JOHN DERBYSHIRE: Prof. Amy Wax Questions Our Importing An Asian Overclass. Apparently, That’s Not Allowed

01/07/2022

[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]

Professor Amy Wax is speaking unspeakable truths out loud again. With the usual results.

Professor Wax — she is the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School — has come to our attention before.

To refresh your memory:

Back in August 2017 she coauthored an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer with another law professor, Larry Alexander, praising bourgeois norms, loosely associating them with white people, and blaming America’s social ills on the breakdown of those norms.
In the fuss that followed that, Professor Wax did a Bloggingheads conversation with Glenn Loury, a black social-science professor at Brown University. In that conversation Prof. Wax remarked that "I don’t think I've ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely in the top half. “

That was a sleeper; no one noticed it at the time. A few months later, though, some witch-hunters dug it up and Prof. Wax was put through another Two Minutes Hate.
Then at the National Conservatism Conference in summer 2019, speaking about immigration, Prof. Wax dared to assert that people from some cultures assimilated better than people from others [Here’s What Amy Wax Really Said About Immigration, Federalist, July 26, 2019]. More pointing and sputtering.

So Prof. Amy Wax has a track record of kicking the stone. As best I can figure she’s not a race realist; but she takes the next best thing — what I have called "hard culturism" — as far as it can be taken without bringing in biology.

OK, so what’s she in trouble for now? Well, on December 20th she was in public discussion with Glenn Loury again.

This is a lady not easily deterred.

They discussed immigration. Prof. Wax said she thought mass immigration from Asia was unwise. Sample:

[We] have to distinguish mass-immigration, which we're getting from the Hispanics, south of the border, which I think poses different questions and challenges from the Asian elites that we're getting … It doesn’t mean that the influx of Asian elites is unproblematic. I actually think it’s problematic. I think it’s because there’s this danger of the dominance of an Asian elite in this country, and what does that mean? What is that going to mean to change the culture?

‘Racist’ Penn Law Prof Makes Disturbing Claim U.S. Is ‘Better Off With Fewer Asians,' by Brooke Leigh Howard, Daily Beast, January 3, 2022

VDARE.com note: The young woman who wrote this hit piece, Brooke Leigh Howard [Twitter/Email] is a very light-skinned woman of color who is “a reporter focusing on race and identity for The Daily Beast” and whose pinned Tweet says “Black women matter.”

Below, left, her Twitter profile pic, and right, her Daily Beast profile pic, giving a very different impression.

This is an easy one for me. I've been arguing against mass immigration from Asia for years here at VDARE.com, so I can just quote myself.

Here I was in December 2017, for example, a post titled Time To Stop Importing An Immigrant Overclass:

The first time America imported an overclass, we did so accidentally. When that Great Wave of Ashkenazi Jews came in after 1881, we had only the vaguest ideas about population differentials in intelligence and personality. Psychometry as a quantitative science was just getting started.

Now we understand much more, and can make better decisions. If we import a new overclass today, we'll be doing it deliberately. We know enough to not do it.

And here I was a couple of weeks later, on the same theme but from a different angle. The title here was: OF COURSE Harvard Discriminates Against Asians. But Maybe That’s Good For Americans? In that post, I pointed out that

Immigration patriots in the early 20th century strove to keep out East Asian immigrants, not because they "hated" them, as the infantile language of our current discourse would tell you, or because they thought them an inferior race, but because they feared mass immigration of East Asians would produce an overclass, generating discontent and resentment among legacy Americans.

As Kevin Macdonald wrote here at VDARE.com in 2004: "Many restrictionists, far from feeling they were members of a superior ethnic group, worried that their people could not compete with Japanese and Chinese."

I love this. At this point in my career as a bloviator I've passed opinions on everything I know about. All I have to do is sit back and direct your attention to people saying the same true and obvious things I've been saying.

None of which detracts from the fact that Amy Wax is raising an important issue, and the attacks on her, above all from her Law School Dean Theodore Ruger (“Wax’s views are diametrically opposed to the policies and ethos of this institution,” i.e., he admits the Law School is politically partisan), are disgraceful in a free society…assuming we are still a free society.

John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.

For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.

Readers who wish to donate (tax deductible) funds specifically earmarked for John Derbyshire’s writings at VDARE.com can do so here.

< Previous

Next >

This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.