Some honest thoughts on affirmative action

An opinion you won't hear in media

I didn’t expect to be writing about an American SCOTUS case while in Geneva, but ever since the decision was released (while I was still in Athens), I couldn’t help but follow the resulting discourse. Recently, I’ve noticed my head drifting off to affirmative action, even when I’m immersed in other topics, topics that I traveled to Geneva to study. So I’m going to just put down some honest thoughts — these are just my opinions and I welcome agreement and disagreement. Or as my friend would frame it, areas of overlap and nonoverlap.

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By not distinguishing between values-based discussions and practical policy-based discussions, the post-ruling affirmative action discourse has minimized the complexity of the Asian American experience and stifled prospects of coalition-building in support of the principles of affirmative action.

I’m going to focus on where these reductions are happening first, in a general sense. Then, I’ll touch on the Asian American specific part of my claim.

From Associated Press

The exact reductive move I am referring to here is the inability to separate discussions about the principles upon which affirmative action rests, and its actual practical policy implementation.

There are a few principles at stake:

1. The existence of systemic racism, which is in accordance with the spirit of affirmative action. I’ve talked about this at length here as well as while in Spain, but the main takeaway is that I strongly believe in the existence of this system due to the litany of its symptoms. I do not believe colorblindness is a solution to systemic racism (I’ve spent 2 months in Europe and I am more than ever convinced).

   1. Corresponding to this belief is the idea that racial equity involves more than equality of opportunity, but an active effort to reverse and heal the scars of systemic racism that inhabit our world today.

2. The illegitimacy of the Supreme Court to decide on this matter. Justices that should not sit in their seats of power, making decisions on behalf of the whole country. Here’s a snippet that I think is especially illustrative:

Meanwhile, the appointment of Kavanaugh would mean the Supreme Court has four justices (John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh) appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote; two justices (Clarence Thomas and Kavanaugh) accused of sexual misconduct and misleading the Senate; and one justice (Gorsuch) who effectively stole his seat from President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland. — Medhi Hasan, The Intercept

Keep in mind this article was published regarding Kavanaugh’s nomination by Trump, which occurred before Amy Coney Barrett’s (so this makes five, not four justices antidemocratically appointed), as well as the recent revelations of ethics concerns around Justices Thomas and Alito.

These are very strong principles, and you can probably tell where I stand on them. I argue, however, that reducing debate over affirmative action to the principled dimension is a huge mistake. Two reasons why:

1. The SCOTUS, as illegitimate as it is, has ruled in favor with democracy in the past (eg. on gerrymandering). Opinions about the justices making decisions should be held at some distance away from opinions about the rulings themselves and their practical effects — we take the wins we can, and we then struggle for more.

2. There is a difference between critiquing the principles of affirmative action and critiquing the ability for the policy to fully uphold those principles. I personally think that affirmative action is absolutely justified in spirit (in principle) and has done a lot of practical good in uplifting oppressed communities, but it remains a decidedly imperfect policy — one piece of a much larger puzzle. Some say it only really benefits upper-income minority communities, for instance. Others mention bias against Asian American applicants (I will directly address this later, I promise — it’s hugely important).

To be honest, it is not easy to even measure what affirmative action has done precisely, in practice. We don’t know much at all about admissions processes to begin with. There is no objective measure by which students are admitted to elite universities (where the practice is institutionalized).

It is thus really hard to say what the ruling will actually do because this information about counterfactuals is inaccessible. As one part of the opinion clarifies, despite a ban on race as a direct admissions consideration, . . .

“Nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.” — from the court opinion

How can anyone say with any sort of confidence what this actually will practically mean for admissions? Articles have speculated on what universities will do, but the messaging I’ve received from Duke and UNC Chapel Hill both is simple: we condemn the principle behind the ruling, and we will see what this means practically, because right now we really don’t know.

For some reason, though, the vast majority of discourse and media I have consumed and/or participated in post-ruling has not made this distinction between principles and practicals clear and explicit. We lose so much nuance without this bifurcation established clearly at the start, as part of our framework of discussion. Our conversation must be wide enough for opinions such as “affirmative action is a shaky and imperfect solution, but it is grounded by very reasonable and clear cut principles” or it is doomed from the start.

This distinction is crucial because discussion otherwise risks conflating practical concerns (with a spirit toward improvement) with immoral complicity. It weaponizes moral high ground to censor reasonable discussions about educational policy, in spirit of the same moral goals.

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This conflation is especially pertinent for the Asian American community. The discursive landscape post-ruling is making it extremely difficult to unify the community with other minority communities in the wake of efforts to divide us. And I think there is blame to be shared by media and progressive activists alike.

I get the impression anecdotally that there are many Asian Americans who exist in a space blocked off by our current discursive framework, one that by default does not accept the nuance between principles and practicals. These impressions are statistically supported.

A US News poll from November reveals that more than 70% of the AAPI community recognizes the existence of systemic racism, which is the grounding principle in accordance with affirmative action. According to a Pew Research Center poll from last month, 53% of Asian adults support affirmative action as a concept. Yet, that same poll also concluded that when “asked about a list of factors that colleges should consider, only 21% of Asian adults say colleges should consider race and ethnicity when deciding which students to accept.”

This is confusing because the media headlines of the ruling were about banning affirmative action, but we at least know from the ruling that direct consideration of race in college admissions is now banned. But all this to say — there is a non-insignificant portion of the population that agrees with the driving principle behind affirmative action, but is more ambivalent about its practice.

What has been especially pernicious post-ruling is that it seems to me media has chosen to represent Asian Americans, in all their nuance and complexity, with one of two characterizations, which both ignore this third category:

1. People who believe in colorblindness and are against affirmative action.

2. People who believe in the existence of systemic racism and are for affirmative action, but who often focus on the principle much more than the practical and in some cases act that the principle is all there is to worry about.

The lack of nuance here is shocking, and apparently anything more complicated than this is too much for the delicate ears of non-Asian-American audiences.

All this folds together into a generation of Asian American students with parents who moved to the United States in search of stability and opportunity, part of which has meant for me personally, and for some of those around me, implicit cultural pressure to stay silent instead of responding to injustice and misrepresentation and microaggression.

Another way to frame this: I have spent this whole summer, on this Substack, challenging myself with the exercise of breaking out of this shell, sharing my thoughts with others, expressing my voice, and fulfilling a mandate for my contribution to our democracy, no matter how diminished it might be made to feel sometimes. I receive institutional support from scholarship funding to travel around Europe and opine on anything I want. And I felt considerable angst as to whether I wanted to speak up, on my personal platform. This is not promising for our community.

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What frustrates me most about the conflation between the principle and practical is it allows pro-affirmative-action activists an escape route out of directly addressing statistical evidence about college admissions and Asian Americans:

“Some proponents of affirmative action agree that there are legitimate questions about whether or not Asian American admission numbers continue to be suppressed at some elite universities.

Sally Chen says that a pattern of lower personality ratings for Asian American applicants indicates pervasive racism and implicit bias. "There is a need for anti-bias training for specifically admissions readers that read Asian American student files," she says.

"There's a lot of room for improvement in this process. But none of that is accomplished through the flat removal of race in educational settings.” — Sandhya Dirks, NPR

I worry that folks in Asian American communities fear bringing up these beliefs because they are worried of being accused on their alleged complicity with white supremacy, exactly because of the conflation I describe.

It does not matter to me whether you think Asian Americans are actually discriminated against in the admissions process, whether in a statistical or systematic sense. The issue is that this demographic of Asian Americans, who are positioned as a wedge group in this issue, who worry about the alleged practical drawbacks of affirmative action but support its principle, did not ask to be in this position. This is a critical demographic to access for those who want to advance the principles of affirmative action.

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I believe that there are many sincerely interested in fighting systemic racism, who are willing to accept the nuance that Asian Americans can feel uncomfortable about their positionality as a wedge group because they want to express support for the principles that ground affirmative action. I have a few thoughts to share to those people:

First, there is no better way to drive discourse underground and make it inaccessible, where it is harder to prevent radicalization of personal frustration and anger and lived experience, than to censor practical policy discussions under the guise of a moral high ground.

Second, the practical concern I brought up earlier about Asian American discrimination is “real” even if it isn’t “true.” It rubs against the perceived, constrained, instant-gratification self interest of many disaffected students. This is especially true due to the environment of extreme scarcity that elite college admissions have engineered, which makes it very tempting to believe that one spot for one community is a spot taken away from another community.

The ability to rise above self-interest is a privilege in such an environment, not an obligation. We need to stop talking about this request like it’s an obligation. It is a privilege in the same way that thinking on a systems level is a privilege, which is why trying to convince a bunch of disaffected Asian American students (the same ones who eventually collaborated with Students for Fair Admissions, the group that won the lawsuits) that this statistic is invalid because of larger systems of capitalism and power structures and white supremacy is unconvincing and tone deaf. In politics, your truth could be the truest truth in the world, but your truth, for better or worse, has no obligation to be the truth unless you articulate it in a way that is accessible.

Characterizing this as more of an obligation instead of a privilege is disrespectful and insulting. It ignores the lived experiences of Asian students who are positioning themselves whilst applying to college as “less Asian” — many have chosen to censor who they are in response to their beliefs around anti-Asian bias in affirmative action.

This is not an easy sacrifice to take lightly:

The fear of self-identifying as Asian can affect one's racial/ethnic identity development and have an impact on one's mental health. Asians who did not possess a strong racial/ethnic identity rated lower scores on self-actualization and acceptance (Iwamoto & Liu, 2010), reported lower self-esteem (Tummala-Narra, Inman, & Ettigi, 2011), tended to have negative attitudes toward schooling, lower academic achievement (Lee, 2009), and could not manage race-related stress well (Yoo & Lee, 2005; Yip et al., 2008; Tummala-Narra et al., 2011). The denial of Asian heritage may also lead to the denial of Asian values, which may create cultural gaps and intergeneration conflict between the students and their parents (Ahn, Kim, & Park, 2009; Park, Kim, Chiang, & Ju, 2010). The psychological effects of this type of conflict include emotional distance between parents and children, interpersonal problems, lack of self-confidence and assertiveness, high suicidal risk, and anxiety and depression (Lee, Choe, Kim, & Ngo, 2000; Lowinger & Kwok, 2001; Kuroki & Tilley, 2012). - American Psychological Association

I was lucky enough to attend high school in the Bay Area, but in that environment this problem became personal. I found myself practically normalized to news of suicide in some of the surrounding, majority-Asian schools — and there was an implicit understanding amongst the communities I inhabited as to why this might be the case.

Third and most importantly, I am disturbed by language around media and progressive activism that provokes a connotation that the disaffected students cooperating with Students for Fair Admissions are being played by the system, that they’ve “inconceivably” defected to the wrong side.

If our hope is to destroy systemic racism and heal the divides affirmative action has wedged between communities of color, this is extremely regrettable language. It minimizes the reality that politics everywhere is about who can more persuasively speak to groups of disaffected populations about their lived experience, whether it’s misleading or not. This is the system of politics we inhabit, and for the foreseeable future it is here to stay — people’s attention spans are too short, or to rephrase, many do not have the privilege to drop everything they’re doing and spend all day thinking about systems like I’ve been doing recently.

Everyone is “played by the system” all the time. There is nothing especially irrational or unusual about Asian American students’ “defection” within this system. This ruling, if anything, should instead be a lesson on how we must be better at communicating to disaffected folks in ways that meet them where they are. This is a fundamental principle in political organizing and ethical, sustainable community engagement. Instead, just talking about these students as if they’re some bumbling idiots who have quacked their way into white supremacy (even if these systems have and do ensnare!!) is disarming of agency and carries the unmistakable odor of privilege.

It is hypocritical for the Asian American community to characterize these students as the “worst” of our own, which is heavily implied by this language. It pleads that our community is better than our “worst” without giving these students the same benefit of the doubt that we are asking for our entire community.

It is far more appropriate to characterize active progressive advocates as being played by the system than disaffected students. Progressive thought-leaders, by nature of their jobs, have a responsibility to recognize the prevalence of post-truth politics. Disaffected students do not. Instead, progressives were negligent in allowing conservatives who are against the spirit of affirmative action work it to their advantage by exploiting progressives’ worst weakness: the inability to emotionally grounded and honest with people who are disaffected, instead of waving their hands in the air about systems that people couldn’t be bothered to critique and analyze. This is the same weakness that gives rise to right-wing populism, to anti-immigrant sentiment, and to the almost-takedown of our democracy on January 6th.

Politics is zero-sum in America. In our system, every advantage conservatives take was once an opportunity progressives did not take.

This is where what sounds like an abstraction in “pushing discourse underground” manifests in very real ways. Keeping this discourse above ground by acknowledging the nuance between principle and practical is absolutely crucial to proactively address and persuade and unify a disaffected community that reasonably feels left behind, for many of whom it is difficult to bear being.

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I arrive at this topic with a lot of personal consternation and feel that I write out of necessity. Affirmative action was at the back of my mind as I applied to college, because I had been culturally conditioned to believe it was harmful and only harmful. Now attending a prestigious college, I can call myself lucky to be able to see above the weeds and reap all that this policy has done to create communities that I care about, as well as critique out of love, out of a belief that more can be done.

It starts with being real with a divided community instead of censoring their complexity.