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Asian Americans and affirmative action: Addressing the color of privilege

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What role has Asian Americans played historically in challenges to affirmative action? Mitchell Chang discusses unresolved issues for Asian Americans concerning Civil Rights.

Image courtesy of interviewee. May 14, 2024

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This video video discusses a lawsuit brought by the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) against Harvard University, aimed at prohibiting the consideration of race in college admissions. The SFFA argued that Harvard's practices were unfair and unconstitutional, particularly regarding the treatment of Asian American applicants, who reportedly needed significantly higher SAT scores than White applicants to gain admission. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with the SFFA, effectively eliminating affirmative action in higher education.

Historically, Asian Americans in elite institutions experienced rapid enrollment growth from 1976 to 1985, yet their admission rates began to decline, leading to complaints filed with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the late 1980s. These complaints highlighted that Asian American applicants were admitted at lower rates than equally qualified White applicants.

In 2016, another complaint accused Ivy League colleges of unlawful discrimination against Asian American applicants, asserting that race-conscious admissions were at fault. However, the OCR found insufficient evidence for civil rights violations.

This video video also reflects on the diverse experiences of Asian Americans, emphasizing differing perspectives on admissions practices and the belief in elite education as a pathway to upward mobility. It argues that the elimination of race-conscious admissions may not be in the best interest of many Asian Americans, especially given the low overall admission rates to elite institutions.

The author emphasizes the need for a collective civil rights movement that benefits all rather than a selective approach that primarily aids a few. They discuss the importance of building cross-racial coalitions and centering Asian American voices in advocacy efforts, particularly to address educational inequities and the broader social structure limiting opportunities for many in the community. The author expresses hope for a future where younger Asian Americans can redefine their narratives and collaborate more broadly on civil rights issues.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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This was a really interesting lawsuit filed by students

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for fair admissions or what I will refer to as F-S-F-F-A

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and is sought to more broadly

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prohibit Harvard from considering race as one

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of many factors they typically use in admitting students.

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Now, SFFA argued

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that this practice is unfair, unnecessary,

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and unconstitutional, especially when it came to

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how Asian American applicants were treated.

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For example, according

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to SFFA Asian American applicants needed

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SAT scores

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that were about 140 points higher than white applicants

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to be admitted and SATs in in the US they're,

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achievement entrance exam scores.

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Curiously, this case did not focus on this wide advantage,

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but instead focus on what SFFA refer to

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as the racial preference associated

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with race conscious emissions practices.

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And as, many folks know, these

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practices do not include white applicants,

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but instead attempted to even the playing field

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for underrepresented racial minority populations.

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So when this case finally reached the US Supreme Court,

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a majority of the court last year ended up siding with SFFA

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and that decision pretty much

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eliminated affirmative action in higher education

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in the United States.

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By contrast, previous Supreme Court decisions,

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which included the landmark regents of the University

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of California versus Bakke in 1978,

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and then cases against the University of Michigan in 2003

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and then the University of Texas in 2013,

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those decisions only incrementally scaled back

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race conscious emissions practices,

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but still held them to be constitutional.

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So the decision last summer with respect

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to Harvard was quite, consequential

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that Harvard case was not the first rodeo

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for Asian Americans when it came

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to challenging college admissions practices.

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Uh, there's a very interesting, backdrop

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between 1976

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and 1985,

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Asian American enrollment in elite institutions in the US

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grew at an extraordinary pace,

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nearly tripling their proportion

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of the undergraduate enrollment by the mid 1980s,

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however, their missions rate at those

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campuses started dropping.

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So Asian American Civil Rights organizations filed

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complaints to the Office of Civil Rights of the Department

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of Education or OCR beginning in

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1988.

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Importantly, however that complaints filed

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during this period did not attribute this drop

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to race conscious emissions practices,

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but instead charged that Asian-American applicants

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had been admitted at a significantly

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lower rate than comparably qualified white applicants.

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The subsequent OCR investigation did indeed confirm this

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disparity, but here's the odd twist.

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They also concluded that the lower rate

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for Asian applicants was not due to discrimination,

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but instead due to plus factors using the admissions process

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such as preferences for children of alumni or legacies

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and athletes, which tipped the missions in favor

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of white applicants, those preferences were considered

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by OCR to be,

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to not be discriminatory

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because they serve what they refer to

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as legitimate institutional goals.

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So as you might imagine,

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this conclusion did not settle the matter.

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Fast forward now a couple of decades In 2016,

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another complaint was filed charging that a handful

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of Ivy League colleges continued to engage

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in unlawful discrimination against Asian American applicants

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in the emissions process.

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Now, unlike the ones filed in the eighties,

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this one called out race conscious emissions practices

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as the main source for this discrimination.

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For decades leading up to this complaint,

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Asian Americans had been repeatedly portrayed

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as the new victims of affirmative action recasting

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the long narrative of reverse discrimination against whites.

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Still similar to those complaints filed in the eighties,

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OCR determined that there was insufficient evidence

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to charge Ivy League colleges

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with any civil rights violations.

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So it was not at all surprising that by 2019,

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well-funded neoconservative groups like SFFA,

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which downplayed wide selection advantages

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to roll back civil rights legislation

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was successful in recruiting Asian American families into

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the service of their political agenda.

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Folks who are considered to be Asian Americans in the US

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are a very diverse category of peoples.

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The Immigration

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and Nationality Act

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of 1965 played a significant role

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in what this population looks like today, positioning some

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but not all groups to compete economically.

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This act favored educated immigrants

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and their family members, which would eventually lead

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to a significant growth

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in Asian American high school students

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who would be better positioned than those in the previous

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generations to pursue admissions into elite

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colleges and universities.

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My father, for example, took advantage

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of this immigration act to lead Taiwan and come to the US

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and with his engineering degree was able to come, come

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and then eventually bring our family along.

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Now our family would eventually, sponsor multiple uncles

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and aunts who themselves were well educated

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and can enter a skilled workforce in the us.

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My siblings and I were expected to go to college

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because it was made clear to us

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that our future would depend on our level of education.

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We also learned, you know, as we were trying to,

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adapt to us culture,

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that not all college degrees were equal,

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and that attending an elite educational institution

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would improve our future opportunities even more.

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And it turned out that we were not the only immigrant family

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that believed this.

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Instead, these expectations

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and goals were quite common among families

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who benefited from the 1965 Immigration Act.

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For us, an elite education would be a pass

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to enjoy the privileges

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that in our eyes growing up in the seventies

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were reserved exclusively for whites.

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This belief has not so far fetched,

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as many studies have shown that elite education

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provides students with credentials, relationships,

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and carefully cultivated lives on campus, all

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of which increase the chances of future success.

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I think more recent waves

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of Asian immigrants still view education as the best path

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for their children to access those privileges

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that are close to them due to language, cultural

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or socioeconomic barriers.

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There's still a durable shared understanding

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that elite schooling is central to becoming an elite.

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Now, given the limited op options for social mobility,

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it seems quite sensible for many Asian American families

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to make great sacrifices and invest their effort

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and resources toward obtaining privilege

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through elite education.

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Certainly that was the case for my family.

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So when their chances to access this pathway

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is perceived to be reduced in favor of groups

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who they perceive to be less qualified, it it right

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fires them up and lead them to side with those

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who can help them eventually realize their American dream.

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One's vulnerability to

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discrimination cannot be eradicated merely

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by earning credentials from elite institution.

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In the American corporate world, for example, there are lots

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of Asian Americans at junior levels and quite a few

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and in the middle management

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and virtually none in the higher reaches of leadership.

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Wisley Yang once wrote in the New York Times magazine,

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and I think it was about 2011,

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that a bitter undercurrent of Asian American life is that

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so many Asian graduates of elite universities

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find that meritocracy as they have understood it comes

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to an abrupt end after graduation.

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Now, although access is important, the story

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of discrimination does not end at the moment of access.

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According to my colleague, Devin Cardo at UCLA,

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inclusion in does not mean the absence

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of discrimination from, in other words, that pass obtained

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through credentials is limited.

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It doesn't provide full access to all privileges

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that one would expect.

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Still, it's better than having no pass at all, which gets us

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to another, perhaps even more unsettling problem, which is

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that individual benefits obtained from having a pass

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do not necessarily trickle down to other Asian Americans.

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So in other words, having more Asian Americans

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with elite credentials does not necessarily improve

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the conditions for those without one,

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especially those at the bottom.

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So some studies have shown that most of those

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who possess a skillset to race to the top

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of the hierarchy are also incentivized

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to pull up the ladder, behind them

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when they get to the top.

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Likewise, there is little reason to believe

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that Asian Americans who over attribute hard work

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and individual merit gaining emissions

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to elite colleges will necessarily

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lift as they climb.

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So my points here raise important questions about whether

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or not eliminating race conscious emissions

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is really in the best interest of Asian Americans,

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especially given that so few are actually admitted to

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in elite college.

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Harvard, for example,

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and mets roughly I think around 2000 applicants per year

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and reject nearly 95% of those

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who apply eliminating race conscious emissions will not

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change those numbers, so will not significantly

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increase one's chances of o of emissions

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and at best may increase only slightly the number

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of Asian Americans admitted per class.

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By comparison, nearly 50%

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of all Asian Americans enrolled in US H Education

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attend a community college or a two year college.

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The civil rights of these students have little, if nothing

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to do with Harvard, yet by actively seeking

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to dismantle hard fought civil rights practices like

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affirmative action that serve to even a playing field,

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it suggests that Asian American either

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do not need such protection, which is wrong

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or are only interested in those protections

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that best serve them.

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However, you can't just selectively choose when you want law

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to be colorblind

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and when you want it to recognize racial discrim

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discrimination, that is just not

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how civil rights advocacy works.

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Instead, it requires cross racial coalition building

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that prioritizes lifting up the bottom

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more than protecting the top.

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For me, it seems disingenuous to cry

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for civil rights protection to get access into the boardroom

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when you don't support other groups access to the kind

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of elite education that puts you in a position to be

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con even considered for the board.

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Clearly, Asian Americans that are, are at

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A crucial Junction when it comes

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to civil rights advocacy,

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and no doubt our interests here are as diverse

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as the population itself.

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On one hand, more Asian Americans than in previous

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generations have access some of the privileges

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that were once reserved only for whites.

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On the other hand, Asian Americans are still quite

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vulnerable to acts of racial violence

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and discrimination

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as was made more public over the past couple

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of years in the US under the banner of Asian hate.

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So where do we go from here when it comes

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to civil rights advocacy?

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Well, I see both challenges and opportunities,

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and I'll offer just three of them given the time limitation.

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First, I think we must recognize that there are limits

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to an unfettered pursuit of the American dream.

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Our society is still structured in a way

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that the well-worn path of obtaining a pass by way

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of elite education provides at best

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a day pass and not a season pass.

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Entry through some doors is still guided

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by racial order and not by credentials alone.

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Second, those who have earned a pass must be honest

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about how they are leveraging their newly acquired

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privileges to advance civil rights.

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Are they doing it to amass even more privileges or to repro

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or to reproduce existing privileges

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for their own children?

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Or are they leveraging their privileges in ways

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that disrupt the hoarding of opportunities

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and subsequently expanding status acquisition?

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Now, I'm not judging here

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because I don't see anything wrong

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with pursuing one's own self-interest.

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My problem is that if those interests

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do not really serve a majority of Asian Americans,

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let's not call what's happening here,

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a collective civil rights project.

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So lastly, I would suggest that we have

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to lean away from narratives that are filtered through a

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mainstream lens

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and lean into narratives

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that center on Asian American voices.

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Take for example how academic achievement is

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characterized in the us.

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Such caricatures through a mainstream, let's call it a gaze,

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would lead us to believe that Asian Americans are

17:15.785 --> 17:19.035
overachievers, have unique cultural values,

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and up upbringing illustrated through tiger parenting

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have good grades, but we character are one dimensional

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and unoriginal are models for other racial

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minority groups to emulate, et cetera, et cetera,

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by contrast.

17:40.035 --> 17:45.015
And American Center gaze would characterize their academic

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achievement as shaped by limited options

17:48.675 --> 17:52.125
for social mobility as stressful

17:52.125 --> 17:54.445
because there are no safety nets.

17:54.985 --> 17:59.725
So failure isn't a viable option as isolating

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due to language

18:01.525 --> 18:05.565
and cultural barriers as disempowering

18:06.305 --> 18:08.445
due to avoidance of conflict.

18:08.445 --> 18:12.285
Because such conflict can derail one's future opportunities

18:13.385 --> 18:18.285
as dehumanizing because they feel invisible as ignored

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because they are never similar enough to be accepted

18:22.505 --> 18:26.645
and not different enough to be seen or heard

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and as lost because they are always code switching

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and never their authentic selves.

18:34.005 --> 18:37.755
These are things that we learned, from the research.

18:39.765 --> 18:42.855
This gaze is a very different way of seeing

18:42.995 --> 18:47.015
and explaining the circumstances of

18:47.235 --> 18:50.095
and conditions for Asian Americans.

18:51.525 --> 18:53.965
I think if we take more seriously

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and more authentic gaze,

18:57.385 --> 19:00.165
we will develop a better foundation

19:00.385 --> 19:03.245
and roadmap for civil rights advocacy.

19:04.865 --> 19:07.885
Now, I'm not necessarily an optimistic person,

19:08.665 --> 19:12.885
but I'm very hopeful that we can move in this direction

19:12.885 --> 19:17.125
because I now see more younger Asian Americans

19:18.285 --> 19:19.685
throwing out the playbook

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and taking ownership of their own stories

19:23.655 --> 19:27.275
and broadening their spheres of association

19:27.455 --> 19:31.755
and sense of achievement by creating new pathways.

19:32.815 --> 19:34.715
If more of us take part in this,

19:35.295 --> 19:39.635
or at least support it, Asian Americans will be less tempted

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to blindly support false promises

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to access privilege

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and become more willing to imagine

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an alternative future.

00:00 - This was a really interesting lawsuit filed by students for fair admissions or what I will refer to as F-S-F-F-A and is sought to more broadly prohibit Harvard from considering race as one of many factors they typically use in admitting students. Now, SFFA argued

00:19 - that this practice is unfair, unnecessary, and unconstitutional, especially when it came to how Asian American applicants were treated. For example, according to SFFA Asian American applicants needed SAT scores that were about 140 points higher than white applicants to be admitted and SATs in in the US they're, achievement entrance exam scores. Curiously, this case did not focus on this wide advantage,

00:57 - but instead focus on what SFFA refer to as the racial preference associated with race conscious emissions practices. And as, many folks know, these practices do not include white applicants, but instead attempted to even the playing field for underrepresented racial minority populations. So when this case finally reached the US Supreme Court, a majority of the court last year ended up siding with SFFA and that decision pretty much

01:32 - eliminated affirmative action in higher education in the United States. By contrast, previous Supreme Court decisions, which included the landmark regents of the University of California versus Bakke in 1978, and then cases against the University of Michigan in 2003 and then the University of Texas in 2013, those decisions only incrementally scaled back race conscious emissions practices, but still held them to be constitutional.

02:06 - So the decision last summer with respect to Harvard was quite, consequential that Harvard case was not the first rodeo for Asian Americans when it came to challenging college admissions practices. there's a very interesting, backdrop between 1976 and 1985, Asian American enrollment in elite institutions in the US grew at an extraordinary pace,

02:36 - nearly tripling their proportion of the undergraduate enrollment by the mid 1980s, however, their missions rate at those campuses started dropping. So Asian American Civil Rights organizations filed complaints to the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education or OCR beginning in 1988. Importantly, however that complaints filed during this period did not attribute this drop

03:09 - to race conscious emissions practices, but instead charged that Asian-American applicants had been admitted at a significantly lower rate than comparably qualified white applicants. The subsequent OCR investigation did indeed confirm this disparity, but here's the odd twist. They also concluded that the lower rate for Asian applicants was not due to discrimination, but instead due to plus factors using the admissions process such as preferences for children of alumni or legacies

03:52 - and athletes, which tipped the missions in favor of white applicants, those preferences were considered by OCR to be, to not be discriminatory because they serve what they refer to as legitimate institutional goals. So as you might imagine, this conclusion did not settle the matter. Fast forward now a couple of decades In 2016, another complaint was filed charging that a handful

04:26 - of Ivy League colleges continued to engage in unlawful discrimination against Asian American applicants in the emissions process. Now, unlike the ones filed in the eighties, this one called out race conscious emissions practices as the main source for this discrimination. For decades leading up to this complaint, Asian Americans had been repeatedly portrayed as the new victims of affirmative action recasting the long narrative of reverse discrimination against whites.

05:05 - Still similar to those complaints filed in the eighties, OCR determined that there was insufficient evidence to charge Ivy League colleges with any civil rights violations. So it was not at all surprising that by 2019, well-funded neoconservative groups like SFFA, which downplayed wide selection advantages to roll back civil rights legislation was successful in recruiting Asian American families into the service of their political agenda.

05:40 - Folks who are considered to be Asian Americans in the US are a very diverse category of peoples. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 played a significant role in what this population looks like today, positioning some but not all groups to compete economically. This act favored educated immigrants and their family members, which would eventually lead to a significant growth

06:16 - in Asian American high school students who would be better positioned than those in the previous generations to pursue admissions into elite colleges and universities. My father, for example, took advantage of this immigration act to lead Taiwan and come to the US and with his engineering degree was able to come, come and then eventually bring our family along. Now our family would eventually, sponsor multiple uncles and aunts who themselves were well educated

06:49 - and can enter a skilled workforce in the us. My siblings and I were expected to go to college because it was made clear to us that our future would depend on our level of education. We also learned, you know, as we were trying to, adapt to us culture, that not all college degrees were equal, and that attending an elite educational institution would improve our future opportunities even more. And it turned out that we were not the only immigrant family

07:29 - that believed this. Instead, these expectations and goals were quite common among families who benefited from the 1965 Immigration Act. For us, an elite education would be a pass to enjoy the privileges that in our eyes growing up in the seventies were reserved exclusively for whites. This belief has not so far fetched, as many studies have shown that elite education

07:58 - provides students with credentials, relationships, and carefully cultivated lives on campus, all of which increase the chances of future success. I think more recent waves of Asian immigrants still view education as the best path for their children to access those privileges that are close to them due to language, cultural or socioeconomic barriers. There's still a durable shared understanding that elite schooling is central to becoming an elite.

08:37 - Now, given the limited op options for social mobility, it seems quite sensible for many Asian American families to make great sacrifices and invest their effort and resources toward obtaining privilege through elite education. Certainly that was the case for my family. So when their chances to access this pathway is perceived to be reduced in favor of groups who they perceive to be less qualified, it it right fires them up and lead them to side with those

09:15 - who can help them eventually realize their American dream. One's vulnerability to discrimination cannot be eradicated merely by earning credentials from elite institution. In the American corporate world, for example, there are lots of Asian Americans at junior levels and quite a few and in the middle management and virtually none in the higher reaches of leadership. Wisley Yang once wrote in the New York Times magazine, and I think it was about 2011,

09:55 - that a bitter undercurrent of Asian American life is that so many Asian graduates of elite universities find that meritocracy as they have understood it comes to an abrupt end after graduation. Now, although access is important, the story of discrimination does not end at the moment of access. According to my colleague, Devin Cardo at UCLA, inclusion in does not mean the absence of discrimination from, in other words, that pass obtained through credentials is limited.

10:41 - It doesn't provide full access to all privileges that one would expect. Still, it's better than having no pass at all, which gets us to another, perhaps even more unsettling problem, which is that individual benefits obtained from having a pass do not necessarily trickle down to other Asian Americans. So in other words, having more Asian Americans with elite credentials does not necessarily improve the conditions for those without one, especially those at the bottom.

11:16 - So some studies have shown that most of those who possess a skillset to race to the top of the hierarchy are also incentivized to pull up the ladder, behind them when they get to the top. Likewise, there is little reason to believe that Asian Americans who over attribute hard work and individual merit gaining emissions to elite colleges will necessarily lift as they climb.

11:52 - So my points here raise important questions about whether or not eliminating race conscious emissions is really in the best interest of Asian Americans, especially given that so few are actually admitted to in elite college. Harvard, for example, and mets roughly I think around 2000 applicants per year and reject nearly 95% of those who apply eliminating race conscious emissions will not change those numbers, so will not significantly

12:27 - increase one's chances of o of emissions and at best may increase only slightly the number of Asian Americans admitted per class. By comparison, nearly 50% of all Asian Americans enrolled in US H Education attend a community college or a two year college. The civil rights of these students have little, if nothing to do with Harvard, yet by actively seeking to dismantle hard fought civil rights practices like affirmative action that serve to even a playing field,

13:12 - it suggests that Asian American either do not need such protection, which is wrong or are only interested in those protections that best serve them. However, you can't just selectively choose when you want law to be colorblind and when you want it to recognize racial discrim discrimination, that is just not how civil rights advocacy works. Instead, it requires cross racial coalition building

13:46 - that prioritizes lifting up the bottom more than protecting the top. For me, it seems disingenuous to cry for civil rights protection to get access into the boardroom when you don't support other groups access to the kind of elite education that puts you in a position to be con even considered for the board. Clearly, Asian Americans that are, are at A crucial Junction when it comes to civil rights advocacy,

14:21 - and no doubt our interests here are as diverse as the population itself. On one hand, more Asian Americans than in previous generations have access some of the privileges that were once reserved only for whites. On the other hand, Asian Americans are still quite vulnerable to acts of racial violence and discrimination as was made more public over the past couple of years in the US under the banner of Asian hate.

14:55 - So where do we go from here when it comes to civil rights advocacy? Well, I see both challenges and opportunities, and I'll offer just three of them given the time limitation. First, I think we must recognize that there are limits to an unfettered pursuit of the American dream. Our society is still structured in a way that the well-worn path of obtaining a pass by way of elite education provides at best a day pass and not a season pass.

15:34 - Entry through some doors is still guided by racial order and not by credentials alone. Second, those who have earned a pass must be honest about how they are leveraging their newly acquired privileges to advance civil rights. Are they doing it to amass even more privileges or to repro or to reproduce existing privileges for their own children? Or are they leveraging their privileges in ways that disrupt the hoarding of opportunities

16:16 - and subsequently expanding status acquisition? Now, I'm not judging here because I don't see anything wrong with pursuing one's own self-interest. My problem is that if those interests do not really serve a majority of Asian Americans, let's not call what's happening here, a collective civil rights project. So lastly, I would suggest that we have to lean away from narratives that are filtered through a

16:53 - mainstream lens and lean into narratives that center on Asian American voices. Take for example how academic achievement is characterized in the us. Such caricatures through a mainstream, let's call it a gaze, would lead us to believe that Asian Americans are overachievers, have unique cultural values, and up upbringing illustrated through tiger parenting have good grades, but we character are one dimensional

17:29 - and unoriginal are models for other racial minority groups to emulate, et cetera, et cetera, by contrast. And American Center gaze would characterize their academic achievement as shaped by limited options for social mobility as stressful because there are no safety nets. So failure isn't a viable option as isolating due to language and cultural barriers as disempowering

18:06 - due to avoidance of conflict. Because such conflict can derail one's future opportunities as dehumanizing because they feel invisible as ignored because they are never similar enough to be accepted and not different enough to be seen or heard and as lost because they are always code switching and never their authentic selves. These are things that we learned, from the research. This gaze is a very different way of seeing and explaining the circumstances of

18:47 - and conditions for Asian Americans. I think if we take more seriously and more authentic gaze, we will develop a better foundation and roadmap for civil rights advocacy. Now, I'm not necessarily an optimistic person, but I'm very hopeful that we can move in this direction because I now see more younger Asian Americans throwing out the playbook and taking ownership of their own stories

19:23 - and broadening their spheres of association and sense of achievement by creating new pathways. If more of us take part in this, or at least support it, Asian Americans will be less tempted to blindly support false promises to access privilege and become more willing to imagine an alternative future.

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