Asian Support for the Affirmative Action Ruling Is More Complicated Than You Think

Let me preface to say I am and always have been a staunch supporter of affirmative action. For the past four years, I have been a special education teacher in predominantly Black and Brown, Title I schools that are >95% free and reduced lunch.

I see how hard students have to work just to graduate high school, let alone college. I’ve seen students battling homelessness and working jobs while trying to balance academics. I’ve called parents countless times to let them know their student’s progress towards graduation, and monitor attendance for students at risk of failing classes who aren’t seniors.

The kid who has to wake up at 5 a.m. and catch two buses to make it to school at 8 a.m. clearly goes through significant hardships a lot of Americans don’t go through. And it makes me very sad to reckon with the fact that my kids will have a harder time getting into college now.

As many liberal commentators and politicians have said, legacy admissions, where children of alumni have a leg up in admissions, is the most insidious and unequal form of college admissions preference that should also be done away with.

While regular people debate each other in highly charged conversations and discussions over affirmative action, I don’t think the colleges themselves are anyone’s friends or allies in this fight: they are clearly looking for ways to save money and look out for their financial interests rather than really serve as an engine for social mobility.

That’s why so much of the preference, even as colleges purported to be diverse, is for wealthy students of all backgrounds, whether it’s wealthy immigrants or wealthy children of alumni. That’s why, at 38 elite colleges, there are more students in the top 1% of the income bracket than the bottom 60%.

I thought most Asian peers agreed with me, and responses to one Pew Research Center poll question seemed to reinforce it.

But I’m getting the growing sense that I was dead wrong.

My own journey defending affirmative action to Asians

In high school, I got into a Facebook argument with a bunch of my Asian peers over affirmative action. A friend posted that affirmative action discriminated against Asians. I made a long, and what I thought at the time was an eloquent argument about how it wasn’t discrimination and how we had an obligation as Asians to essentially take one for the team and not agonize over getting into Harvard versus going to our best state school. I said it wasn’t discrimination because we were worried about the prestige of the school we got into, not whether we got into colleges at all.

I recoil a bit at the memory because of the mental gymnastics I had to play to dismiss the experiences of my Asian peers, as well as my own. I always scored well above the median test score or had above the median GPA for whatever school I went to in my undergraduate and graduate experience, and yet faced surprising rejections all around, seeing White peers with similar if not worse qualifications not have the same difficulties. I wondered whether there was some deficiency in my application, my character, or whether there was something wrong with me that made it so my applications seemed lackluster. As a writer, did I suddenly become a worse writer when it came to applications to colleges and graduate school?

Still, for the greater good of the liberal cause, I pushed those feelings aside because I believed that due to my relative privilege, other underrepresented minorities needed affirmative action more. Some classmates countered that that was true, but that admissions should be based on merit, not race, and that affirmative action should be based on socioeconomic status and class rather than race.

At that time, I was the liberal moral and thought police, insinuating that my Asian peers were, at best, out of touch and privileged, and at worst, racist towards Black and Brown students.

Complicating views on affirmative action

My views on affirmative action as an Asian-American have matured and become more complicated over time. I followed the Supreme Court that made race-based admissions unconstitutional closely. Harvard didn’t help its case by using a “personal score” rating the leadership qualities and likeability of students, consistently rating Asian students with much lower scores than White students.

Students in “sparse country” are students that come from geographic regions that don’t usually send a lot of students to Ivy League schools. Asian male students in “sparse country” needed to score a 1380 on the SAT, while Asian female students needed to score a 1350, compared to just 1310 for a White student and 1100 for a Black student.

Former Harvard Dean, William Fitzsimmons, provoked widespread outrage in some Asian circles when he said, “There are people who, let’s say, for example, have only lived in the sparse-country state for a year or two,” in response to a question about why Asian students needed to score significantly higher than White students. The implication, of course, is that Asians only lived in those states for one or two years and didn’t spend their whole lives there.

“To Fitzsimmons, evidently, and by extension, the Harvard admissions office, Asian applicants are not citizens with legitimate ties to a community but are instead newcomers who should be thought of by their race,” Jay Caspian Kang wrote in 2022.

So my mind was changed, and I think the use of this “personal rating” scale and “sparse country” mentality are very wrong and, yes, discrimination against Asians. However, at the end of the day, I still maintained my support of affirmative action and didn’t think the Court needed to go so far as to overturn affirmative action entirely, just the admissions measures used to dock Asian applications.

Around this particular issue, I had to do a deep internal reckoning with myself as a possible race traitor. I was the one completely dismissing my own experience and the experiences of my Asian peers, advocating for us to take a position against our self-interest for the sake of taking one for the team. I was the one playing all these mental gymnastics to convince everyone we weren’t being discriminated against when the evidence was egregious in showing we were.

And although I still stood by the decision, I was abiding by a system where Asians were discardable cogs in the left-wing coalition, taken for granted and forgotten in this conversation about college admissions. I’ve seen a lot of takes that Asians who supported Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff in the SCOTUS case against Harvard, were victims of a right-wing misinformation campaign that believed that racial classification was unfair, completely denying those students agency as grown adults who can think for themselves instead of victims of manipulation.

I even used to have that opinion, but in light of the recall of the San Francisco Board of Education protesting changing a merit-based admissions system from Lowell High School to a lottery-based system in the name of racial equity, I had to reconsider. The backlash to equity-based admissions measures that disadvantage Asians who excel at having high test scores is a very real and growing thing, so it seems like I’ll lose a lot of credibility in conversations among Asian peers advocating for us to “take one for the team.”

What a lot of Asians really think won’t be revealed by journalists or polls

In light of the ruling, I read headlines from mainstream media outlets like Vox and TIME Magazine overwhelmingly condemning the decision and claiming that most Asians supported affirmative action. Yes, a Pew Research Center study gave conflicting results on public opinion — 53% of Asian respondents answered “yes” to whether they support affirmative action, but only 21% of Asians said colleges should consider race and ethnicity in admissions decisions. 76% of respondents think colleges should not consider race and ethnicity in admissions decisions.

It’s clear that issue polling data is heavily biased by how the question is asked. A question from the Asian American Voter Survey (AAVS) that asked, “do you favor or oppose affirmative action programs designed to help Black people, women and other minorities get better access to education?” received over 60% support. In 2016, the same group asked “in general, do you think affirmative action programs designed to increase the number of Black and minority students on college campuses are a good thing or a bad thing?” produced two-thirds of Chinese-American participants disapproving.

So what numbers should someone trust to actually gauge Asian support/disapproval for the Supreme Court ruling and affirmative action? None of them.

When you read Reddit threads in Asian-related subreddits, including r/asianamerican (a relatively liberal Asian subreddit), you see a whole other side of super passionate backlash against affirmative action. It’s like the difference between a multiple choice question and a free response question: people answer “yes” or “no” to an issue polling question. People elaborate on how they actually think and feel about the issue on a forum.

The top r/asianamerican comment on the thread, with over 300 upvotes, advocated for a class-based affirmative action alternative that pushes back against the “super wealthy Chinese person” stereotype. Others expressed being conflicted because of their personal adverse experiences with affirmative action and their care for equity. A lot of people took exception to the implication of Asians being White-adjacent or model minorities.

So many replies to threads talked about how colleges are still going to find ways to discriminate against Asians and how they got a certain perfect score on the SAT or ACT and didn’t get into any of their top choice colleges. Many defended California, the most progressive state in the country, defeating a proposition to reimplement affirmative action by 15 percentage points. Many talked about finally being glad they can be judged by their merit rather than their race. The vast majority took exception at non-Asians telling them how to think on the issue.

One commenter, who received 37 upvotes, countered a commenter who said Asians are being used as a wedge between White Supremacists and proponents of racial equity. The commenter thought the insinuation was ridiculous. The person (I’m just assuming it’s a male commenter) talked about how Asians need to look out for their own self-interests, like other racial groups. He talked about how nobody cares about Asians’ problems in light of rapidly rising hate crimes and violence against Asian elders and Asian women. He talked about how there was no movement to support Asian-owned businesses, no strong movement for Asian lives being killed disproportionately.

And he talked about the biggest reason there is a lack of support for Asian issues, like Asians being the poorest race in New York and the lack of support for Asian-owned businesses. It hit me really hard and felt like an attack on an Asian like myself, who prioritizes the equity issues faced by Black and Brown Americans over those of my own:

“All of these things happen and Asians wonder why nobody supports us and it’s obvious — because we don’t even support ourselves first!”

As you can see, I’m someone who’s very sensitive to others’ opinions and the pulse of the room, and this comment felt like a gut bunch. I also believe in adapting to the times, and I felt myself agreeing in part with the person that someone like me doesn’t do a good enough job supporting Asian people and Asian causes. And I’m seeing a growing divergence between the interests of a lot of Asians versus the broader liberal cause for racial equity.

Sure, not everyone on r/asianamerican is Asian. But I also went on the r/lawschool subreddit, being in law school, and also found significant support for the ruling and backlash to the ruling. Yes, in this subreddit there are even fewer Asians than in the r/asianamerican subreddit.

Every single comment about colleges and law schools becoming less diverse got downvoted into oblivion. One commenter talked about how UC Berkeley’s most recent entering class is “30.7% white, 52.1% Asian, 3.6% Black, 21.1% Latino, and 1.8% Native American,” compared to the general Califonia population of “35% white, 15% Asian, 5% Black, 39% Latino, and 1% Native American.” In this enrollment, Asians were drastically overrepresented while every other race, including White people, were underrepresented relative to their share of the population.

In response to one commenter saying this was less diversity than before, one commenter, who got over 100 upvotes, said, “an unspoken premise of your argument is that Asians are not diverse or don’t count as minorities. Otherwise, you would think UC schools are extremely diverse…It’s just funny that somehow if Asians overrepresented at certain universities, that means that those universities are not diverse.”

I felt like a lot of these commenters were missing the point of why the ruling is so bad, but if I said that, it’s clear my comment would have also been downvoted into oblivion. I may have had a pulse on what takes and opinions are from journalists and columnists at the New York Times, but it seems like I did not have a pulse on the comments section of the New York Times or Reddit, where anonymity is core to expression. Almost every single highly recommended comment on New York Times articles about the ruling said something like “this is the first time I agree with this conservative Supreme Court” and “I’m Asian and I’m not sorry about being Asian — finally we can stop being discriminated against.”

Others talked about banning legacy admissions, but I sensed this huge disconnect in Asian subreddits and comment threads — the support for the ruling is far more pronounced than advertised by polls or liberal Asians like myself.

There is a huge element of social desirability bias once someone’s name is attached to their opinion, especially on an issue as divisive in America as affirmative action. Publicly disavowing affirmative action and celebrating the ruling is a pretty insensitive thing to do in this present moment, so it makes sense that the reactions are significantly more galvanized when the anonymity factor is present.

Takeaways

I think unless you’re an Asian person who has progressive leanings and wants to be accepted into progressive circles, like myself, there’s probably a part of you that has been frustrated by how affirmative action has been implemented. I take more stock in what the lurkers and anonymous posters say on these forums, what gets massively upvoted and what doesn’t, compared to what writers are willing to say in public because of this social desirability bias.

To me, it’s suggesting we’re drastically underestimating Asian support for this controversial Supreme Court ruling, and a lot of more progressive Asians like myself will try to play this gaslighting game where we pretend that support isn’t there or say “this is just a right-wing misinformation campaign.” But I don’t think we’re persuading our fellow Asians or doing our community or our side of the political spectrum any favors by sweeping this problem and distrust for equity-based admissions measures any favors.

The past liberal advocate I had been for positions against Asians’ self-interest in college admissions and academia will only get me labeled a race traitor in a lot of circles, even among my Asian friends and peers. Even if they don’t say it out loud or publicly, many will think it and take to anonymous forums like Reddit or the Asian comments on the New York Times to voice their displeasure with the previous status quo.

Unless an Asian-American is galvanized around liberal politics like myself, they will more often than not be very against affirmative action and race-based admissions measures — just look at how California — the state with the most Asians, has consistently voted to overturn affirmative action and stop its resurgence into its public university system.

I am dismayed because I see a multiracial, liberal coalition that I want and want to be a part of as less sustainable. I do believe this ruling will accelerate a massive right-wing swing among Asians, especially the ones who try not to get involved in politics, who are more moderate, who usually don’t even vote, who immigrated to the country when they were 8, 10, 12, or 15. In the 2022 New York gubernatorial election, some parts of Sunset Park’s Chinatown voted Republican by over 15%. Whether it’s the tepid response to the #StopAsianHate campaign where Asian women and elderly people were getting stabbed to death in their homes, killed in the street, or pushed in front of the subway, I do sense a growing, pessimistic worldview around Democrats, liberals, and Asians.

Yesterday, I told my friend “I think Republicans just won over the Asians over 45 demographic.”

It certainly doesn’t help my side that the Asians who are not woke and are part of this backlash against equity measures in education are overwhelmingly working-class, and that the Asians who are on the woke side are more college-educated professionals, like myself. This class divide does not bode well for Democrats electorally or for people like me.

There is incredible division in the Asian community over whether there should or shouldn’t be more policing in response to hate crimes against Asians. And there is also division on the affirmative action question. But that’s what we see when I read articles in the news or polls asking a socially desirable question like “do you support affirmative action?” That’s not what I see the moment I stumble upon the comments section of a New York Times article about affirmative action or a Reddit forum where people open up about what they really think, or a WeChat group chat where Asian parents complain about discrimination against their kids in the college admissions process.

That cynical worldview is that Democrats and progressives do not have the interests of Asians at heart. Whether it’s the nonchalance about Asians getting killed in the street the past few years or the position on race-based admissions where Asians are seen as overrepresented and de-prioritized over other minorities. From the perspective of an Asian-American in the middle or who identifies as independent, the Republicans might be crazy with Trump and trying to overturn elections, but at least they’re ambivalent about Asians, while Democrats actively fight for a cause that is against Asians’ self-interest and takes Asian electoral support for granted.

Personally, I will continue to support race-based admissions because it’s the right thing to do. We should correct past historical wrongs and take into account the legacy of systemic racism in the educational experiences of all Americans. We should want a diverse student body to enrich the educational experiences of the student body and diversify America’s future elite. And colleges should continue to find other ways to keep their student body diverse (which I suspect some Asian readers will see as “so you just want colleges to find more insidious ways to discriminate against Asians?”)

I grew up with an educational experience surrounded by a ton of Asians, as an Asian-American. Some of my classes were 50% Asian. And I don’t necessarily think it’s a rich experience to have the Asian population of our universities completely explode at the expense of White, Black, and Brown students, but I know a lot of my Asian peers disagree.

But I do admit the “we should support race-based admissions because it’s the right thing to do” is going to ring very flat to the Asian college freshmen that got rejected by all their dream schools even though their grades, test scores, and extracurriculars were well above the average admitted student, to the Asian parents who see their children cry and agonize when everything they worked hard for seems to be for naught due to a factor completely outside their control.

The truth is people can only vote against their self-interest for so long. I do disagree with the notion that race-based admissions is against our self-interest because my educational experience was enriched by being around people of all races and cultures, and my circle of best friends is a byproduct of that.

But this, I believe, is where Democrats will lose their hold on the Asian vote and coalition. It won’t come out on mainstream media outlets, but it is exemplified by the lurkers, the Chinese-language chats on WeChat. Biden’s statement condemning the decision is what he had to do politically and the right thing to do, but it will drive away even more Asian voters.

I think these outspoken Reddit posters who are enjoying broad, popular support among the Asian community are wrong and missing the point. But I can’t really say completely dismissing all those sentiments and concerns is the right thing for me to do anymore. And I know overweighing anonymous posters and how they vote is not the best metric to go off of to assess Asian support for the ruling, but we have to be honest and realize that it does add another layer that the numbers and news articles don’t capture. There were people who posted opinions like my own, but the most popular posts clearly supported the ruling and a need for Asians to look out for their own self-interest.

I think it’s a tragic step in our nation’s history that our colleges and the future of our country’s elite are going to be less diverse and accessible. Affirmative action wasn’t perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction.

But I can see the response to that now — am I saying significantly more Asian means our colleges are less diverse? I’m going to offend a lot of Asians by saying our notion of diversity hasn’t grown intersectional enough to really consider Asians diverse. So as it stands, by how most people understand diversity today, colleges having a major oversaturation of Asians and undersaturation of Black and Brown students does mean colleges will be less diverse.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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