Word: descented
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...master's degree and a Ph.D., with the eventual aim of teaching women's and Asian- American studies at the university level. Her story sounds like every parent's dream come true, but it is hardly unique. Around the country, young people of Asian descent seem to embody the tongue-in-cheek demographics of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, where "all the children are above average." Working-world Asians, meanwhile, have produced a veritable galaxy of stellar performers in the U.S., from the arts and sciences to business and finance. Like immigrating Jews of earlier generations, they have parlayed cultural...
They already make up disproportionately large shares of university classes, a development that has stuck a bamboo pole into the affirmative-action machinery. Fully 41% of the entering freshman class at UCLA this autumn consists of students of Asian descent. At Berkeley they total 33.6% of enrollments, which has prompted calls for an admissions policy limiting their numbers. Not all rivals for the fruits of education are convinced that such an invidious system would be fair play. Some black intellectuals who have a stronger faith in self-reliance have argued that competing minorities would be better off raising their...
Four hundred miles up the coast, at the University of California, Berkeley, "students of color" -- notably those of Asian and Hispanic descent -- have grown into a majority that demands to see its diversity reflected in textbooks and the faculty. After a debate admittedly more political than scholarly, the school now requires all undergraduates, whatever their ethnicity or major, to study at least three out of five cultural groups: Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, African Americans and Europeans. The explicit goal: to move away from an "Anglocentric" curriculum toward one that validates other cultures, however slim their connection with America's past...
...rather like union members refusing to cross a picket line. The very use of the term "of color" -- which embraces blacks, historically antagonistic Asian ethnicities, Native Americans and Hispanics, many of whom are ethnically white -- implies that these disparate groups are bonded simply by not being of Northern European descent. Often such coalitions add up to a majority, but they cling to rights based on minority status. When white male conservatives feel harassed, multiculturalists retort that they are enabling these fellow students to share in the sense of disenfranchisement, enriching their understanding of the world...
...York of his day, a tribal pecking order prevailed in many fields. Mario Cuomo, though a top student, couldn't find a berth in any major law firm. Except for the lowliest jobs, Wall Street, insurance and banking were also closed to those of Mediterranean or Slavic descent. A handful of legal and financial establishments were the preserves of high-caste German Jews, seldom hospitable to Polish and Russian Jews. The Postal Service was more ) egalitarian. The merit system allowed a Baratz to rise in rank, slowly. But my father felt that he lived in confinement -- a condition from which...