Hmong students face barriers in campuses
IF YOU are driving east on Florin Road toward Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California, you will pass under a pedestrian bridge that has a message permanently affixed to it: “If you dream it, you can do it.”
It’s the kind of message I have seen in neighbourhoods where aspirations far surpass resources - and in that way it is fitting. More than three-quarters of students at Burbank qualify for free lunches. A fifth of students come from households where Hmong is the primary language. The school has one of the highest concentrations of Hmong students in the city.
It was here, last year, that school counsellor Janet Spilman and teacher Katherine Bell dreamed up a scheme: They would get every eligible senior to apply to college - any college. “It wasn’t just the 4.0s,” Bell told me in December, sitting in the lightfilled front office. “It was the 2.0s and everyone who was within one year ... of being eligible” to apply. In the end, they wrangled about 400 students into the school’s two computer labs, sat them down and walked them through the application process.
The massive undertaking taught Spilman and Bell a lot about what was keeping students from making post-high school plans: Many Hmong students had no idea they were “college material.” Some said they had thought about college but no adult had ever spoken to them about it. Others fretted about the finances and negotiating with parents who expected them to remain home.
When Students for Fair Admissions sued Harvard in 2014 over its race-conscious admissions policies, only one member of the organisation was described in detail, a young man who, according to the lawsuit, deserves a seat at the university. He is the son of Chinese immigrants, attended one of the nation’s top high schools, was captain of the tennis team and got a perfect score on the ACT. By contrast, Hmong students at Burbank come from a community with a childhood poverty rate of about 40 per cent statewide.
“Some Asian Americans came to the United States to escape communism, authoritarianism, war, and poverty, while others simply sought out greater opportunities. Some Asian Americans come from highly educated families, but many others do not,” Students for Fair Admissions noted in its complaint. But Harvard officials, the group went on, “lump all Asian Americans together in the admissions process” by taking into account race when whittling down the roughly 40,000 applicants for a class of 2,000. In an effort to create a diverse student body, Harvard holds Asian Americans to a higher standard than other races, the group argued. The result is “a remarkably low admission rate for high-achieving Asian-American applicants.”
Harvard says that its admissions process considers race in the context of a candidate’s whole life story - not independent of it - and lets applicants distinguish themselves. “Harvard doesn’t have quotas,” said spokeswoman Rachael Dane. “Students of one racial category are not competing against each other.”
In a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Harvard, a group of social scientists also singled out applicants like the kids at Burbank High who don’t fulfil the model-minority stereotype “but nevertheless have the potential to make enormous contributions to the campus community.” Such candidates, the brief went on, “benefit greatly from holistic review processes like Harvard’s.”
A judge heard arguments in the fall and had not issued a ruling as of early March. During the trial, Students for Fair Admissions argued Harvard punished Asian-American applicants by giving them lower “personal ratings” than those of other races, accusing admissions officers of evoking stereotypes of Asians as sharp and studious, but not sociable. (Harvard disputed the analysis.) Edward Blum, a conservative activist who founded the group, told me in an interview: “Race is not just a light thumb on the scale, but it is a dispositive thumb on the scale.”
As a remedy, Students for Fair Admissions wants the court to declare Harvard’s admissions practices unconstitutional. But it goes further: It wants an injunction that would bar Harvard admissions officers from learning the race of applicants - a prohibition that might force students to scrub any mention of their race in their applications. If the case advances through the courts, it could have wider implications. President Trump’s Justice Department has backed the fight, and the Supreme Court’s shift to the right has raised the odds that a majority of the justices could vote to abolish or curtail the use of race in admissions at colleges across the country.
Implicit in the argument made by Students for Fair Admissions is that ending racial considerations in admissions would ultimately benefit the kids at Burbank High. And yet, in the coverage of the Harvard lawsuit, and indeed in almost any story on affirmative action, you rarely hear from this group - the ones without the Tiger Moms and the private SAT tutors - or from the high school counsellors like Spilman and Bell who worry less about whether their students will appear “too Asian” and more about whether they even know how to apply to college. Decades after the myth of Asians as a model minority took hold, we seem unable to escape it.
As I followed the Harvard lawsuit, I wondered whether the debate around it would be different if Harvard were not in the Northeast but in a place like Sacramento, one of the few places in the country that captures the diversity of Asian America and the pitfalls of the model-minority stereotype. The California capital has also existed in a post-affirmative-action world for more than 20 years, thanks to Proposition 209, which ended race-conscious admissions policies at state schools. And it happens to be my hometown.
The family of my dad, Albert Balingit, arrived there more than six decades ago from the Philippines, settling in the Meadowview neighbourhood when he was a child. At the time, Meadowview was one of the few communities that did not explicitly bar non-white families from moving in though individual homeowners could refuse to sell to them. Elsewhere, real estate agents had formed pacts to keep non-white buyers out of centrally located neighbourhoods like Land Park, and some homes had deeds that barred non-white people from ever setting foot in them. My grandfather, though, managed to find someone who would sell a house to him.
My dad shared a cramped home with some assortment of his seven siblings and other Filipino families or distant relatives who were down on their luck. His father worked as a janitor while he flipped burgers, sometimes sneaking food for his mother and younger siblings. When he started at Burbank High in the late 1960s, the country was roiled with racial tension that spilled over into the school’s hallways. My dad was on the college preparatory track, one of the few students of colour preparing for an education after high school. But as graduation approached, a counsellor advised him to become a carpenter, which was a bad idea since he was a strong student and to this day can’t drive a nail.
Instead, after a stint at community college, he transferred to the University of California at Davis, just outside of Sacramento, where he would start the first club for Filipino students, called Mga Kapatid, the Tagalog phrase for “brethren.” He became a leader in the movement to bring ethnic studies to the campus. And after he graduated, he was accepted to the law school, which placed him in the ranks of Asians in this country who today, as a group, are better educated than white Americans, and out-earn them, too.
But these superlatives obscure the extreme poverty among some subsets, in particular refugees whose stories get lost in the averages when they are included with more-established groups from places like China and South Korea.
In 2014, for example, nearly 40 per cent of Hmong had less than a high school diploma. Asian Americans are now the most economically divided racial group in the country, with the wealthiest 10 per cent earning more than 10 times the amount of the poorest 10 per cent, according to a report from the Pew Research Centre. And that gap is growing: Rich Asians are getting richer, and poor Asians are staying poor.
You can see this trend playing out in Sacramento, where Southeast Asian refugees have settled in poor communities like Meadowview, while Chinese and Japanese families have decamped to newer housing developments in wealthier neighbourhoods in adjacent Greenhaven. Recent arrivals from Laos, Bhutan and Myanmar are more likely to have come because they were displaced by war or religious and ethnic persecution. Many are Hmong, a mountain tribe in Laos whose members in the 1960s and 1970s were recruited by the United States to battle communist forces taking over their country. When the Americans pulled out of Laos in 1975, the Hmong had to flee or risk execution. Many were slaughtered, and those who survived ended up in camps in Thailand, where they languished for years, sometimes decades, waiting to immigrate to America. Once they arrived, they were deeply unfamiliar with modern American life, and some were forced to abandon farming and hunting.
Mai Xi Lee, the director of social-emotional learning for the Sacramento City Unified School District, remembers the day she left Laos. She was five, and her mother slaughtered a chicken and gave her the prized drumstick. Then, her mother told her to pack. Within an hour, they were marching with Lee’s siblings toward the Mekong River. They made it to Thailand, where Lee spent a few years in a refugee camp before immigrating here.
Lee told me her story as I sat in her office in the Sacramento City Unified headquarters. A long-time educator, she has become an advocate for Hmong schoolchildren.She wants to get the district to tally performance measures for Hmong children separately from their Asian peers. It has been a long-time fight for many Southeast Asian advocates, who want to raise attention - and draw resources to where their communities are falling short.
“When we look at Asian data, it is absolutely misleading, and I don’t think that there is great awareness of the tremendous differences even (among Asians),” she said, “what it means to be a refugee versus what it means to be an immigrant.”— Washington Post.
When we look at Asian data, it is absolutely misleading, and I don’t think that there is great awareness of the tremendous differences even (among Asians), what it means to be a refugee versus what it means to be an immigrant. Mai Xi Lee, the director of social-emotional learning for the Sacramento City Unified School District