Affirmative Action and Asian Americans: a former admissions officer's perspective
By Jessica Ch’ng
At almost every date, wedding, or social gathering I go to, I get asked the same question: “What do you think about affirmative action?” I probably get asked this question so often because I'm an Asian American Harvard alumna, and for nearly six years, I worked at a highly selective university in their office of admissions.
Edward Blum, founder of Students for Fair Admissions (Image from Reuters/Bryan Snyder)
In 2016, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the race-conscious admissions process at the University of Texas at Austin in Abigail Fisher v. University of Texas. The lawsuit had been filed by conservative activist Edward Blum in an attempt to dismantle race-conscious affirmative action in higher education. As the Fisher case made its way through the courts, Blum turned his attention to Asian Americans. Blum – who is white – assembled a group of Asian-American students rejected by Harvard University to form Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) and launched a lawsuit against Harvard University for intentional discrimination against Asian American applicants. In the most recent October 2019 court decision on the case, Federal Judge Allison D. Burroughs rejected SFFA’s claims of intentional discrimination, yet called upon the university admissions office to do more to reduce unconscious biases.
Student activists rallying in support of affirmative action. (Image from The Wellesley News.)
Within the Asian American community, affirmative action has been a divisive issue, and I’ve heard so many friends express ambivalence about the topic. While SFFA comprises “more than a dozen” Asian American students alleging discrimination in the Harvard admissions process, the Legal Defense and Education Fund at the NAACP has amassed the support of 25 Harvard student and alumnx organizations – representing many different affinities, including a diversity of Asian American organizations – in an amicus brief to preserve affirmative action. In the Fisher case, over 160 Asian and Pacific Islander organizations joined amicus briefs in support of affirmative action. The New York Times, in August 2019, catalogued some of the perspectives of Asian American young people on affirmative action: some contended that the use of race in college admissions is entirely unfair; some expressed sadness that their achievements seem to be discounted because of their race; some upheld the value of diversity and stated the necessity of solidarity across communities of color; and some commented that they support affirmative action despite the perceived discrimination against Asian Americans. Clearly, there is no singular Asian American opinion on affirmative action, and although these divisions and ambivalences preceded SFFA v. Harvard, the case has reignited these tensions and the complicated emotions that accompany them.
When I worked in admissions, I focused on multicultural recruitment and college access. I was responsible not only for recruiting and enrolling talented students of color and low-income students at the university, but I also worked to develop the pipeline of underrepresented students pursuing higher education more generally. Given my own identity and experiences so close to issues related to college access, educational inequality, and (mis)conceptions about merit, I would like to share a few of my perspectives on admissions, affirmative action, and their relationships to Asian Americans:
1) In my experience, there is no intentional/explicit discrimination against Asian Americans, and there are no quotas on Asian Americans in the admissions process. In my experience, admissions officers recognize that each applicant, regardless of race, is an individual and appreciate the immense diversity of backgrounds and experiences within each racial and ethnic group. This is not to say that the admissions process is perfect. There are vulnerabilities in the admissions process that allow for negative biases to creep in for all students of color, for women, for students with disabilities, for queer & trans* students, for any student representing a marginalized identity or experience. It's a people-centered process, and the people involved – individual admissions officers, guidance counselors, teachers, interviewers, and students themselves – carry their own biases and unconsciously internalize messages about identity from broader society. This is more than a Harvard issue or admissions issue; it's a societal issue, and one that does warrant scrutiny, critical engagement, and accountability in the admissions profession.
2) In a holistic admissions process, we consider every application in context and act affirmatively on all kinds of things: racial background, socioeconomic status, geography, other marginalized markers of identity. Why? Because all of those things contribute to an individual's access to education and often affect how an individual is perceived and treated by other people. Race enormously affects how an individual navigates their education, the opportunities to which they have access, and the support they receive from various gatekeepers. And not just education, race historically and currently affects how an individual navigates the world, their access to stable housing, adequate health care, economic opportunity, and financial security, and their treatment by law enforcement, immigration processes, and so on. All of these factors and forces additionally enable or undermine educational access. Moreover, in my experience, students from underrepresented backgrounds often see and solve problems differently. They change our campuses and society for the better.
“Asian Americans experience prejudice, invisibility, erasure, and assumptions about foreignness, citizenship, and loyalty. The source of these biases isn’t affirmative action. It’s white supremacy.”
3) Broadly and like many other communities of color, Asian Americans experience prejudice, invisibility, erasure, and assumptions about foreignness, citizenship, and loyalty. The source of these biases isn't affirmative action. It's white supremacy. White supremacy produces biases against Asian Americans. White supremacy dismisses our individuality and attempts to place boundaries on who we can be. White supremacy exploits our labor. White supremacy invisibilizes us and writes us out of our own stories. Affirmative action, however, is one strategy to erode white supremacy. Affirmative action valorizes different ways of knowing and ways of being. Affirmative action strives to diversify leaders and decision makers. Affirmative action attempts to make our institutions more representative, more equitable, and more just.
4) Standardized testing is not an objective measure of merit, potential, or ability. Standardized tests are fraught with racial and socioeconomic biases. Indeed, in an ongoing lawsuit, students, community organizations, and the Compton Unified School District have even sued the University of California system for its standardized testing requirements, citing the discriminatory nature of these tests against disabled, low-income, multilingual, and underrepresented minority students. We should be skeptical of any argument that positions standardized tests as metrics of achievement or future contribution. Moreover, to suggest that bright, motivated students who come from marginalized backgrounds are less capable because of their scores on racially- and socioeconomically-biased standardized tests is akin to blaming the victim.
5) If we, Asian America, truly care about justice for Asian Americans, we must critically examine prejudice and marginalization within our own community, too. Our victimization by white supremacy doesn’t absolve Asian Americans of our responsibility to do better. We need to advocate for data disaggregation and for educational inclusion and access for underrepresented Asian American groups. We must fight for immigration legislation that supports undocumented immigrants, who represent 1 in 7 Asian immigrants in this country. As income inequality among Asian Americans surpasses any other racial or ethnic group, we must support social safety nets and access to quality education, health care, and job opportunities for all people, regardless of income. Like every community, we are not immune to internalizing and reproducing racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, colorism, Islamophobia, and other forms of bigotry. We must reject these prejudices and the social and structural forces that produce them – they affect Asian Americans, too.
“If we really, truly care about justice for Asian Americans, we need to fight white supremacy and advocate for equality and justice for all people of color, not just ourselves. ”
6) And if we really, truly care about justice for Asian Americans, we need to fight white supremacy and advocate for equality and justice for all people of color, not just ourselves. Too often, our people have been invoked to advance projects of racial and global subordination. As the Asian American Racial Justice Toolkit explains, “Throughout history, Asians have entered into the folklore of race in various ways – as despised foreigners used to justify chattel slavery, as exploitable foreign labor used to justify abolition, as targets of U.S. military aggression alongside Indigenous peoples, as model minorities used to discipline Black freedom movements, and as terrorists used to justify surveillance and war.” We need to address anti-blackness in Asian and Asian American communities. We need to consider how our incorporation into the nation-state reifies settler colonialism. We need to recognize the privileges some of us experience in educational and professional spaces. We cannot integrate into “mainstream” (read: white) society at the expense of other racial groups. Assimilation doesn’t free us from white supremacy; rather, assimilation implicates us in white supremacy if we accept its racial hierarchy.
To close, I want to acknowledge that equity in college admissions is just one piece of a larger struggle. Indeed, as the Varsity Blues scandal demonstrated, selective admissions and elite higher education too often reproduce other forms of inequality, consolidating resources for the few while excluding the many. The student bodies of prestigious universities are far from representative of the country as a whole. Affirmative action addresses some of the symptoms of social inequality, but we must endeavor to address its roots. To that end, the Asian American Racial Justice Toolkit has assembled an incredible set of workshops and resources to inform and support Asian American activism. Nonprofit organization Asian Americans Advancing Justice strives to “advance civil and human rights for Asian Americans and to build and promote a fair and equitable society for all.” Our people can do and are doing big things to create a more just world, and to that I say, 加油!