It’s Complicated

Some lament that white conservatives like Blum are using Asian Americans for malicious purposes. Winifred Kao, a lawyer at the Asian Law Caucus, accused Blum of “using Asian-Americans as a wedge, as we’ve often been used, throughout our racial and civil-rights history.” 

“I feel that the Asian-American student population and community is being used as a pawn in a chess game, around limited resources in elite sectors of American society,” said Prudence Carter, a sociologist and the dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California.

Originally, affirmative action was literally just a Black and white issue—with Asian Americans in the mix, things are more complicated.

“This alliance, between a white conservative tactician and a comparatively inexperienced base of recently energized Asian-American activists, has complicated the traditional optics of the civil-rights and diversity debates,” writes Hsu.

In reality, the complaints come from a small but vocal minority in the Asian American community. Asian Americans consistently show support for affirmative action—more so even than other racial groups. While majorities of all races say that race shouldn’t be a factor in college admissions, Asians are the least likely to agree: 58% agree, compared to 62% of Blacks, 65% of Hispanics, and 78% of whites. 76% of Asians and 65% of Pacific Islanders support “affirmative action programs designed to help blacks, women, and other minorities get better jobs and education.”

And, as has been done so often in American history, one should resist the urge to reduce the Asian American community to a monolith. A 2016 survey found that while most Chinese respondents opposed affirmative action—a trend that Hsu attributes to the spread of misinformation on the popular Chinese messaging app WeChat—overwhelming majorities of Vietnamese and Filipinos, who are generally underserved communities and can benefit from affirmative action, supported it. And the groups that support the S.F.F.A. lawsuits are comprised largely of foreign-born immigrants, many Chinese. The Asian Americans organizations that support affirmative action tend to be older, having grown up in an age when alliances between civil rights groups fighting for Asian, Black, and Hispanic Americans led to great gains for all groups.

“Affirmative action is part of a larger struggle,” said Kennedy. “The much larger struggle is the struggle against the idea that the United States is a white man’s country. Do people of Asian ancestry benefit from that larger struggle against the notion that America is a white man’s country? Yes, absolutely.”

Should affirmative action in higher education be done away with—the Court will hear arguments in the Harvard/UNC case this October and release its decision in the spring or summer of 2023—it could have a devastating impact on Black and Hispanic students. Black students have long faced significant barriers to entering and finishing college, and historic inequities persist today. Over the past 20 years, the percentage of Black students enrolled in the “101 most selective public colleges and universities” has fallen almost 60%. A 2018 report by the Government Accountability Office found that Black colleges generally had endowments half the size of those at comparable white colleges. 

Even with affirmative action, Asian Americans make up a disproportionate percentage of students at selective colleges, while Black and Latino students are underrepresented. Harvard’s undergraduate population in 2020 was 21.4% Asian, 10.9% Hispanic or Latino, and 8.9% Black. With Asians making up just 5.9% of Americans, Latinos 18.5%, and Blacks 13.4%, Asians are afforded nearly four times their share of spots, while Latinos and Blacks are filling just about half. And the percentage of Black freshmen at elite schools has essentially stagnated since 1980.

A countrywide ban on affirmative action would most likely set Black and Hispanic students back even further; one just has to look to the nine states where bans have already been instituted. After Michigan prohibited the consideration of race in admissions at public colleges and universities in 2006, Black enrollment at the University of Michigan more than halved, decreasing from 9% to around 4% today. California universities saw a similar effect in the years following Proposition 209. Peter Arcidiacono, a Duke economics professor, estimated that if the Supreme Court rules in favor of the S.F.F.A. in these upcoming cases, Black enrollment at U.C. Berkeley will drop by two-thirds. An expert who testified in the Harvard case said that without race conscious admissions, the percentage of Black students at the school would drop from 14% to 6% and the percentage of Latino students from 12% to 9%.

Research conducted to study the effects of California’s Proposition 209 found that by the mid-2010s, the policy “had caused a cumulative decline in the number of early-career [underrepresented minority] Californians earning over $100,000 by at least three percent.” Affirmative action’s new wage benefits for underrepresented minority applicants were also found to have exceeded the small costs for white and Asian applicants, while after the ban, whites and Asians didn’t greatly benefit.

“Maybe the ultimate goal is for Asian-Americans to be the predominant group in the elite schools, as opposed to whites,” said Carter. “I don’t have a problem with that. But I do have a problem with picking on the few numbers of black and brown students in those schools.”