No doubt everyone is proud of this, but I have often heard it said that if Berkeley does not greatly increase its percentage of Hispanic students and faculty within the next generation, it will not be able to maintain its present standing. This common speculation measures the campus’ social value by its degree of direct service to ethnoracially defined segments of the state’s population. We should reject this definition of the University’s social responsibility, despite decades of its implicit acceptance by many academic leaders. If the public will not put in place educational and social programs that can help historically disadvantaged people, the pool of Hispanic Californians prepared to flourish at Berkeley will remain scandalously small. Wealthy private universities and colleges will continue to recruit many of the Hispanic Californians who are ready to thrive at a place like Berkeley. The campus is right to want more Latinos, but it should be cautious about the impressions it leaves as to why so few are here. Proposition 13, which more than 30 years ago cut the taxes that might otherwise have helped California’s schools, is much more to blame than Proposition 209.

Much can be learned by examining the recent history of Asian Americans at the University. Asian Americans constitute about 48 percent of the class that entered Berkeley in August 2005. With about 9 percent of California's population, Asian Americans are overrepresented here by well over 400 percent, or by about 1,500 percent if viewed in a national context. This has occurred despite the fact that nearly all immigrants from Asia were not allowed to become naturalized citizens until 1952, and that blatantly racist restrictions on Asian immigration were removed only in 1965. Readers of this magazine know enough about California's past to need no detailed reminders of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and of other examples of anti-Asian prejudice within our lifetimes.

Understanding this dramatic increase of Asian Americans at Berkeley focuses attention on just where the barriers to black and Latino progress are. What happened, despite California's history of anti-Asian prejudice and violence, to bring so many Asian Americans to Berkeley? Does anyone really believe that this happened as a consequence of affirmative action for Asian Americans of the sort Proposition 209 now prevents us from practicing for black and Latino Californians?

Surely, this demographic change in the composition of Berkeley undergraduates follows from other causes. The economic position, commercial skills, and level of literacy brought to the United States by many immigrants from China, India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and other Asian countries are relevant. Our social scientists tell us that for all the internal diversity of the population we call Hispanic, many derive from some of the economically poorest communities in Mexico. Bengali engineers really do bring to California a different set of skills than do agricultural laborers from Chihuahua. These skill sets affect the life opportunities of the children and grandchildren, too.

A society that does not provide social support services and effective K-12 education cannot expect an economically disadvantaged Hispanic population to be well represented in its universities. An important study by several of Berkeley's finest social scientists released this last fall, Return on Investment: Educational Choices and Demographic Change in California's Future, found that the percentage of Hispanics who complete those high school courses that might render them eligible for admission to UC campuses is much lower than for other ethno-racial groups. Asian Americans were many times over more likely to complete these courses than black or Hispanic or, for that matter, white students. The authors (Henry Brady, Michael Hout, and John Stiles) pointed out that even a small monetary investment in a better educational system would have enormously beneficial payoffs for California.

This study is a welcome exception to our national as well as our local diversity discourse, which avoids the Asian American case with almost pathological regularity. A typical example is the report of President Clinton's 1998 Commission on Race, the only presidential-sponsored inquiry on the topic since the Kerner Commission of 30 years before. One America in the 21st Century: Forging a New Future systematically concealed the differences in overcoming white racism achieved by Americans of Asian descent as opposed to those of African and Latin American descent, and offered recommendations that made no significant distinctions between these groups. On campuses today, the question is often pushed aside. I have often heard it said that, "the Asian American case is no longer relevant because Asian Americans are no longer underrepresented," without any analysis of why this is so. Do we learn nothing from one of the most dramatic cases in all modern history of a stigmatized group suddenly becoming one of the most well-educated, well-paid segments of a national population?

Scholarly investigation into underrepresentation and overrepresentation is also a step toward the anti-racist demystification of descent communities. Social scientists and historians often attribute the overrepresentation of black men in prison and their underrepresentation in colleges and universities to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow racism. It is not inherent "racial" characteristics, our scholars keep hammering away, that explain these demographic facts; rather the explanation is found in a complex of social conditions that have developed historically. The same kinds of historical and sociological explanations can help us understand the overrepresentation of Jewish Americans and Japanese Americans in some occupations and not others. The more we focus on historical conditions rather than flee from them, the farther we will move away from racism. Indeed, a failure to look to historical explanations for the differential experience of different descent-defined groups can serve indirectly to reinforce unspoken ideas of genetic hierarchy.

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