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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous] When I discovered that the YY principal was black I thought, oh right, a practical approach to drawing in the area Chinese community.  YY could have done a nation-wide search to find and hire at least one experienced ethnic Chinese administrator.  There are school districts in California where half the administrators are Chinese.

[/quote]  Are you seriously suggesting that YY should have turned down a qualified principal because she is black in order to pander to the assumed racism in the Chinese community?  No matter how  "practical" that may be, I wouldn't want to be a part of such a school.[/quote]

This particular principal isn't the one to break down barriers.  A different story if she spoke great Mandarin, had lived in China, and, preferably, had a Chinese spouse and mixed-race children.  Pandering to racism in the Chinese community is a loaded statement.  Working around centuries-old prejudices in a sensible and strategic way in the choice of admin team wouldn't have hurt the school.

It's worth taking a hard look at the origins and nature of Chinese prejudices as a tool to breaking them down.  The strongest my Hong Kong immigrant relatives harbor certainly aren't against those of other races, they're against Mandarin-speaking northerners and other "mainlanders."  You probably have to start with the Opium Wars to get your head around it.  They love to refer to mainlanders as crooks and prostitutes.  If you get self-righteous with them, start sermonizing, and push random Mandarin speakers on them, you fuel the fire.  What the ABC generation does to challenge is tease them, to joke in Cantonese about how paranoid they sound.  You can get them to laugh and admit that they've been knee-jerk in their thinking.

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