Asian Mom, Engineer Smeared as ‘White Supremacist,’ ‘Not Qualified’
John Ransom | February 13, 2021
(The Lion) — Virginia Democrats voted along party lines to oust a parent who was appointed to the Virginia Board of Education (BOE), claiming she wasn’t qualified.
“They voted to remove Suparna Dutta, shockingly claiming that a public school parent isn’t qualified to serve on the Board of Education,” Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who appointed Dutta to the BOE last year, said in a statement.
“She is a mother and advocate for parents’ rights, she is an immigrant and an advocate for Asian American rights, she is an engineer and advocate for STEM in education,” added Youngkin.
Sen. Ghazala Hashmi, D-District 10, introduced a last-minute amendment to the bill authorizing Gov. Youngkin’s appointments, striking Dutta’s name. The amendment was then approved along party lines, Fox News reports.
Dutta was involved last week in a heated exchange with members of the local school board over whether the U.S. Constitution was a “flawed document” because it failed to outlaw slavery and whether communism and socialism are compatible with democracy.
The “Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are remarkable documents” and socialism and communism are “incompatible with democracy and individual freedoms,” Dutta told the local school board, according to Fox News.
But many of Dutta’s supporters say that anti-Asian racism is to blame for the vote to oust her.
Dutta, who founded a coalition for a Fairfax, Virginia high school that fought back against the school’s plans aimed at reducing Asian enrollment in order to enroll more black and Hispanic students, has been a target for the hard left in Virginia.
In a lawsuit filed on behalf of Dutta and other parents of Thomas Jefferson High School, seeking to overturn the racially-motivated enrollment policies at the school, a federal district court ruled that “the Board defaulted to a system that treats applicants unequally in hopes of engineering a particular racial outcome,” according to Education Next.
The liberal policies “cut Asian student admissions by 19 percent” over a one year period, wrote Mike Ginsberg, chairman of local the GOP, in the Fairfax Times.
As a result, local Democrats have accused the Indian immigrant, who came to the U.S. to study engineering, of being a “white supremacist,” said Ginsberg. “Imagine being so incapable of making a substantive argument that you are forced to smear a woman of color, a South Asian immigrant, as a white supremacist.”
Asian Americans have fought similar battles around the country, as Asian successes in education appear to be targeted, reducing enrollment.
In New York, liberals have been trying to reduce the enrollment of Asian students to gifted programs since 2018, only to be met with furious opposition by Asian American parents, often immigrants to the U.S. who think that education is the key to advancement in society.
At the national level, the Supreme Court is currently considering a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice under the Trump administration against Harvard and the University of North Carolina over racially targeted admissions which discriminates against Asian students.