I’ve got mail. I figured I’d get some about my alma mater, Lowell High, when I wrote that San Francisco’s Chinese Americans were No. 1, above “Angry White Males” even, as America’s champion whiners.

And why not? I’m not giving them any affirmative action on that one. They’ve earned that status. They’re clearly superior “victims,” having forced their way into Lowell with the ouster of the city’s school desegregation plan.

Still, e-mailers took me to task. One suggested that since I was Filipino American, I was out to get the Chinese. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I’d be just as harsh of a Lowell that was 40 percent Filipino!

Another e-mail, from a Filipino American, begins: “Manong (elder brother in Iloko—one of the many dialects in the Philippines) Emil, you are simply dead wrong in your continued support of race preferences ... What is wrong with Lowell High being 90 percent Chinese?”

I can only suspect that the greeting manong indicates the writer is a foreign-born Asian American. And perhaps that explains why a number of my AsianWeek readers have forgotten the spirit and the purpose of affirmative action.

They never really learned the lesson.

Most Asian countries are definitely more homogenous than our stars-and-stripes democracy. Is there any wonder why Asians may be pre-disposed to seeing all-Asian anything, anywhere? When that’s considered normal, what’s a little lack of diversity at Lowell High?

Another e-mailer, Becky on AOL, asked me: “What [was] the kid’s test scores? How about his transcripts? Did he qualify otherwise?”

Quite honestly I don’t know what Patrick Wong’s scores were, nor do I care. What do test scores mean anyway? That’s just one of many criteria. Is it any surprise that the people with the highest scores and grades would say it’s the only and best criteria for admission? Never mind questions of bias that color any test results. And grades? Well, we all know what a reliable standard they are. Knowing that, how responsible or fair would it be to base admissions to a public school like Lowell exclusively on grades and test scores?

But how’s this for stereotyping: I presumed Patrick was qualified to go to Lowell, considering he was the lead plaintiff on the lawsuit.

But Becky was trying to trap me.

“It’s interesting how you didn’t include this [test score] information,” her e-mail stated. “If he met or exceeded all of the academic prerequisites and scored better than a black or Latino student that was admitted, should he still be denied because of his ethnicity? Isn’t that racism—telling someone he is not worthy because of the color of his skin?”

This, of course, would seem to be checkmate; Ward Connerly, playing white, wins.

But it is actually the crux of our dilemma. It’s what I like to call “the affirmative action paradox.”

Can we correct discrimination with what seems to be discrimination? Frankly, I don’t see any other way to do it.

People like Becky, or Connerly for that matter, will argue that it’s reverse discrimination. Suddenly, they feel the competitive strain and advocate “color-blind” solutions.

“Factoring in skin color in the decision process is not equal opportunity,” Becky’s e-mail continued.

Well, that depends. If you’re trying to correct for one-sidedness based on race, skin color must be a factor. To try to correct for racial imbalance by not factoring in race seems to be somewhat idiotic. But let’s be charitable. It’s an “inefficient” way to address the problem.

“Sorry ... I think you are the whiner here, whining about the other whiners.”

Well, it’s true. I’m whining because we’ve lost a handle on what affirmative action is really all about.

We’ve come to that point where self-interest has blinded our societal interests. It has totally colored a misguided argument. When Chinese Americans complained over the 40-percent ceiling at Lowell, they threw altruism out the window and stood up for themselves.

For their affirmative action, the argument became, “Equal opportunity is fine. Just make me more equal than you.”

So now San Francisco is trying “need-based,” or “class-based” affirmative action just to ward off charges of racism. But making color irrelevant doesn’t make the problems go away.

“Social engineering” will still be present. And there will certainly still be victims—qualified students passed over in favor of candidates admitted on the basis of their lower economic status. Lunch program kids. I was one of them. They’ll get in. But the middle class? In need-based affirmative action, they’ll be the aggrieved. If the S.F. Unified School District starts up such a plan, expect to hear whining soon afterward.

There is only one real solution for Lowell High School—and it’s not a lawsuit. It’s the creation of more Lowells. Clone that idea. Give us more schools with the high standards of an elite school.

Now that may strike you as “too simple” an answer, but it’s really the only one that makes sense. If there were public alternatives offering a great college prep education, do you think the Chinese Americans would be upset in being turned away from Lowell?

Years ago, that was the case. When students were rejected from Lowell, a decent public education at a neighborhood school was still possible. Not anymore.

That’s why all the schools should be like Lowell. That they aren’t any only exacerbates the Lowell problem. This is why I sympathize for the Chinese American plaintiffs. When you get rejected where do you go? To a neighborhood school where teachers worry about safety?

I give credit to the Chinese Americans for being pro-active on the “quality education” issue. But they’re not alone. Schools have gotten so bad that, when given a choice, people will always choose “better education” rather than “better diversity.” They’ll gladly forget about the power of school to replicate an ideal mini-society, one that gives our kids a way into society. When the schools are bad, parents prioritize, and they just don’t care about anything but the basics.

But remember, these are public schools. Making all the schools like Lowell puts us back on track. Then no one will feel opportunity has been denied.

I first became interested in getting rid of racial preferences in 1985, two years after a court-ordered settlement imposed quotas on San Francisco’s Lowell High School and others district-wide.

That year, I was 14 and applying to Lowell. In the 14 years since then, I’ve debated countless friends, acquaintances and total strangers over the logic and morality of using racial classification and sometimes blatant discrimination to eliminate racial stereotyping and discrimination.

Sometimes, I have left the discussion acknowledging legitimate areas of contention that only time or further study could resolve. Other times, I have been flabbergasted and frustrated by the insistent ignorance of ideologues, made more annoying by preachy self-righteousness.

Some may think I am guilty of this charge, but I do try to keep an open mind. I can generally accept paeans to the glories of racial diversity and warnings that such diversity is not attainable without the use of quotas. It’s a free country and all that. I also happen to believe that racial diversity is not in and of itself a bad thing, and believe that a sufficient amount of such diversity can be attained in most societal settings without ham-fisted, poorly-thought-out governmental intervention.

Yet once in a while, I hear or read something that makes me ill - such as the vitriol spewed by apologists among the Asian American left after the San Francisco Unified School District was finally forced last month to abandon admissions quotas set in place 16 years ago to settle an NAACP discrimination suit. The level of commentary from those who characterize the Chinese American plaintiffs as selfish whiners demonstrates a shocking depth of ignorance,worsened by an attendant snideness, that I find hard to stomach.

The reactions to those who might be called “Distressed Orientals for Racial Preferences” (DORPs for short) might be chalked up to ignorance about how the 1983 settlement was reached and how it came to be dismantled. The DORPs weren’t there when concerned parents brought their stories of demoralized and disillusioned children to activists at the Chinese American Democratic Club in 1992 because none of the “civil rights” organizations would listen to their grievances. They didn’t hear about how children refused to do homework and questioned the value of hard work when it became apparent that skin color was the critical factor in determining where they went to school. They didn’t spend nearly two futile years trying to convince the school district to reform the consent decree on its own.

Single mother Charlene Loen, who struggled to raise her son, Patrick Wong, by herself, has seen all that. So has Jane Chen, who gave up friends, family and comfort to come to the United States because she believed that her children would not be judged for their skin color in this country. To certain apologists, they and other Asian American plaintiffs are just piggish parents who wanted to get their kids into Lowell. However, among the named plaintiffs, only Loen’s son Patrick was denied admission to that elite high school. Brian Ho, for whom Ho vs. SFUSD was named, was not allowed to enter kindergarten, and Jane Chen’s daughter was subjected to a long daily commute to a middle school halfway across San Francisco. Incidentally, Patrick ended up at Abraham Lincoln High School, where he was also originally capped out due to quotas.

So if the Chinese American plaintiffs weren’t just trying to squeeze a few more kids into Lowell, why did they agree to subject themselves to spurious insults and baseless attacks? I was there, and I can say unequivocally that the lawsuit was initiated because the plaintiffs believed in the principle that children were not just little colored pawns that could be moved around according to the whims of SFUSD bureaucrats, NAACP ideologues and their ivory-tower advisers. White men did not ask or pay them to file a lawsuit. The plaintiffs filed the lawsuit reluctantly and as a last resort. They did so only after the school district, the NAACP, Chinese for Affirmative Action and the American Civil Liberties Union - among other groups - failed to hear their grievances or even acknowledge that they could have been wronged.
The plaintiffs were not used by anyone.. They used the legal system to strike down an unfair law.

While some have implied that they should have instead lobbied for more and better schools district-wide, it is simply unreasonable to make the victims of discrimination responsible for improving public education, or to hold those victims accountable for the consequences of eliminating the discrimination they faced.

The victims are individuals, with limited resources and expertise. The SFUSD has a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and besides, we taxpayers pay them to come up with the appropriate educational solutions. To see how preposterous it would be to hold Wong, Ho and Chen accountable for a whole system’s ills, imagine former Alabama Gov. George Wallace saying that African Americans had to figure out how to improve Mississippi’s dismal public education system or come up with a way to pay for the cost of busing before any African American child had a right to attend a desegregated public school or university.

Moreover, the central purpose of desegregation, as spelled out 45 years ago in Brown v. Board of Education, was to ensure that individual children were not forced to attend certain public schools based on their race. Ironically, “desegregation” today often involves forcing children to attend particular schools or keeping them from enrolling because of race. Sadly, the children who are bused around invariably are poor, minority kids whose parents don’t have the means to escape failing urban school systems.

Finally, some have said that the plaintiffs have eroded some inter-minority solidarity, or chipped away at the construct called “Asian America.” But we are a nation of individuals rather than racial groups, and our constitution endows individuals with inalienable rights, not racial groups. Most Americans, including most Asian Americans, want to be treated as individuals, rather than as a fungible cog of any ethnic machine.If the price of being judged as an individual requires the destruction of a false “Asian American” facade, hand me a pickax.

Lee Cheng, 27, is a lawyer in Washington, D.C. Email him at lcheng@dla.com