Racism doesn't exist anymore! OK-I'm obviously full of it. I just want to keep the concept of racism in perspective in the aftermath of Barack Obama's historic victory. Today on "The Cackling Hen Show" … I'm sorry, I was confused. That was actually "The View." Barbara Walters didn't let being a person of no color stop her from becoming a race expert-declaring that the '08 election meant the realization of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream, and in extension, that racism was now just this thing of the past.

But that's bull-something I want to stress to people who look like me.

Look, I'm not trying to play the pointless game of the "Oppression Olympics." I'm only stressing this point because so many are resistant to the idea that Asian Americans could face any type of racism. Even as a student on a very liberal campus, I've been told that I shouldn't talk about race because apparently, I'm not a "real" minority.

And what's sad is that I'm sure a lot of people reading right now probably agree with that. I mean, we can see yellow almost everywhere at UC Berkeley, the top public school in the nation. So when Asians dare to claim that racism still impacts our lives, it must be because we're just a pathetic whinos, right?

Wrong! I'm not going to go into all the issues that Asian-Americans face irrespective of class status. But I will say this: The racist, over-generalized notion that all Asian groups are this American Dream success story just isn't true.

I know this is going to come as a complete shock, but all Asian Americans aren't the same-culturally, historically or in terms of success in America. According to the 2000 census data, the Hmong, Cambodian and Laotian communities have lower college attainment rates than both the Latino and African-American communities.

So when all of us are stereotyped as this "model minority" category, what happens is that the issues that disproportionately impact the various subgroups that happen to fall within the ridiculously over-broad Asian race become completely removed from the political discourse.

To use an example students can relate to, I ditched class over 20 times during my senior year of high school. And it wasn't like I was one of those fence-climbing, expert-liars with this absolute resolve to get off campus by any means necessary. It was the exact opposite.

Teachers just never asked for "re-admit" forms. Administrators never placed my name on the detention lists. And attendance monitors didn't say a word as I walked right off campus in the middle of the school day.

Whether you want to believe it or not, it wasn't just because I was "lucky" or because the school staff was so amazingly incompetent (as incompetent as they were). It was about the color of my skin. I was Asian (and in case you're wondering, I still am), which translated to a perception that I was this perfect student who could do no wrong. For the record, I checked the detention list. No Asian last names appeared on the list.

What's so tragic about all of this is that non-Asians aren't the only ones who don't seem to recognize Asian racism. So many of us have internalized this idea that race doesn't impact us.

But it does. Yes, even for communities that are very well represented here at Cal. The model minority stereotype operates by convincing us that the reason for Asian American success, relative to other minority groups, doesn't have anything to do with the historical reality-that racism led the U.S. to historically exclude almost all immigration from Asia, save those who were highly-educated and highly-skilled.

Instead, it was about an over-simplistic, Asian cultural formula of work ethic + respect for authority figures = success … something that relies on this absurd notion that Asian American culture is somehow especially foreign and in consequence, Asian American people are especially unable to assimilate (an argument used to justify the Japanese Concentration camps during WWII actually).

But the biggest problem here isn't the racist generalizations, but the political implications. "Respect for authority figures" is codeword for political apathy.

The road map to economic justice all of a sudden isn't about forms of political resistance like the iconic Civil Rights Movement. It's about replying to inequity with passivity-something that's worked to keep Asian Americans as a miniscule political force.

Don't believe me? Asian Americans make up roughly 40 percent of the student body on this campus. But the first languages set to be cut next year? The East Asian Languages.

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