Asian Privilege: I'll Bet You Never Heard of THAT Before

White privilege exists. Or so critical race theorists and those in their thrall would have you believe.

To make you believe it, they're frequently keen to bombard you with half-cooked statistics combined with half-baked logic. Here's one that recently came to my attention: in schools operated by the Toronto and District School Board, black and aboriginal students are suspended most often.

That's bad.

But here's something from the Toronto Star's take on it that really stands out:

"Black students make up only about 12 per cent of high school students in the Toronto public board — about 32,000 — yet account for more than 31 per cent of all suspensions. White students account for some 29 per cent of suspensions, but make up nearly one-third of the entire student body."

So black students are statistically overrepresented in their share of suspensions. But at 31% of students, white students account for 29% of suspensions. There's a pretty good chance that two percent is within the study's margin of error. For all practical purposes, white students are neither overrepresented nor underrepresented in suspensions.

The only way this is possible is if some other racial/ethnic group is underrepresented among student suspensions. And as it turns out, one is: Asian students.

The comparison in suspensions between white and black students is the kind of thing that critical race theorists frequently point to in order to prop up their claims that white privilege exists. But if privilege accounts for the rates of suspension, it would seem that it isn't white students who are privileged at all, but rather Asian students.

Of course, you never hear about "Asian privilege". (At the risk of uttering a racial slur, would "yellow privilege" be a more appropriate term?) As a racial minority, critical race theorists hold that Asians cannot be privileged, their own standard of evidence to the contrary.

Of course, there's a better reason why you don't hear about "Asian privilege." Because like "white privilege," it doesn't exist.