Winkler isn’t a Klansman and Tong is hardly a victim – Journal Inquirer

Participating in a legislative hearing on housing discrimination last week, state Rep. Michael Winkler, D-Vernon, may not have known (along with most of his constituents) a couple of disgraceful aspects of United States history: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent during World War II when they were falsely suspected of disloyalty. Or maybe Winkler just forgot about them. That can happen.

So Winkler mistakenly remarked that a Greenwich housing official who was defending his town against complaints of exclusivity should not have counted residents of Asian descent as members of oppressed minorities because Asian Americans never faced discrimination.

While mistaken, Winkler had not "disparaged" people of Asian descent, as some people inferred and some news organizations reported. He was just opposing exclusive zoning and was a bit inept as he argued, accurately, that wealthy Greenwich is not as open residentially as it might like to pretend, and that Blacks are the most disadvantaged of Connecticut's minority groups.

But since this is the era of political correctness, indignation, intimidation, and posturing, Winkler's colleagues at the state Capitol couldn't just cordially correct him. They had to demonstrate their righteousness by denouncing him as if this avuncular liberal Democrat was actually a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

The next day state Attorney General William Tong, himself of Asian descent, carved time from his busy schedule posturing elsewhere to pile on, though Winkler had already apologized contritely at the end of the hearing the night before. His contrition did Winkler no good. The verdict was already in: Off with his head!

Tong bellowed: "The history of bias and hate against Asian Americans in this country is long and largely invisible, an unfortunate reality that has been highlighted by the ignorant comments made by Representative Winkler. The myth of the so-called model minority' is a dangerous fiction that for too long has allowed this country to erase and ignore this shameful history."

Of course nearly everybody these days wants to be considered a victim of one thing or another because victimhood is so powerful politically. If you're a victim, everyone is supposed to be cowed into doing whatever you demand, even if it isn't any fairer than what was done to you. Victim status is especially useful to politicians, even those who have reached high office, thereby inadvertently giving evidence that maybe they weren't such victims.

Anyone who questions this racket risks getting called an ugly name. So most people in politics endure it in silence.

But the "model minority" isnota myth about people of Asian descent in America. The social science and occasional political controversies suggest that despite the bigotry they have faced -- much reduced now, the Chinese Exclusion Act being long repealed and the internment of the Japanese Americans long repudiated by statute and reparations -- Americans of Asian descent indeed tend to work harder than they complain. As a result their success, as a proportion of their numbers, is much greater than that of other ethnic groups and whites, especially academically. This may have more to do with culture and family values than genetics.

So the bigger history here is not, as Tong says, "shameful" butheroic-- a history of overcoming injustice and thus making the whole country more just. Indeed, that remains the American story generally, which in turn is part of what used to be called the ascent of man, though it may have slowed lately.

Even as the attorney general postures about injustice to people of Asian descent in the distant past and in the present inotherstates, he has dismissed injustice to them right in his own state. For Tong has taken the side of Yale University against the litigation brought on behalf of students of Asian descent who claim that in pursuit of "diversity," Yale, like other elite institutions, has imposed a quota on their admission, just as higher education long has done against Jewish students with superior qualifications.

If academic achievement determined admission, student populations in higher education would be even more Asian and Jewish than they already are. But the political correctness Tong strives to serve in pursuit of even higher office confuses diversity with justice.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer.

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Winkler isn't a Klansman and Tong is hardly a victim - Journal Inquirer