It's anti-asian and also anti- any race that isn't on the list of beneficiaries. The original argument could have been conveyed better by framing it more broadly, but it isn't wrong.
Aah, that makes sense, if I'm understanding it correctly, they specified Asians because they're another minority, but disadvantaged by policies that seek to help other minorities.
I guess, but it's, well, complicated. In my country, there are (a small number of) spots in medical school reserved for the native people.
Naturally, lots of non-native people considered that racist.
Except it was done to try to correct a very real problem - that the native people have disproportionately worse outcomes in our health system. And likewise, due to about 150 years of deliberate policy that marginalised the native people, they were disproportionately less likely to enter medical school.
And there's now, after some years of this policy, an emerging body of evidence that this "racist" policy around medical school spots is making a difference around health system outcomes for native people.
So yes, the policy is, on the surface racist, but it's slowly combating a systemic racism that was baked into all of our government institutions by previous racist policies. (E.g., native people experience a higher conviction rate and harsher sentencing for the same crimes as white people)
There's still a long way to go for us, but yeah, it gets damn complicated when you're trying to undo the damage of previous racism by introducing positive discrimination.
Asians were mentioned specifically because one common example of those "anti-racist" practices: college admissions is well known to discriminate against Asians - if you're an Asian you need to be more competent and score better on exams to have the same chance for an admission as a black person for example.
