Chapter One
Everyone loves a good underdog story.
I was reminded of how true that cliché is when I watched King Richard last year, a movie about how Richard Williams took his daughters Venus and Serena from the streets of Compton to the top of the tennis world.
I used to play competitive tennis myself and watched the sisters play in person countless times, so I was fascinated by the tale the movie told. Venus and Serena overcame long odds, but their dad is the original underdog of the story. He starts off the movie penniless, coming up with a seventy-eight-page plan to turn his yet-to-be-born children into tennis stars to carry the entire family out of poverty. Then he starts training them each once they turn four, having them practice long hours, rain or shine, sometimes rallying back and forth to the sound of gunshots.
The Williams sisters served as executive producers for the film, so the movie understandably takes care to leave out some complicating details. For instance, although Richard frequently tells his kids that he’ll “always be there” for them, the movie doesn’t mention that he abandoned five children from his first family when the oldest was only eight.1 The fairy-tale underdog can have minor character flaws, but only ones that arise from the very virtues that make him succeed. The only faults the Will Smith version of Richard has are that he’s too driven, too demanding.
The movie presents a heartwarming tale of a father determined to keep his daughters off the streets so they can get out of the ghetto. But what it doesn’t say is that the family already had the money to live in a better neighborhood. “The ghetto will make you rough, it’ll make you tough, it’ll make you strong,” Richard told CNN. “And so that’s why I went to Compton with them.”2 His plan worked out perfectly for Venus and Serena, but their half-sister Yetunde Price was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2003.
I found the true story even more intriguing than the sanitized one. Just as the movie itself cleaned up Richard’s life to distill it into a story for the big screen, he consciously designed his own daughter’s lives to raise them to see themselves as underdogs. He engineered them that way, right down to hiding his wife’s birth-control pills after she was reluctant to agree to his plan to turn their future children into tennis stars.3 Richard Williams knew that everyone loves a good underdog story, so he made one out of his girls’ lives. Then they made one out of his.
Narratives about one’s identity hold great power—not just the power to understand a life in hindsight, but the power to create it, the power to give it meaning and direction. At its core, the appeal of the underdog story comes from its promise that we can create something from nothing, imposing our will on an unforgiving universe. The narrative promises that we can choose our own destinies, no matter how humble our starting points. It offers the hope that if we work hard and attempt great things, we can succeed. It may be easier for a favorite to win, but that only makes the dark horse’s victory sweeter. In the process of working hard to overcome our disadvantages, we gain not only glory, but character. The underdog who has to claw their way to the top understands things the favorite will never know.
The United States of America began as a nation of underdogs. Our founding fathers stood up to the most powerful empire in the world, declared their independence, and then somehow turned assertion into reality. Then, a little over 150 years later, we ourselves became the most powerful country in the world. We went from a loosely affiliated collection of backwater farmers to an empire in the blink of an eye, in the eyes of history.
Ever since claiming our independence, Americans have had a special fondness for underdog stories. It’s our national DNA. Every politician knows this. It’s why they all have their own version of the “born in a log cabin” story. We even have a name for the American take on the trope: Horatio Alger stories. Horatio Alger made a name for himself in the 1800s writing rags-to-riches young adult novels, publishing a hundred before his death. His books were almost always about impoverished boys who made comfortable lives for themselves through hard work, honesty, charity, and a healthy dose of luck. After Alger’s publisher gently suggested he tour the Western United States to inspire him to write something new, he kept writing the same stories but set them in California. His books remained the bestsellers of the era.
The presence of good fortune in the narrative may confuse some people—isn’t virtue alone supposed to be enough? But as the Roman philosopher Seneca famously put it, luck is simply what happens when preparation meets opportunity. If the American system does a good enough job of ensuring everyone gets a fair chance, and they prepare themselves by exemplifying the appropriate values, the American Dream promises that every underdog eventually has their day. Democracy was supposed to give them equal rights, capitalism was supposed to ensure equal opportunity for upward economic mobility, institutions like Christianity were supposed to instill them with the right values, and then their own virtue was supposed to do the rest.
Coming in the economic boom of the Gilded Age, Horatio Alger stories spread like wildfire, capturing the popular imagination and giving many a dream that the American way of life allowed them to turn into reality. As its citizens prospered, the nation did too. That’s the America I knew. It’s the America my parents came halfway around the world to join.
But what happens when the longshot becomes the favorite? Does an underdog story ever end? If it does, what takes its place?
I was reminded of these questions last year when I saw a commercial for, of all things, Dodge pickup trucks. “When does an underdog stop being an underdog?” it asked. “After the first big win? The second? Try never. Because being an underdog isn’t about how much you win. It’s about how hard you’re willing to work for it. And making sure your opponents never know your next move. Which is why some of us make a point of staying the underdogs, even when we’re on top.”4
I didn’t end up buying the truck, but the ad stuck with me because it’s the same message I preach to every company I’m involved in founding. We must be “insurgents, not incumbents,” I say. Startups are by definition not incumbents, but the key to lasting success is that you can’t ever allow your company to think of itself that way.
If it’s true for companies, it’s even more true for individuals. Michael Jordan really was an underdog at the start of his basketball career—as a sophomore, he didn’t make the varsity team, a grudge he’s held to this day. But when he was a six-time NBA champion and five-time MVP, he still saw himself as an underdog, motivating himself with imagined slights. In Jordan’s mind, for instance, he was cut from the varsity team when in fact he simply wasn’t placed on it. He flew out the one sophomore that did make the team to his Hall of Fame induction speech, where, after giving a few perfunctory thank-yous, he spent twenty-three minutes settling old scores, as if he thought no one had ever believed in him.5
Some people thought it was tasteless, but they missed that Jordan was actually revealing his secret to becoming the greatest basketball player of all time. True underdogs never stop seeing themselves that way. It’s the narrative of their entire lives, not just a chapter in it. It’s who they are, not a thing that once happened to them. As they achieve their goals, they constantly create new ones, always broadening their aspirations until the deck is still stacked against them. Like Jordan, they always convince themselves that they still have something left to prove.
Underdogs are always outsiders, struggling to prove themselves to a world that doesn’t believe in them—not necessarily because the world actively doubts them, but because they know there’s still more in them than they’ve been able to show. When underdogs are praised for accomplishments that seem to them small in light of their ambitions, they take it as a sign that the one giving the praise doubts they can accomplish more.
For a few people like Jordan, and apparently for organizations like Dodge, their underdog story never ends. They’re always telling it to themselves to help them reach new heights. Sadly, that’s not the way things usually go. More often, underdogs who succeed do eventually stop seeing themselves that way. The dark horse becomes the favorite; the insurgent becomes the incumbent. They stop growing and start coasting. They focus on keeping what they have instead of improving themselves to get more. The athlete stops learning new skills, since the old skills were good enough to win games. The company stops making innovative new products and instead keeps updating the old ones.
Once successful underdogs start resting on their laurels, they’re ripe for a new narrative of their lives to emerge: victimhood.
Everyone Loves a Good Victim Story
If the story of the Williams sisters and their dad is the story of the American underdog, then Jussie Smollett’s is the paradigmatic story of the American victim.
In January 2019, Smollett, a well-known actor who’s gay and black, filed a report with the Chicago Police Department claiming he’d been the victim of a vicious hate crime. He said that he was attacked by two ski-mask-and-MAGA-cap-wearing men who savagely beat him, wrapped a noose around his neck, and poured chemicals on him, shouting racial and homophobic slurs and proclaiming their allegiance to Donald Trump the whole time. He was hospitalized for a day while receiving treatment for his injuries.
Conservatives instantly spotted the implausibility of the story. But left-leaning media, politicians, and celebrities ate it up. In fact, it seemed as if every prominent left-leaning figure in America felt an obligation to immediately make a public statement supporting Smollett. As if filling out a form letter, virtually identical messages condemning Smollett’s attackers and calling for justice issued forth from luminaries such as Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pete Buttigieg, Kirsten Gillibrand, Rashida Tlaib, Ariana Grande, Ellen DeGeneres, Cher, and Al Sharpton.
The celebrity call for justice was answered, though not in the way they’d hoped. A few weeks later, Chicago police arrested Smollett after their investigation concluded he had hired two extras from his show Empire to stage the attack on him. A grand jury charged him with filing a false police report.
But a month after that, state prosecutors dropped all charges against Smollett for mysterious reasons, and a judge ordered his court file sealed.6 Perhaps coincidentally, Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff Tina Tchen had reached out to the prosecutor overseeing the case to convey Smollett’s concerns about the investigation.7 Perhaps coincidentally, Smollett and Obama were good friends. Who can say why the charges were suddenly dropped? The world may never know.
The story might’ve ended there, and many notable figures would’ve been happy. But the Illinois Prosecutors Bar Association released a scathing statement that began, “The manner in which this case was dismissed was abnormal and unfamiliar to those who practice law in criminal courthouses across the State. Prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges alike do not recognize the arrangement Mr. Smollett received. Even more problematic, the State’s Attorney and her representatives have fundamentally misled the public on the law and circumstances surrounding the dismissal.”8 President Donald Trump then directed federal officials to reopen the case and investigate the dismissal, a special prosecutor was appointed, and Smollett was once again charged.
The trial began to go poorly as two of Smollett’s friends testified in great detail about how he’d paid them $3,500 apiece to stage the attack. Both are black, and one had an intimate homosexual relationship with the accused; nevertheless, Smollett insisted the attack was motivated by homophobia. As his prospects started looking increasingly grim, his lawyer bizarrely asked the judge to declare a mistrial, crying and accusing him of lunging at her during a sidebar and snarling while sustaining prosecutors’ objections. She said it was part of a nationwide pattern of disrespect toward black female attorneys.9
Despite his attorneys’ inventive strategies, Smollett was convicted. One black juror said that the smoking gun for him was Smollett’s own testimony that after the attack he returned home and placed the noose around his neck again so the police who came to interview him could see it.10
In this single episode, victimhood became a status symbol, a fashion statement, and a (nearly) get-out-of-jail-free card. How did this identity become so prized in our country? When did we stop wanting to be underdogs and start wanting to be victims?
I know, I know. Bringing up the Jussie Smollett case is just a conservative talking point. My liberal friends regularly remind me not to parrot those. Right after the initial staged attack, the standard progressive line when conservatives questioned his account was that we were victimizing him all over again by doubting him. Now that he’s been charged, re-charged, and convicted of a hate crime hoax, the standard line is that mentioning any of this is just a conservative talking point.
In this book I hope to present many good conservative talking points, and other talking points as well. Here’s one: there’s actually not that much difference between an underdog story and a tale of victimhood. They’re close cousins, competitors of each other. That’s why it’s so easy to transition from one to the other. That’s what I think is happening to America today—to liberals, conservatives, and everyone in between.
In both narratives, the protagonist is a sympathetic figure who faces overwhelming odds through no fault of their own. In both, the meat of the narrative involves struggling against an unfair world, and the story can only be successfully resolved once the hero attains the worldly wealth or victory their virtuous heart deserves. A classic Horatio Alger story.
But although underdog stories and victimhood ones follow the same broad outline, the details of the execution are much different. The most crucial distinction is that the underdog struggles and overcomes the forces arrayed against them, but the victim’s task is to convince others to overcome adversity for them. The underdog makes a demand of themself; the victim makes a demand of those around them. The underdog’s hardships are dealt to them by fate, not by other people, and they make it part of their own destiny to overcome those hardships. The victim’s hardships are necessarily created by other people—the evildoers who commit racist acts, the perpetrators who steal elections—who owe them something in return.
An underdog story offers the hope that you can do anything, that no matter your lot in life, your fate is ultimately in your hands, that it’s only a question of how hard you work and how long you have to wait for preparation to meet opportunity. That’s a naïve view at times, but at least an inspiring one. A quintessentially American one, and true at its core. Maybe people can’t do anything, but they can almost always do more than they think.
In contrast, although the victim starts in the same destitute position as the underdog, their story is all about what they can’t do—the odds are too great, the enemies too strong, the circumstances too unjust for the happy ending to be achieved by the hero’s own power. The only way to reach a successful resolution is for the victimizers to eventually make recompense to the victim by helping them reach the finish line. The underdog’s task is to overcome others’ doubt by proving them wrong about what they can do. But the victim’s task is to overcome their doubt by persuading them to recognize them as a victim.
Victimhood is often born out of a psychological need created by one’s status as an incumbent. If wealthy Hollywood stars and former presidents can be victims, then the greatest country in the world can be one too. The United States has gone from being a nation of insurgents at its founding to a nation of incumbents today. Though the transition hasn’t fully eroded its wealth and power, it’s already been hell on our national spirit.
In some ways our founding fathers knew we would walk this path. Some of them even hoped for it. John Adams told his wife, “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”11 That was a bit of a humble-brag. It’s true that Adams studied politics and war, but he also studied math, philosophy, and poetry, along with Greek and Latin. A little-known fact about Adams is that after serving as our second president, he committed himself to becoming a scholar of Hindu scripture.12 He wrote to his friend and rival Thomas Jefferson that if he were to live his life again, he’d have been a Sanskrit scholar. Both men continued learning things right up to the day they both died—July 4, 1826—exactly fifty years after they signed the Declaration of Independence together. Jefferson and Adams studied much more than politics and war.
Nevertheless, the quote from Adams expresses a beautiful sentiment. Arguably, it’s even played out that way—modern Americans are far more likely to study art and literature than war. But if Adams could’ve seen even further into the future, he might’ve wondered what his great-grandchildren would study, and their children, and generations further into the future. Did he imagine that it would all be William Wordsworth and John Keats forever, or that Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo would one day supplant them? Mired arm-deep in war and politics as he was, in trying to build a great nation from nothing, Adams could hardly have imagined that one day success would bring its own problems.
The words often attributed to Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, the founder of Dubai, come closer to reality: “My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I ride a Mercedes, my son rides a Land Rover, and my grandson is going to ride a Land Rover, but my great-grandson is going to have to ride a camel again. Hard times create strong men, strong men create easy times, easy times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”13
The viral saying perfectly captures the journey from insurgency to incumbency, from underdog to victim. Today, almost all Americans live far easier and more luxurious lives than our forefathers did. The life span of the average American has doubled since 1776. GDP per capita has multiplied by over forty.14 An analysis from the Heritage Foundation points out that even poor Americans have things their ancestors wouldn’t have dreamed of:
According to the government’s own data, the average American family or single person, identified as poor by the Census Bureau, lives in an air-conditioned, centrally heated house or apartment that is in good repair and not overcrowded. They have a car or truck. (Indeed, 43% of poor families own two or more cars.)
The home has at least one widescreen TV connected to cable, satellite, or a streaming service, a computer or tablet with internet connection, and a smartphone. (Some 82% of poor families have one or more smartphones.)
By their own report, the average poor family had enough food to eat throughout the prior year. No family member went hungry for even a single day due to a lack of money for food.
They have health insurance (either public or private) and were able to get all “necessary medical care and prescription medication” when needed.15
Don’t worry, I’ll get to wealth inequality later in the book. But in absolute terms, the average American is doing pretty well compared to the ones who came before us, as you would expect in the richest, most powerful nation in the world. Next to most of the world, we live in a land of milk and honey. Hardworking immigrants should want to be Americans, and we should let them. My parents are still grateful for the chances this country gave them. I’m grateful, too. This is still the land of opportunity.
But it’s that very prosperity that now affords us the luxury of seeing ourselves as victims instead of underdogs. Our forebearers in American history (like much of the developing world today) had to focus on surviving and building a future for their descendants. Today we worry about microaggressions, while they were more concerned about regular ones. But when microaggressions are all you’ve known, those become regular aggressions on the scale you’ve built for yourself, the same way a well-coddled baby cries over anything they dislike because it’s quite literally the worst thing that’s ever happened to them. Bickering about pronouns is a classic first-world problem. Americans now worry about finding words to be offended by, while many people in the world still worry about finding food.
Our forefathers didn’t have any choice but to embrace the underdog narrative, but we do. That’s the crucial difference between a nation of insurgents and a nation of incumbents. The nation as a whole possesses a lot more resources today, so it becomes possible, even logical, for people to overcome adversity by changing the way the pie is distributed instead of by growing it. A story of victimhood would win little in sympathy or reward in the nation’s past. But today, it’s often the fastest path to greater money and influence.
Underdog stories and victimhood tales are like the light and dark sides of the Force: they have something in common, but the dark side is the easier path to power, even if it leaves you worse off in the end. The underdog’s journey is hard; that’s what defines it. It’s even more daunting set against the backdrop of a long history of people who have made the same journey successfully. That’s the historical backdrop of our merit-based culture, one that places a lot of pressure on people today—pressure that the original underdogs in our nation didn’t have to face. The high risk of failure in an established merit-based culture provides a powerful incentive for people to take the easier path—say, victimhood—whenever it’s available.
Logically, we could resolve that problem either by closing off victimhood as a path to success or by moving away from our merit-based culture. In this book I make the case for the former; in his recent book The Meritocracy Trap, law professor Daniel Markovits argues for the latter.16 Markovits believes meritocracy gives the rich an insurmountable advantage over the poor because it makes education the key to success, and the rich can pay for expensive educations for their children. Those children become successful, educate their own children, and the gap between rich and poor gradually widens into an informal hereditary aristocracy. Markovits also says that even the winners of meritocracy’s game are unhappy, because they’re placed in a rat race that requires long hours of grueling work, with the constant fear that if they slow down they’ll fall behind forever. That’s a debate for later.17
Nation of Victims
But a victimhood narrative allows one to skip the rat race altogether and jump straight to the cheese at the end. That’s the path Jussie Smollett tried to take to prestige and influence. It was working wonders until he got caught, and it even worked for a while afterward, so strong was the narrative and so powerful the people advancing it. Of course, Smollett is just one example, and a mere conservative talking point at that. But look closer at modern America and you’ll see people pursuing the path of victimhood everywhere.
Naomi Osaka, formerly the top female tennis player in the world, abruptly withdrew from the French Open. Why? Because of the stress created by press conferences, we’re told. Then, less than a year later, in March 2022, she played a match at the famed Indian Wells tournament in California. In a stadium filled with thousands of fans, she heard one woman scream from the stands “Naomi, you suck!”—and that fan was then shouted down by other fans who were rooting for Naomi. Nothing unheard of at sports games with tens of thousands of fans packed into a stadium. Osaka’s response? In the middle of the match, she asked the chair umpire to let her take the microphone and talk to the audience—and then cried before going on to lose that set 6-0, and then eventually the match.18
It’s particularly interesting that Osaka cited the reason for her trauma at the match back to the moment in 2001 when Serena Williams—and her father, Richard—were booed at the Indian Wells tournament. In that case, there was a real controversy at issue: Venus was supposed to play Serena in the semifinals, yet Venus withdrew from the match due to an injury. Richard Williams was an increasingly prominent and public figure who said all kinds of crazy-sounding things on camera, and there was growing suspicion of foul play of some kind arranged by Richard between the two sisters to give Serena a path to victory at the tournament. In that situation, the entire crowd booed Richard and Serena as they entered the stadium—over ten thousand people jeering against the two of them under suspicion of them having done something wrong.
It might’ve been unfair. Serena certainly seemed to think so, since she boycotted Indian Wells for fifteen years thereafter. But not after first defeating Kim Clijsters in the championship match at the tournament, without a tear in her eyes at the end of it. It was the inverse of Osaka’s situation: a single fan who said a mean thing was shouted down by the rest of the audience, only to have caused Osaka herself to have a meltdown so unprecedented that she begged for a microphone in the middle of the match to address that lone fan.
The new trend toward victimhood isn’t limited to sports. It’s everywhere.
To begin with one notable example, Rachel Dolezal mastered being a victim. Some people know her as a white woman who posed as black. She rode her civil rights advocacy and her fake race all the way to becoming the president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, an instructor in Africana studies at Eastern Washington University, and education director at the Human Rights Education Institute as well as securing an appointment to a police advisory commission. She reported numerous hate crimes against her to the police; none panned out.19 Dolezal’s parents eventually outed her as white. She acknowledged that her parents were white but insisted that she still identified as black. She wrote a memoir about it in 2017.20
This is only one example. I doubt academics have conducted rigorous studies about how many of them are faking their races—how could anyone know, and who would fund that? But what we can know is that when society attaches massive rewards to being the right race and allows people to self-report it, that provides a powerful incentive for people to lie. I see more and more stories like Dolezal’s popping up as time goes on, rarely covered with as much publicity.
Jessica Krug, associate professor of history at George Washington University, had risen to the top of academia by writing about her experiences as an “Afro-Latinx” woman who was an “unrepentant and unreformed child of the hood.” When a couple of actual black Latino scholars eventually became suspicious, she admitted she was white. Krug said that her deception was the product of mental health issues.21 Neuroscientist BethAnn McLaughlin, founder of the MeTooSTEM organization, used the same excuse when she admitted to having created a fake Native American adjunct professor to defend her on Twitter. McLaughlin’s followers became suspicious after she held a Zoom memorial for her fake friend, whom she’d killed off with COVID-19.22 Around the same time, Indiana racial justice activist Satchuel Cole, who uses they/them pronouns, admitted they were a white person who faked being black.23 Kelly Kean Sharp, a scholar of African American history, resigned her professorship at Furman University after being outed as white instead of Hispanic.24
How many academics and activists are faking their racial identities? An article in The Atlantic concludes, “You would be surprised at how many there are.”25 Well, I wouldn’t. All we can know for sure is that America’s new incentive structure, which rewards victimhood narratives, combined with the ease of lying about one’s race, ensures that Dolezal is far from alone.
The problem with these false public narratives about racial victimhood is that they create new false narratives in everyday life. I had an Afghani friend who, disappointed to find he’d get no affirmative action boost in his college applications because he counted as Caucasian, told me he was applying as black. I tried to convince him not to. He later told me he’d applied as Hispanic. Considering how competitive college admissions is, how much of a difference race makes, and how easy it is to lie, I would be shocked if it was not very common for people to lie about their race. Colleges certainly have every incentive to turn a blind eye to it; faking your race makes it easier for them to meet their unofficial quotas. It’s a win-win. Only dignity and integrity lose, along with the nation.
There’s one group that can’t fake its race in college admissions and would probably really like to: Asians. In her landmark opinion legalizing affirmative action in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, Sandra Day O’Connor famously concluded with “The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”26 This is the only time I can think of in all of law when the Supreme Court assigned an expiration date to a constitutional right. We’re coming up on Justice O’Connor’s deadline, and, right on schedule, the Supreme Court is poised to end affirmative action in lawsuits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina.27 But the legal argument is not that affirmative action is unnecessary, but that it causes schools to actively discriminate against Asian applicants.
The evidence is infuriatingly strong. The standard data everyone discusses on this point is Princeton professor Thomas Espenshade’s 2009 study finding that Asian applicants had to score 140 points higher than white ones on the SAT to have the same chance of admission to elite colleges, 270 points higher than Hispanic applicants, and 450 points higher than black ones. It is equally standard for progressives to respond that Espenshade himself has said that his evidence isn’t a smoking gun because it’s possible that Asian applicants tend to be worse than those of other races on all the soft factors beyond GPAs and test scores.28 I can’t help but notice that liberals don’t demand a smoking gun when inquiring into racism against other races.
Schools like Harvard have wholeheartedly embraced the idea that Asians have to score higher than every other race and get better grades because our personalities are worse. The group suing Harvard conducted a statistical analysis of more than 160,000 records and found that “Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like ‘positive personality,’ likability, courage, kindness and being ‘widely respected.’”29 Harvard disagrees with the methodology of the analysis, yet the lawsuit has revealed that its own private study in 2003 concluded that it appeared to discriminate against Asians:
University officials did concede that its 2013 internal review found that if Harvard considered only academic achievement, the Asian-American share of the class would rise to 43 percent from the actual 19 percent. After accounting for Harvard’s preference for recruited athletes and legacy applicants, the proportion of whites went up, while the share of Asian-Americans fell to 31 percent. Accounting for extracurricular and personal ratings, the share of whites rose again, and Asian-Americans fell to 26 percent.
What brought the Asian-American number down to roughly 18 percent, or about the actual share, was accounting for a category called “demographic,” the study found. This pushed up African-American and Hispanic numbers, while reducing whites and Asian-Americans.30
It’s kind of funny and sad that our antiracist society gives serious consideration to the argument that elite colleges aren’t discriminating against Asians because we’re just cowardly, unlikeable, unkind worker drones who aren’t leaders. It’s common knowledge that this is the exact same argument that Harvard made when it discriminated against Jews almost a century ago. Harvard wanted to reduce its population of Jewish students from 25 to 15 percent. It called that “the Jewish problem.” To accomplish this without imposing a strict quota, it introduced “character” requirements like leadership, which it found Jewish applicants consistently fell short on. It also introduced legacy admissions to further address its Jewish problem.31
Look, I don’t think we need to bring in Sherlock Holmes on this one. Harvard is discriminating against Asian applicants in exactly the same way it did against Jewish ones, for exactly the same reasons, with exactly the same results, and exactly the same justifications. But when you look at media analysis of the issue, you get a dozen progressive think pieces about how calling this racism is nothing more than another conservative talking point. Jonathan Chait documented this liberal hypocrisy in an excellent article in New York Magazine. He begins with this thesis: “The institutions that crafted these policies, and the liberals who have defended them, have relied overwhelmingly on dissembling and lies. Whatever the legal merits, the political case for Harvard’s system, and the similar systems used by its fellow elite institutions, has been formed by a stream of insultingly dishonest propaganda.”32 An apt assessment.
What liberals miss in their ruthless pursuit of social justice is that elevating some races above others based on a hierarchy of victimhood inevitably creates new victims. I was giving advice to a bright young Indian guy who wanted to major in computer science. He had a 1550 on the SAT, a 4.5 weighted GPA at a tough school, great essays, and a bunch of extracurricular activities, from editing the school paper to an internship at a top tech company. I foolishly encouraged him to apply to fifteen of the top thirty colleges. He ended up getting rejected from all of them, eventually attending a solid public school where the average GPA and SAT score were significantly lower than his.
It’s not the end of the world. He’ll likely have a comfortable middle-class life instead of getting on the fast-track to joining America’s elites. But as he kept dejectedly informing me of rejection after rejection, I just know that with each one he was thinking, What’s wrong with me? That’s the message an Asian kid gets when they read all their rejection letters and look at how much higher their test scores and GPAs are than the college’s averages, when they see their friends getting into those same schools with worse numbers: What’s wrong with me? What do they have that I don’t? That message is reinforced when the media keeps telling them it wasn’t about their race, that maybe Asians as a group just deserve to do worse on all the personality-based parts of the application.
I wanted to tell that kid that there was nothing wrong with him at all. I wanted to tell him that people were just holding his race against him, that they just had too many applications from Indian guys who love building robots. But I didn’t, because I thought telling him about the racism our society still endorses would’ve been cold comfort. I’ve decided to tell the next one.
I raised the issue of anti-Asian discrimination in college admissions in Woke, Inc. and was greeted with resounding silence. It was the single least-discussed aspect of that book, and it will likely be ignored again in coverage of this one. For liberals, the anti-Asian discrimination they allow and encourage in college admissions is the ultimate inconvenient truth. Some of you will accuse me of raising this as a conservative talking point meant to advance white supremacy, even as I’m objecting to discrimination against my own race. What a tangled web we weave…
Society seems to be going in the direction of handing out education, jobs, honors, and even medical treatment on the basis of race. As I write, New York, Utah, Minnesota, and other states are increasingly allocating scarce lifesaving COVID-19 treatments on the basis of race, explicitly prioritizing nonwhite people above white ones on the FDA’s recommendation.33 The question of whether one can identify as the race of their choice is now a life-or-death issue.
Race-based victim status isn’t just a shortcut to education and lifesaving care these days; it’s also becoming a qualification for government money. In March 2021, Oakland announced to great fanfare that it was launching a pilot program testing universal basic income, distributing $500 per month to six hundred low-income families for eighteen months. There’s a catch: white people weren’t eligible to apply.34 Officials and media justified this discrimination by appealing to gaps in median wealth between races; the editorial board of the Daily Californian breathlessly praised “The radical potential of guaranteed income based on race.”35
But individuals are not mere representatives of their race, and a poor black family and poor white one with the same amount of money are equally poor no matter what’s happening to the median white and black family. As the threat of lawsuits rolled in,36 Oakland quietly changed its eligibility requirements to say that people of all races are permitted to apply to the program, though its focus is still on helping “BIPOC” people.37 This is clearly a fig leaf to hide the city’s naked discrimination from the equal protection clause of the US Constitution. It appears the city will permit white people to apply and then will prioritize nonwhite ones when approving applications. I don’t think the Constitution will be so easily fooled; I hope the same is true for today’s judges who interpret it.
We’re not a nation that tells itself Horatio Alger stories anymore. Instead we award jobs, educations, medical care, and money—and even vice presidential and Supreme Court nominations—to whoever presents themselves as the right kind of victim. Since race, gender, mental illness, and other preferred victimhood categories are blurrily and subjectively defined, we encourage Americans to lie, stretch the truth, or simply focus on one narrow aspect of their identity to the exclusion of others—we incentivize them to tell stories of victimhood about themselves. There is no need to take the hard road of the underdog. If they can but find the right magic words, their narrative’s happy ending awaits.
The insurgent and the incumbent; the underdog and the victim. Two close competitors playing tug-of-war over the American soul. So how did we get here? That story starts farther back than you might think. Turn over the heavy log of a nation’s history, and don’t be surprised at what crawls out.