(FORTUNE Magazine) – With a somewhat volatile mixture of dismay and hilarity, your correspondent has been following the recent strange proceedings on Asian-American civil rights problems. These have taken the form of a ''round-table conference,'' held by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights with Commissioner Sherwin Chan in the chair. The session we zeroed in on was held in Houston in late May; however, two other sessions, in New York City and San Francisco, will soon have been completed. Civil rights hearings are not usually risible matters, but the Houston proceedings had a wild way of parodying the genre. Central to this unintended result was the difficulty experienced by numerous participants -- and the commission itself -- in stating what the problem was. Preparatory to the event, the commission had published a volume called The Economic Status of Americans of Asian Descent: An Exploratory Investigation. In years past the usual point of all such exercises at the commission was to demonstrate how minorities were battered by discrimination. But this time, clearly, something had gone wrong. Among the study's major findings: -- ''The average incomes of native-born Chinese, Japanese, and Korean families exceed by more than 40% the average for native-born white families.'' -- ''The educational levels of all Asian groups considered in this report either approach or surpass the average level of schooling for whites.'' -- Native-born Asians also tend to have lower unemployment rates than whites -- substantially lower in the case of the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. -- Among native-born men, those of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian extraction are substantially better represented at the top of the occupational distribution -- in the professional, technical, sales, and administrative jobs -- than are whites. To be sure, some footnotes and qualifications go with these prodigious accomplishments. By several measures, native-born Filipinos do substantially less well than whites; they have, for example, higher unemployment rates than native-born whites. It also needs to be noted that one reason for the high family income among Asian Americans is the above-average propensity to work among the women. At all ages, Asian-American women seem more likely than native-born white women to be in the labor force. But those high family incomes are not created by cumulating the earnings of a lot of low-paid drudges: In fact, the Asian incomes also reflect superior levels of pay among working women. Among the native-born, Chinese women earn 52% more on average than do white women; Japanese women earn 44% more. None of these figures prove, of course, that discrimination against Asian Americans is nonexistent. It obviously exists in college admissions, for example (where, in the age of affirmative action, it also exists against whites). But before the proceedings began, the commission had effectively undermined any case that discrimination was seriously thwarting Asian-American efforts to get ahead in the world. So what was the message of the participants? A few, but not many, of those who showed up indicated that they would just as soon get rid of the government antibias operation; several witnesses seemed to be saying (although guardedly) that they regard the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as biased against Asians (and in favor of blacks and Hispanics). A more typical response, however, was represented by speakers who wanted Asian Americans to retain the status of an oppressed minority and get the benefits deemed to go with it. They had a variety of angles. One memorable gripe was put forward by the lady who said her compatriots were not getting enough action under the Job Training Partnership Act. ''The biggest problem,'' she stated forthrightly, ''is that you have to be socially or economically deprived to get those monies.'' Our own favorite proposal concerned college admissions and was offered up by a woman who said she had been reading about ''race norming,'' a practice described in these pages a fortnight ago. This is the deal in which state employment services employ separate scoring systems for black and white job applicants so as to ensure that the lower average scores of blacks do not result in a lower proportion of blacks getting job referrals. The speaker noted that Asians applying for college tend to be all work and no play, which gets to be a handicap at most colleges. The kids keep coming up short when the admissions people ask about extracurricular activities. Wouldn't it be a great idea -- the speaker earnestly proposed -- to have some race norming on the extracurricular front? We confess to another chuckle at this point. Which definitely does not signify that the idea is a loser.