As Asian Americans Become More Pivotal In The Affirmative Action Debate, Both Sides Weigh In
Two opposing viewpoints on affirmative action, from Cory Liu and Jenn Fang.
“America, you great unfinished symphony, you sent for me / You let me make a difference / A place where even orphan immigrants / Can leave their fingerprints and rise up.” — Lin-Manuel Miranda
Last week, I penned a post titled, Asian Americans Are Being Used As A Wedge To Advance The Anti-Affirmative Action Agenda. It evoked passionate responses from both sides of the aisle.
Affirmative action in higher education is clearly an issue on which reasonable minds may disagree. The percentage of Asian Americans who believe “affirmative action programs designed to increase the number of black and minority students on college campuses are a good thing” dropped from 63% in 2014 to 52% in 2016 (11% and 14% didn’t know, respectively). However, 64% of Asian Americans still “favor such policies” (while 9% are unsure if they favor or oppose such policies).
How Transactional Lawyers Can Better Serve (And Maintain) Their Clients
In 2015, affirmative action support among African-Americans was 77%, Latinos was 61%, and white Americans was 53%. But in response to a 2016 Gallup Poll question asking if “race or ethnicity should be taken into account in college admissions decisions in order to promote diversity,” only 44% of blacks agreed, with 29% of Hispanics and 22% of whites following suit.
Today, I’d like to feature two opposing viewpoints on affirmative action, from Cory Liu and Jenn Fang.
Cory Liu, a Houston attorney and the volunteer executive director of Students for Fair Admissions, believes:
In our increasingly multiracial society, the Census Bureau’s crude and antiquated racial categories should not be used to determine our destiny. It doesn’t matter what your name is or where your family is from. We are all Americans with equal rights, and we all deserve an equal opportunity to attend the school of our dreams.
Sponsored
Law Firms Now Have A Choice In Their Document Comparison Software
AI’s Impact On Law Firms Of Every Size
How Transactional Lawyers Can Better Serve (And Maintain) Their Clients
Why Do AI And Legal Professionals Make The Perfect Partnership?
In contrast, Jenn Fang, founder of Reappropriate.co, argues:
The Supreme Court recognize that schools have a “compelling interest” in on-campus diversity. In addition to creating higher education access for traditionally-marginalized students, affirmative action enables all students to learn in racially diverse classrooms, which boosts cognitive development, analytical problem-solving, and teamwork – all skills needed for success in the modern American workforce…. [A]ffirmative action ensures that all students – including Asian Americans – have equal opportunity to receive quality higher education.
Cory submitted his piece to us as a rebuttal to my post, and Jenn expressed her ideas in response to Cory’s submission. I hope you find their writings illuminating; I certainly have. Without further ado, here are their viewpoints.
Antiquated racial categories should not be used to determine our destiny
By Cory Liu, Volunteer Executive Director, Students for Fair Admissions
Sponsored
Generative AI In Legal Work — What’s Fact And What’s Fiction?
Why Do AI And Legal Professionals Make The Perfect Partnership?
Cory Liu
As the son of Chinese immigrants, I have always struggled to understand how my family fit into the conversation about racial equality. The typical discussion about race in the U.S. focuses on black and Hispanic Americans, and people often forget that Asians even exist. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the debate over racial preferences in college admissions.
My parents immigrated to the U.S. in 1987 after living through starvation and oppression in Communist China. They planned to return to China after my father finished his postdoctoral research at UT-Austin, but when the Chinese government massacred its citizens at Tiananmen Square, President George H.W. Bush gave them permanent residency.
When my parents came to this country, they didn’t have much. My mother worked at the Jester Center cafeteria at UT-Austin to pay her tuition at Austin Community College. She dreamed that I might one day have the opportunity to attend UT-Austin and achieve the American Dream.
Unfortunately, when I applied to UT-Austin, I was rejected. Though my test scores were by no means perfect, my classmate’s were. He too was the son of Asian immigrants. He earned perfect scores on both the SAT and the ACT, volunteered at the library, and was a black belt in kung fu. When he applied to several Ivy League schools, he was rejected from them all. For Harvard, perfect wasn’t good enough.
The standard response from schools like UT-Austin and Harvard is that admission is about more than test scores—it’s an individualized, holistic process that looks for well-rounded applicants. But the ugly truth is that if my friend had been black or Hispanic, he would have easily gained admission to the most selective schools in the country. Because he checked a particular racial box, in the eyes of Harvard, he was just another Asian who wanted to be a doctor.
In the Fisher lawsuit, Justice Clarence Thomas noted that in UT-Austin’s entering class of 2009, the average GPA and SAT scores for Asians were much higher than those of whites, blacks, and Hispanics. A Princeton study by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford showed similar racial disparities in SAT scores at elite universities. For decades now, the negative effects of race-based affirmative action on Asians have been well documented.
It is racist and insulting to insist that these disparities are the results of an individualized, holistic process. That argument is dishonest, and it reinforces the stereotype that Asians are only good at test taking. It perpetuates the myth of the model minority by holding Asians to a higher standard than students of other races, even though many Asians come from less privileged backgrounds than black and Hispanic beneficiaries of racial preferences.
The truth is that UT-Austin and Harvard are engaging in the nasty business of racial balancing. They think that Asians are “overrepresented” relative to other minority groups. No matter how hard we try, they refuse to treat us as individuals because of our race. The deck is stacked against us.
Though I was not admitted to UT-Austin, I attended the University of Chicago and Harvard Law School. My experience with the admissions process led me to join Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) as its volunteer executive director. SFFA is a non-profit organization with over 21,000 grassroots members, most of whom are Asian, and we are suing UT-Austin, Harvard, and UNC for using racial balancing in admissions. If you were rejected from one of these schools, please share your story with us at http://studentsforfairadmissions.org.
There are alternative ways of achieving student body diversity, such as UT-Austin’s policy of automatically admitting students in the top 7% of their high-school class. Universities have no legitimate reason to limit our educational opportunity based on which family we happen to be born into.
That is why a 2016 Gallup poll showed that 70% of Americans disagree with the use of race in college admissions. In our increasingly multiracial society, the Census Bureau’s crude and antiquated racial categories should not be used to determine our destiny. It doesn’t matter what your name is or where your family is from. We are all Americans with equal rights, and we all deserve an equal opportunity to attend the school of our dreams.
Affirmative action ensures everyone has equal access to higher education
By Jenn Fang, Reappropriate Founder/Editor
Jenn Fang
Affirmative action has its origins in the Civil Rights Movement as an effort to address the injury caused by generations of American racism.
After outlining his support in 1965 for a proposed federal affirmative action program that would have helped employ 20 million black youth, Martin Luther King, Jr. speculated: “I do not intend that this program of economic aid should apply only to the Negro; it should benefit the disadvantaged of all races.”
True to King’s vision, the widespread enactment of affirmative action policies has dramatically improved access to government employment and higher education for many of America’s traditionally disenfranchised groups, including women and racial minorities. Among those for whom affirmative action has produced the most rapid success is Asian Americans.
The gates of America’s universities have been historically sealed against anyone not a white man; only a handful of Asian Americans or other non-whites were able to gain entry into the Ivory Tower. Since implementation of affirmative action, Asian American enrollment has – like that of Black, Latino, and Native students – increased dramatically. Indeed, Harvard University recently reported that its incoming freshman class will be majority non-white for only the second time in the school’s history. As at most of America’s most selective universities, Asian American students now make up more than 20% of Harvard’s admitted students — nearly four times our share of the national population.
Despite the proven effectiveness of affirmative action in breaking open the doors of the Ivory Tower to non-whites, Harvard is being sued by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), a group formed by conservative strategist Edward Blum. Blum has orchestrated several recent attempts to overturn civil rights legislation in the Supreme Court, including Fisher v. University of Texas (2013, 2016), Shelby County v. Holder (2013), and Evenwel v. Abbott (2016).
As outlined by Cory Liu, SFFA contends that because Harvard admits black and Latino students with lower mean test scores than some rejected Asian Americans, Harvard’s admission policies (which include the measured use of affirmative action) discriminate against Asian Americans.
Yet, evidence to support SFFA’s claims are thin. Liu suggests that an unnamed friend’s rejection from Harvard despite solid test scores and extracurricular activities could only be due to anti-Asian racism stemming from affirmative action.
To bolster this argument, Liu cites a 2009 study by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, but misinterprets its findings: it did not report actual “racial disparities in SAT scores at elite universities,” as Liu contends. Instead, investigators calculated the likelihood of admission into America’s top universities and translated their results into a hypothetical SAT score.
By Espenshade’s own account, they did not weigh the hundreds of other factors considered in holistic review, and their study provides no “smoking gun” proving anti-Asian bias. To Liu’s original point, self-reported SAT scores at Harvard actually vary only slightly by race, are largely explained by students’ socioeconomic backgrounds, and are poor predictors of student merit and success.
It is unreasonable to conclude that only racism explains why an Asian American with high SATs is rejected from Harvard. Like all Ivy League schools, Harvard admits only 5% of the ~40,000 applicants it receives annually. That Harvard must turn away thousands of deserving students each year is not evidence of racial bias. In 2016, 21% of Harvard’s applicants were Asian American, as were 22%–27% of admitted students.
In other words, the Asian American admission rate at Harvard is equal (or higher) compared to other applicants – and not discriminatorily lower, as SFFA alleges. Moreover, Asian American enrollment in the Ivy League has largely tracked with our population’s overall growth. For example, at Princeton the fraction of Asian American students has doubled since 1990.
Affirmative action has withstood numerous legal challenges because both university administrators and the Supreme Court recognize that schools have a “compelling interest” in on-campus diversity. In addition to creating higher education access for traditionally marginalized students, affirmative action enables all students to learn in racially diverse classrooms, which boosts cognitive development, analytical problem-solving, and teamwork – all skills needed for success in the modern American workforce.
This is likely why a majority of Asian Americans actually support affirmative action on college campuses and why over 135 Asian American organizations have issued a joint statement defending it: we recognize that affirmative action ensures that all students – including Asian Americans – have equal opportunity to receive quality higher education.
Cory Liu is an attorney in Houston and the volunteer executive director of Students for Fair Admissions. He previously served as a law clerk to Judge Danny J. Boggs on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and he is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago. He can be reached at cory.ren.liu@gmail.com.
Jenn Fang is founder of Reappropriate.co, one of the web’s oldest and most popular Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) race advocacy and feminism blogs. Her writing has also appeared in Quartz, BlogHer, Asian Pacific Americans for Progress, Asian Americans for Obama, Angry Asian Man, and Northwest Asian Weekly. Reappropriate can also be found on Twitter (@reappropriate) and Facebook.
On behalf of ATL, I would like to thank both contributors for their thoughtful and passionate dialogue on affirmative action. As I mentioned last week, it is clear that going forward, Asian Americans will be key players in the future fight for or against affirmative action policies.
The debate on these type of policies in higher education will only heat up in the coming months. So whichever side of the affirmative action aisle you are on, don’t hesitate to become more involved in the conversation. We would love to hear your voice.
Earlier: Asian Americans Are Being Used As A Wedge To Advance The Anti-Affirmative Action Agenda
Renwei Chung is the Diversity Columnist at Above the Law. You can contact Renwei by email at projectrenwei@gmail.com, follow him on Twitter (@renweichung), or connect with him on LinkedIn.
