25-Year-Old Chinese-American Activist Claims First Victory Against ‘Woke’ University Programs

Kenny Xu, a 25-year-old Chinese American. Courtesy of Kenny Xu

Twenty-five-year-old activist Kenny Xu has recently garnered media attention for his outspoken opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The second-generation Chinese-American and his team, Color Us United, scored a major victory in February when they successfully campaigned for the University of North Carolina (UNC) system to ban DEI requirements in recruitment and hiring.

At its Board of Governors meeting on Feb. 23, UNC voted to ban DEI statements and compelled speech from admission, hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions.

However, Xu sees it as a small success. His ultimate goal is to abolish DEI across all universities in the United States.

The board’s vote to remove the DEI statement “was their decision, and we are proud to support them,” Xu told The Epoch Times. “But there’s still plenty of DEI in the med school. They still have their task force to integrate social justice into the curriculum, they still have fellowships that they give out only to black students ... They’re still doing race-based fellowships, they’re still teaching unconscious bias.”

Xu says his team’s ultimate goal at UNC is to eliminate DEI initiatives in the university’s medical school. He would like to see the dean of the medical school renounce DEI, and “talk about how DEI is corrupting the med school and lowering the standards for their profession and how he will work to fight against it.”

“If we can take it out in the medical profession, by exposing the injustice being done at medical schools, I think we can be well on the way to eliminating DEI in our country,” he said.

Challenging DEI Policies at UNC Medical School

Xu launched a petition drive in late January to cancel DEI policies at UNC Medical School. The petition had over 2,600 signatures at the time of publishing.

“Most Americans, regardless if they’re left, right, or center, want to be treated by the most qualified doctor. They don’t care if the doctor is white, black, yellow, [or] green,“ Xu said. ”They want to know that the doctor that’s treating them is the most excellent and has come from the most excellent training.”

UNC Health is currently teaching “unconscious bias,” and teaching students that health care problems are due to racism, rather than teaching future doctors essential medical knowledge, Xu remarked.

“It does inspire a lack of faith from the public towards their doctors ... These are not good ways to train the best quality doctors. So I think that the ordinary American would be opposed to this.”

The Epoch Times reached out to UNC for comment.

A Bias Against Hard Work

Xu’s campaign originated from his observations during college. He found that high-performing Asian American students were called a “privileged” race, and placed in the same category as whites by DEI advocates.

“Looking back at our history, most of us come to the U.S. with no money and no social connections. How are we privileged? We got here through hard work. And then I realized that there is an attack on anybody who works hard in our country, and it’s done in the name of diversity and inclusion,” Xu said.

Xu’s parents taught him to “work very hard, no matter what I did,” he said. They taught him that everything in life requires effort and that excelling in any field requires “10,000 hours” of hard work.

“So when I saw that there is a decline in hard work in our country. I looked for the sources of that. I saw that people kept complaining about their problems in college and saying it’s because of racism. And it’s not because of racism. So that angered me,” he said.

Xu acknowledged that “diversity, equity, and inclusion are in part good things,” but said people don’t realize that DEI officers are lowering standards to achieve diversity.

He cited the example of Harvard’s admission policy, which requires Asian students to score points higher than black students to be admitted. “I don’t like lowering standards for diversity for any reasons,” he said.

In his book “An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy,” Xu argues that Asian Americans have to work twice as hard as others to achieve success and that a stable two-parent family structure plays a significant role in their academic and career achievements.

The book is “about how Asians really inconvenience this narrative on race,” Xu said. When first or second-generation Asian immigrants who made their way in America with very little besides hard work are labeled “privileged,” it highlights the illogic of the DEI ideology.

“I just want to erase this culture of victimhood from our country. So that’s my motivation for fighting DEI,” he said.

Countering the Fallacy of ‘Wokeism’

Xu is essentially waging a war against all left-wing “woke” ideologies, including DEI and CRT.

According to him, America’s race-based policies stem from a sense of “guilt about why black Americans aren’t achieving at the same level as whites.”

Concern about the lack of black representation among the elites in the United States has led to the implementation of DEI and other initiatives, with the goal of increasing the percentage of black Americans in elite professions, Xu said. However, affirmative action and welfare have failed to bridge the gap over the past several decades.

DEI and quotas won’t solve the problem: “People don’t realize that you can’t solve this at the level of medical school. You have to solve this at the level of culture and family and study habits,” he stressed.

Xu believes that a practical and effective approach—promoting candidates based on merit only and replacing “unconscious bias training” with “more hours in the lab and in the medical field”—is key to resolving Americans’ distrust of the medical field.

His ideal is a “color-blind, merit-based” America, he says. “God doesn’t use skin color to judge us. Why should we be using skin color to judge other people?”