Clarence Thomas, as affirmative action hires.

As Sander and Taylor point out, instruction tends to be aimed at the median student. Students who arrive less prepared — and test scores are a good measure of this — will often fall behind. Blacks and Hispanics graduate and pass professional exams at lower rates than their better-prepared schoolmates.

Another result: These students tend to cordon themselves off into separate enclaves, an understandable defensive response — and one encouraged by administrators who create separate orientations, dormitories and graduation ceremonies for “underrepresented” students. Universities’ shameful speech codes and ridiculous “safe spaces” are justified as needed to protect their feelings.

My impression is that there is less personal interaction between black and white students on today’s “diverse” campuses than there was when I was in college a half-century ago. The supposed benefits of diversity, which O’Connor identified in Grutter as excusing racial discrimination, appear to be dismally small.

None of the 100 colleges and universities cited in the Times article has a black student percentage at or above that of the college-age population. Only 11 (nine in California, one each in Arizona and Texas) have Hispanic percentages above the national percentage; only UC Merced tops its state’s Hispanic percentage.

Why does “underrepresentation” persist despite administrators’ earnest efforts? The reason is that selective schools, by definition, seek students who are at the right tail of bell curve distributions of test scores and, as Brookings Institution scholars Richard Reeves and Dimitrios Halikias report, “race gaps on the SATs are especially pronounced at the tails.”

No one decries the “underrepresentation” of most groups on National Basketball Association teams or the list of Nobel Prize recipients, both drawn from the right tails of particular skills. Selective institutions such as the U.S. Army and the New York Police Department have “overrepresentation” of blacks and Hispanics.

Excellence should be celebrated wherever it is found (and looked for in unlikely places). And attention and respect should be paid to those without right-tail skills who work and contribute conscientiously to society — for example, lots of the people who have been rescuing so many in Houston. You don’t have to be elite to earn success.

In the meantime, let’s admit that talents and interests aren’t proportionately distributed in a fair society and that it’s time to drop colleges’ racial quotas and preferences.