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I mean, China had fucking standardized tests before folks in Europe could fucking read en masse

zuky:

hamburgerjack:

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Are you fucking serious right now?

“They’re doing too well, they’re scaring us and challenging Whiteness.”

I mean

Are they going to talk about the CAPS

the literal limit caps they have on Asian students, domestic and abroad, going into schools?

Like, trying to make room for Whitey so they don’t feel bad?

I hear stories about some students marking White, whether they have ancestry or not, just so their applications can get a glance because they’re aware of the discrimination against high performing students of Asian descent?

They’re always so scared that they literally bar others from any chance of success.

That is how Whites have become dominant. Historical fact.

Historical fact.

Historical fact.

Yes, you sure did work hard once the competition was enslaved or dead, you had Jim Crow working, and you had folks in camps or barred from immigration

Yeah, sure did well

Mother fuckers

Ya’ll ain’t right.

Ya’ll just ain’t fucking right

and it eats me alive inside Ya’ll ain’t right.

Thank you.

I occasionally consider writing something about all this talk of test-taking and race which I’ve been hearing frankly since the 1980s, then I back away because I don’t feel like tackling all of the historical, cultural, socio-economic, political, psychological, and who-knows-what-other factors which combine to produce the results we see. But one of the big factors is exactly what hamburgerjack has mentioned: China’s long history of imperial examination as the principal vehicle for social mobility.

All Confucian societies — including China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Singapore — place heavy emphasis on a system of standardized testing, administered by the state, which largely determine a young student’s societal destiny for life. Historically, this was known as the Imperial Examination System and was put into practice in China in the Han dynasty, around 200 BCE. Back in the day, a peasant family’s best shot at striking it rich was to select the brainiest child in the family, relieve them from working the fields and instead make them study like the family’s fortune depend on it (because it did).

This system had a profound impact on 2,000 years of Chinese history and culture. Today’s college examinations are directly descended from that system. An entire thriving economy has developed around test-taking. It’s maximum pressure, high intensity, and brutal. While young students take their examinations, in any given town in China, you’ll see throngs of parents, friends, and relatives waiting outside the testing facility, for days if necessary, burning incense, making offerings, praying.

Believe me, there’s heavy discussion and debate in China about this system. Plenty of scholars criticize its mono-dimensionality, as well as its pressure which drives young people to depression, mental health problems, and suicide at alarming rates. That’s a debate that’s going to play out for years to come. At the same time, all students of East Asian history recognize the important and sometimes successful role the system has played in the development of society, governance, and culture. 

Now what do you think happens when you transpose that cultural tradition into North American society? Especially when US immigration policy since 1965 selects the most highly-educated, resource-connected families for admission into the country? Yeah. Standardized tests here are not all that brutal by comparison and Asian students ace tests with regularity, creating an aura of intellectual intimidation which is shown to throw off non-Asians in the same room. This isn’t because of any innate racial characteristics, it’s the result of concrete societal factors, too many to name, including two millenia of Confucian history.

“I mean, China had fucking standardized tests before folks in Europe could fucking read en masse”

LOL, WHITE PEOPLE.