I’m not American.
I’m Danish.
I’m married to an Italian.
I have lived 4 years in Germany as a youth, and visit there frequently.
I’ve lived in America and Denmark nearly equal amounts of time at this point.
I have been to a few other countries in small dozes however.
Danes certainly think they know a lot about America, and I guess in contrast to the Italians and to a lesser extent the Germans they do. But really almost everyone I know here is ignorant amount anything other than their area, but they believe differently.
It reminds me of these foreign affairs regional magazines a friend of mine used to get, and it was amazing the level of detail these magazines would go into. I think the North African Regional issue came out once or twice per year. Reading it I realized that the geographical knowledge that I had previously prized as showing how smart I was and engaged in the world was a ruse, I didn’t know shit, and all my thin patina of knowledge did was disguise that to myself.
Show me someone living in the US who doesn’t believe a rich kid has a well-trod path to buying their way into university admission, outside of the usual “proper” and legal channels.
Maybe they were innocent fools, but I don’t think a modern super-wealthy Chinese parent with their eyes on Yale is that different from a modern super-wealthy Californian parent with their eyes on Yale. They would both do their basic homework about how little they can pay to achieve their project, they would both assume they were buying special treatment for their money.
And even legally, I would not be surprised if a Californian of British or Australian parent could get their kid in for a million, where a parent from a “less Whitish” country might find themselves paying two, because of what people might call “cultural differences”.
I believe that one of the contemporary perspectives on racism is that it’s inextricably linked to power differentials between groups. Because black people, as a group, continue to be oppressed by American societal institutions, and theories of race and racial inferiority continue to be part of the justification for this oppression, black people can be subjected to racism here regardless of their individual wealth or power. A super-rich black man can always be pulled over by a white cop and treated differently (subjected to racism) because he is black. On the other hand, “reverse racism” is a meaningless myth, because white people, as a group, enjoy a privileged position in American society.
The position of Chinese educational tourists is complicated. On the one hand, it is true that there was at one point structural racism against Chinese people in America - see the Exclusion Acts, etc. On the other, today’s Chinese college students are economically advantaged over the average American, not vice versa.
Once upon a time, international students were fewer and mostly from other countries - such as the rich Saudi kids who perennially crack up fancy cars on Boston streets and get whisked away home on private jets before they can face charges - but this phenomenon has changed. Over five percent of American college students, or more than a million students, are now international students, and around 360,000 are from China alone. That doesn’t count hundreds of thousands studying in high school.
These people are not structurally oppressed in America. Perhaps instead they’re a burgeoning colonial power. They are not victims of racism for paying higher bribes any more than a white dude from the midwest is the victim of racism for paying “tourist rate” in a Caribbean market.
Your whole argument rests on your claim that racism against Chinese people is some distant thing of the past in America.
That will be a surprise to many people.
This also describes experiences of other non-white people in American society, even if the specific details of that experience manifest in different ways. And like you say, it happens even when those people have more money than they used to.
Pointing to the population of Chinese students doesn’t support any conclusions either. While there are more women in college than men, I don’t think that proves that sexism is only something that happened in the distant past.
So, a lawyer is pointing out the unequal treatment his clients received from a grifter when it came to bribing said grifter, with the intent of getting said clients’ child unequal treatment when getting into Yale.
It would be interesting to tease out how much of this price inflation was due to the racism of the grifter vs. how much was due to the grifter passing on the cost of having to pay a larger bribe to a racist institution.
We’re talking about foreign people here, people who can drop millions just on the bribes. Who knows how much they spend on condos so the kids don’t have to live in dorms.
If you can really feel a sense of white privilege in comparison, enjoy it while you can.
I’m always amazed that both the idea that racism is ancient history, and the idea that other races are some ominous force coming to colonize and replace white people in the very near future, are two ideas that can be argued at the same time.
And I think they might still have some lingering concerns about racism, in 2019, in a Trump-heavy America.
I realize there are probably gold-infused caviars from endangered fish or something that allow this easily, but I momentarily had the pleasant mental image of Rupert Murdoch choking to death after being forced to cram a stack of hundreds on a cracker down his gullet.
Not “praying”, for gods’ sake, “preying”. Yikes.
Not to mention that the correct word is used in the quote. Take a minute to read your work. I understand you have to post at internet speed, but still, take a second.
The ‘admissions consultant’ is gouging everyone for as much as he can get because he wants as much as he can get. Being Asian is much less a factor than being super-rich, I’d wager.
Reading these comments, it’s like nobody heard of intersectionality. Maybe because, generally, the system is used to show how not only is someone disadvantaged for one reason (black), but it is worse because of another (woman). But the power of intersectionality is that it applies to all sorts of situations. Yes, there is anti-Chinese bias and racism. Yes, also, Chinese immigrants (and recent non-Central American immigrants generally) tend to be better off than those they left behind. Remember Vietnamese boat people? They were the Vietnamese who could afford to buy boats at exorbitant prices from profiteers, with gold. So some Chinese-Americans immigrants are wealthy. The intersectional pattern includes deficits (race, language) and advantages (wealth, cultural stability).
In short, it’s complicated. Not everything is a tweet.
Could just be that Sherry in particular was hard to make look good on her application, so a higher magnitude of bribe to spread around was needed. As compared to other kids involved in this scheme.
After all, Yale could use an international airport…
According to the article they paid most of the money to a fake non profit and were never told that the student would be set up as a fake soccer player. That was done between the soccer coach and the middle man who set up the non profit. They thought they were donating money to underprivileged youth and that that would help their daughter’s application. As a non-American, from what I’ve heard about how American institutions work that wouldn’t be an unreasonable assumption.
