New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has been advocating for the scrapping of the SHSAT, which determines admission to the city’s top public schools like Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, and Bronx Science. How much of this is fear and resentment of an Asian takeover? Can the rise of Asian politicians, such as in California, strengthen our community? Teen, Chris, and Mark discuss this contentious topic, along with the trailer for the new Wong Fu series “Yappie” and bad Asian baby names.

Twitter:

The following are edited excerpts from “NYC Specialized High Schools, ‘Yappie,’ and Asian Baby Names,” the 30th episode of Plan A’s podcast, Escape From Plan A.

I don’t think actually having a school that’s 75% Asian is necessarily the way you want to go. I don’t think the way it’s set up now is necessarily all that good for Asian kids to begin with. But the problem is the way in which the failure of the system has been blamed on Asians, that it’s our fault that we push our kids to cram schools to prepare for this. That we’re cheating, like we’re stealing [these spots]. Fuck you, de Blasio!

— Teen

[Mainstream Asian American online activists] are very languid people until it’s time to attack Asians. Then they become badasses. They start hulking up and become 10 times bigger.

— Chris

Asians weren’t even part of the equation when these systems were set up. The system was set up way back before the mass Asian immigration into America. Asian people were just not part of the equation. So once the Chinese Exclusion Act was lifted and we started having Asian immigrants from countries other than China, we gummed up the works.

— Mark