Renu Mukherjee Why Did a Star Columbia Student Join an Anti-Semitic Mob? Yunseo Chung’s descent into pro-Hamas activism reveals a tragic outcome of higher education’s fixation with racial victimhood.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/yunseo-chung-columbia-university-hamas-anti-semitic-protest
On March 27, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the State Department had revoked the visas of at least 300 students for participating in violent anti-Israel protests. One of the first to face deportation was Mahmoud Khalil, a former master’s student at Columbia University. Given his background, Khalil quickly became the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on non-citizen terror supporters. But last month, a new face emerged: Yunseo Chung, a junior at Columbia.
Like Khalil, Chung is a green-card holder—but the similarities end there. She immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea at age seven with her parents and a sibling. She was valedictorian of her high school class, holds a 3.99 GPA at Columbia, and is a member of both the university’s undergraduate law review and its literary magazine.
Why would a straight-A Korean immigrant who has lived in America for most of her life join a violent, pro-Hamas protest? One possible answer lies in a core tenet of modern progressivism: its rejection of the model-minority stereotype. Perhaps Chung—an otherwise exemplary student with no history of lawbreaking or violence prior to college—believed that protest activity would earn her validation from non-Asian peers at Columbia University.
Since at least the 2010s, the social order of highly selective universities has been strongly influenced by the principles of Critical Race Theory, the scholarly idea that racism is embedded in the social, political, and legal institutions of Western civilization. Chief among these is the perpetual victimhood of minority groups—“people of color,” women, the disabled, transgender individuals, and so on.
In a social order that valorizes victimhood, Asian students face an inherent disadvantage due to their cultural status as “model minorities.” First popularized in a 1966 New York Times article titled “Success Story, Japanese-American Style,” the “model minority” stereotype casts Asians as uniformly high-achieving and financially successful—despite a history of discrimination. This framing often invites comparison between Asians and other minority groups, most notably black Americans.
Social scientists have valid reasons to be cautious of the model minority stereotype. For one, it flattens important distinctions among ethnic groups—treating, for example, Indian Americans as interchangeable with Hmong, who tend to be much poorer in the U.S. It also fails to account for generational differences within immigrant communities.
Critical race theorists acknowledge these limitations. But their primary objection to the model minority stereotype appears to be political: it threatens the unity of the progressive Left’s racial-justice coalition by positioning Asians “above” other minority groups. In a widely cited 1999 article, political scientist Claire Jean Kim of the University of California, Irvine, called this dynamic “racial triangulation.” According to Kim and others, white Americans invoke the model minority narrative not simply to praise Asians, but to create divisions among minority groups—elevating Asian Americans in contrast to others, particularly black Americans, who are made to feel comparatively marginalized.
This is why critical race theorists take issue with Asians who oppose affirmative action: they view it as a betrayal of other racial minorities in exchange for proximity to whiteness—acceptance, they argue, that will always remain conditional.
Kim’s perspective is dominant at elite universities like Columbia. It shapes the social order and may help explain Chung’s disruptive behavior. Like many students, she likely wants to fit in—to be accepted by her professors and peers. Doing so, in this environment, means rejecting the model minority stereotype.
A student who arrives in the U.S. from South Korea at seven and graduates as valedictorian of her high school class isn’t considered “cool,” according to the standards of critical race theory. But an Asian student who occupies Ivy League buildings and harasses Jews is.
Social scientists have studied how the model minority stereotype affects social dynamics among different racial groups. Some have found that the concept engenders hostility among other racial minorities toward their Asian peers.
In the late 1990s, two researchers interviewed a sample of students at a majority-minority high school in New York City, where over 90 percent qualified for free lunches. The group included 20 Asian freshmen, 20 black freshmen, and 20 Hispanic freshmen. They found that many teachers, influenced by the model minority stereotype, tended to favor the Asian students—an attitude that, in turn, fostered resentment among their black and Hispanic peers.
More recently, the 2024 Asian American Attitudes Survey (AAAS)—a national survey of 6,272 Americans—revealed that many blacks and Hispanics perceive Asians as more valued in American society. Nearly half of black (49 percent) and Hispanic (45 percent) respondents said that they view Asian Americans as holding a higher cultural status than their own. Since the 2021 AAAS, the number of black and Hispanic Americans who see Asians as closer to whites than to other people of color has continued to rise.
None of this excuses Chung’s behavior, or that of other violent Asian protesters. But the data offer a social explanation. Nearly 60 percent of Asians aged 16 to 24 in the AAAS identified as “people of color.” Chung may simply have wanted to demonstrate racial solidarity—and to be accepted by her peers at Columbia.
Her participation in the university’s anti-Semitic mob reveals yet another tragic outcome of higher education’s fixation with racial victimhood. Today, many “students of color” believe that they will only be revered on account of their left-wing activism—not their academic prowess or good citizenship.
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