Its’ quite a telling moment from the Gray Lady, spotted by Eugene Volokh of The Washington Post:

 The New York Times Bits blog reports:

Google on Wednesday released statistics on the makeup of its work force, providing numbers that offer a stark glance at how Silicon Valley remains a white man’s world.

But wait — just a few paragraphs down, the post notes that non-Hispanic whites are 61 percent of the Google work force, slightly below the national average. (That average, according to 2006-10 numbers, is 67 percent.) Google is thus less white than the typical American company.

The New York Times is joining Apartheid-era South Africa in conferring “honorary white” status on Asians.

The “problem” in the Times’ (and just about everyone not a clear headed conservative) eyes is that black and Hispanic employment at Google trails their share of the population. And underlying that “problem” status is the conviction that any time (except in the NBA and a few other fields) racial employment patterns do not reflect demography, invidious discrimination must be at work.

This is nonsense, and pernicious nonsense at that. As Volokh notes:

Indeed, if the goal is “reflecting the demographics of the country” as to race –

Google’s disclosures come amid an escalating debate over the lack of diversity in the tech industry. Although tech is a key driver of the economy and makes products that many Americans use everyday, it does not come close to reflecting the demographics of the country — in terms of sex, age or race.

– Google can only accomplish that by firing well over three-quarters of its Asian employees, and replacing them with blacks and Hispanics (and a few whites, to bring white numbers up from 61 percent to 67 percent).

Asians today face official and institutional discrimination unmatched since the era of Jim Crow. No one but the clearly delusional can maintain that “Asian privilege” is responsible for the outstanding success certain Asian groups have enjoyed in the United States. But it is an open secret that the large numbers of Asians scoring high on SATs and achieving high grades in high school is causing elite colleges and universities to apply higher standards to Asians than to other groups. At UC Berkeley and UCLA, which campuses are forbidden by law from taking race into consideration, Asians make up a majority or near majority of undergraduates. The diversity mavens at other elite campuses do not want to face a campus so disproportionately comprised of one minority subgroup, just as they for many decades discriminated against Jews.

This is a problem that does not just impact Asian ethnicities. It is polluting the cultures, as Volokh explained in an earlier post:

The racial divisions between white and Asian, once so stark and to many almost unbridgeable, are quickly fading away. Marriages between Asians and whites are increasingly common; while anti-Asian bigotry exists, it is (at least among whites) much rarer than it was only one or two generations ago. As with the experience of the American Irish, Italians, Jews, and many other groups, the Asian experience shows that racial divisions and hostilities can subside over time.

But there’s a sinister aspect to this as well. To begin with, calling Asians “non-minorities” or even “white” is an error, and is a denial of their heritage. Asians have succeeded even though they are a racial minority — this fact deserves to be acknowledged. It redounds to the credit of the many Asians who worked terribly hard against often overwhelming odds. And it’s evidence of the essential fairness of the American capitalist system, which has rewarded this hard work even though many people, including many government officials, tried to penalize it.

Calling Asians white also creates new lines, possibly very dangerous ones. “White” has stopped meaning Caucasian, imprecise as this term has always been, and has started to mean “those racial groups that have made it.” “Minority” has started to mean “those racial groups that have not yet made it.” (A recent San Francisco Chronicle story even excludes non-Mexican-American Latinos from the “minority” category.) This new division is as likely as the old to create nasty, corrosive, sometimes fatal battles over which racial groups get the spoils. So long as we think in terms of “white” and “minority,” we risk disaster, no matter which races are put in which box.

The entire racial engineering model of social justice must be scrapped. It is time to tell the truth: that certain values (studying hard, applying oneself) produce better occupational outcomes than others (such as planning one’s career in the NBA and spending one’s time perfecting hoops).

Asians bear the brunt of discrimination because their story puts the lie to the race-mongers’ story.