San Francisco school board member Anne Hsu is in hot water for comments she made about black and Latino students, and the reason they’re harder to educate. From AsAmNews:
San Francisco school board member Ann Hsu has apologized for racist comments she made in a candidate questionnaire about the challenges facing Black and brown students.
According to KTVU, Hsu said in a candidate questionnaire for November’s elections that it is challenging to educate Black and brown students because of their “unstable family environments” and “lack of parental encouragement.”
San Francisco Mayor London Breed appointed Hsu to the school board in February after the recall of three board members. Now, Hsu is under fire for comments parents and community members say are racist and harmful. According to The San Francisco Chronicle, many have called for her resignation.
The MSN version of this story includes a video, in which we get more details about what she actually said:

Let’s do something that Hsu’s detractors seem incapable of doing. Let’s view this through the lens of reasoning.
Almost every aspect of modern life can be described in relative terms. When we say a person is “suffering from hunger,” we don’t always mean that he has absolutely NO food whatsoever. What we generally mean is that he lacks enough quality, or quantity, of food to flourish. When we say that a student “lacks discipline,” we’re not saying that he’s the same as a wild animal, with no inhibitions or self-control whatsoever. What we mean is that, RELATIVE to other students, he’s not as disciplined.
East Asians have a worldwide reputation for excelling in school. A quick internet search will yield many mainstream websites that give essentially the same reason. For example, the website IMDiversity has this to say about it:
… Asian parents take the time out to really get involved and know what their child is doing in the classroom. They are very aware of what’s going on. Asian parents are generally very practical people. They are the first to tell you that money really matters, that if you can’t pay your bills, it’s difficult to be happy.”
While many American parents encourage their kids to have as many extra-curricular activities as they can handle, Jane Kim says Asian parents usually don’t do that. “I think Asian families, many of them, make sure that the number one priority is education,” Jane says. “So they tend to limit a handful of extra curricular activities. Both Soo and I played piano. We also played tennis, and they are great for taking your mind from your studies and being able to mingle with other students. But I think if you have so many, it’s going to detract and you’re not necessarily going to do a great job in all of them.”
Soo Kim Abboud says she considers herself fortunate that she was raised in an Asian family. Being raised here in the United States, she says, was another advantage.
We can find countless other examples. They all agree that there are cultural traits, common to many Asian ethnicities, that stress academic achievement over all else.
Isn’t this the same as saying that other cultures stress academic achievement LESS? Anne Hsu is Asian, and she is 100% correct in pointing out that black and Latino families offer less academic support to their kids than do Asians.
Hsu’s mistake was apologizing; she’ll probably lose her job anyway, along with her dignity. If it’s forbidden to attribute racial academic disparities to cultural differences, then we might as well cut right to the chase and spell it out: These differences are rooted in BIOLOGICAL disparities between the races. Culture is downstream from genetics.
Why would she even want the job? Even if she “wins” it’s a
pyrryic victory. Kind of like ascending to the king of the North Pole.