Stories and Beliefs
Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it.
-Thomas Jefferson
The first time I heard someone in LA use the word jap, I glared at them. I was in high school at the time. Where I grew up, it was a derogatory term non-Japanese Asians used to refer to Japanese people. A friendly adult said it when referencing someone I didn’t know. It changed my perception of them as a person. I didn’t know the phrase meant Jewish American Princess to them– a culture I didn’t understand.
High School
In my public high school class of over 500 kids, I was the only Jewish kid. I was the only white kid in most of my classes (the honors and AP classes) and the only white kid on the tennis team. Checking now, it’s over 95% minority. My high school was Asian.
The fobs and non-fobs self-segregated. Fob stood for fresh off the boat. You can tell if someone is a fob by their accent, mannerisms, and the content of their lunches.
Asia
I later lived in Korea for over a year. Now, I was the fob. I worked with the chaebol. Before that, I taught English from pre-K to high school to university to 80-year-olds whose families split up during the Korean War. It was like an extreme version of high school with the added culture shock and lost in translation issues. Every day, children would point at me and yell foreigner.
I had students who worked for years to save $500K to move to America and start a business. $500K is the minimum investment needed to obtain an EB-5 green card. It was the only path they saw to come to America. When you meet someone whose decade-long goal is to save money to get a visa to live in America, it forces perspective.
Policy
It’s personal for me to fight against policies superficially “promoting diversity” because they’re designed to hurt the diverse people I grew up with. To get into college, to immigrate to the US, or to get accepted into any government program, Asians have it harder. DEI policies are designed to push them down due to the circumstances in which they were born.
No matter the extreme obstacles my Asian friends faced, they, in addition, had an artificially higher bar. This was most blatant in the recent Supreme Court Case, showing how Harvard has discriminated against Asians for decades under the guise of affirmative action. Asians have to work harder and do more… all because they were born Asian. This is wrong.
What’s in it for me?
Nothing. I’m fine either way. No skin off my back. Life would be much easier if I only supported and said things that were always seen as polite. Life would be easier if I perfectly followed the Overton window. But I view it as cowardly– a life not worth living. No one who has created a legacy or lived a life others respect perfectly follows the Overton window.
Here’s the kicker. Beyond anything, I think personal stories like mine above don’t matter. What matters are the results of policies. Let’s A/B test policies and see what leads to the best outcomes. Let’s push for policies that are proven to do the most good. Not those with the best story that most tug at our heartstrings.
Policy vs Story
It reminds me of a Milton Friedman video where an audience member asks if he was ever poor or on welfare. The ad hominem question attacked him for being an out-of-touch capitalist who can’t relate or even fathom what it’s like to be poor. Friedman answered that he was and worked a 12-hour day to get paid 78 cents, and the audience applauded. But at the end, he says, “It’s irrelevant. Is there one of you who is going to say you don’t want a doctor to treat you for cancer unless he himself has had cancer?” You want the best doctor, not the doctor who experienced your ailment.
Similarly, empathy exists. You don’t need to have a loved one murdered to imagine how awful it must feel and know that it’s wrong. A/B testing and observing the outcomes of policy works. You don’t need to grow up in each circumstance to understand the best policy. The best policy is the one that ultimately leads to the best outcome.
Intentions
People attacked Betsy DeVos for being a wealthy woman passionate about education. She promoted charter schools. DeVos doesn’t economically benefit from her policies. Think of the time and money she spent dedicating her life to improving education. And yet, the media cast her as a villain hell-bent on destroying children’s lives.
Education didn’t affect her directly; she did it because she cared about helping the children in our country. You can disagree with her and attack her policies, but attacking her intentions is absurd. The post-modernist, post-truth world led to a pervasive view that if you disagree with someone, they must be bad.
Stories are fun for storytelling and getting people to feel. However, policy can and should be measured. Trust results.