As usual, your writing remains a high point of my day-to-day life this summer, Andrew. I’d like to touch briefly on the two key narratives you reference and share some thoughts on underlying failures of the media as a truth-seeking institution. (Re-reading my notes here, I don't want to sound accusatory or strictly tie you to these narrative points you mention; these are comments on the narratives as they exist, not necessarily your views within their context. I think it's clear you come at this with much more nuance than the binding limited depth of discourse these issues are plagued by.)
Legitimacy
It is no secret that the Court—one of the few remaining institutions with broadly perceived legitimacy—has faced a monumental decline of institutional credibility. I tend to attribute this to short-term interests by activists and opportunists who use the once-resilient Court as a punching bag for quick political points.
The narrative of “appointments by illegitimate presidents” is stunningly dangerous. For starters, both of George W. Bush’s nominees were placed on the Court during his second term—a seat he won by 2.5 points and with 286 electoral votes. And regardless of one’s thoughts on the 2000 election (which I would contend was legitimate and fair, and am happy to discuss more at length), every reasonable argument about the electoral advantage of incumbency seems counterintuitive to Bush’s second term: he had previously endured 4 years of attempts to delegitimize his victory in the 2000 election, and the war in Iraq offered few if any incumbency advantages to the Bush team, who just 29 days before Election Day had been rattled by the Iraq Survey Group’s assertion that Saddam was not stockpiling WMDs.
Trump did, indisputably, win the 2016 election. The effect of foreign election interference was almost certainly not to a scale at which outcomes might have been changed. His popular vote loss may be cause for question, but the precedent of dismissing any action taken by a president who reached his office not only through the institutions we’ve agreed upon by society but did so without any particularly unique anti-institutionalism is deeply dangerous. Had, for whatever reason, the 2020 election been overturned by some legal or legislative technicality, then a legitimacy critique would certainly be valid, but there were no substantive irregularities to the process by which Trump ascended to the presidency in 2016.
Further, the appointments of Gorsuch and Barrett (and I’d contend it seems hypocritical to call both illegitimate) were in line with historic precedent. Across US history, 29 SCOTUS vacancies have arisen during the last year of a presidential term; in 19 cases, the Senate was held by the President’s party and in 10 cases, the opposite. Under each sets of conditions (unified government, split government), there has been exactly one deviation from the norm followed by Republicans between 2016 and 2020. When under split governance in the last year of a president’s term, you wait until the new election. When under unified governance, you confirm. And Republicans not only held the Senate in the 2018 midterms, they made gains, picking up two Senate seats and growing their majority to 53. Their mandate was clear and affirmed.
Rationale for Affirmative Action
The use of affirmative action as a mechanism for reparations or a tool for remedying systemic injustice was not a question before the Court. Not because they craftily circumvented it through legalese or avoided it’s rigorous consideration by belying reality, as Justice Jackson suggested in her dissent—this question was not on the table in June because it was settled in 1978.
Since Regents of Univ. of Cal. v. Bakke (a highly splintered decision featuring a nebulous body of 7 writings beyond the Opinion with few if any clear lines drawn between the majority and the dissenting minority), affirmative action in college admissions has been strictly tied to diversity interests. Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), the scope of this narrowly-tailored interest was further refined. The question at hand in the SFFA cases was whether this narrowly-tailored diversity interest was violative of Equal Protection, and the Court held yes. In no way was reparative policy before the Court—their opinion on that matter has been unwavering for 45 years.
However, reading the dissents from Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, it is not at first apparent that this question was not appearing before the Court. In their written-for-primetime prose, the minority of justices appointed by progressive presidents appealed to broad arguments that fit within a national climate.
On the Media
I immediately recognize that I read this as an outsider. My attention to detail while absorbing the wall-to-wall SCOTUS discourse over the last week has not been attentive to the framing of different racial and ethnic groups. My frustration has come from the near-absolute ignorance of legal questions with a preference for the practical, political, and pseudo-moralistic. But I’m not sure that the rift you’ve identified and the one I focused on are fundamentally separate. It is the absence of a meaningfully rigorous consideration of legal questions in the public sphere that opens the door to divisive scapegoating—at best a frivolous political tool, and at worst a nefarious weapon.
Obviously, one cannot expect the mass media to treat their audiences as legal scholars (or even just intellectually curious university students), but the trivialization of the judicial process to its purely consequential ends is a pernicious attack on the mechanisms which exist to preserve institutional legitimacy and protect individual rights. The judiciary is countermajoritarian, and necessarily so. I would hope the growing role of the Court would elevate public discourse on the complexities of Constitutional governance, on the responsibilities of the civically-engaged to ethically and morally consider the nuanced underpinnings of the republican system.
To overlook the political realities of the Court is foolish. But to conveniently forget the political history of the Court is willfully ignorant. When the media presents a narrative that “an illegitimate Supreme Court with purely evil intentions has exercised a unique and extraordinary disregard for precedent to harm a select group of people,” they not only craft a deceptive falsehood, they invite personal and political blame to be levied against others. They force sides to be taken. The confer a degree of tribalism upon an area of scholarship and adjudication which should exist not beyond the political, but in spite of it.
Thanks for this comment Matthew! No worries on sounding accusatory - always very willing to engage here.
On Court Legitimacy:
Your points here make me think we've definitely had some sort of conversation in the past about this. This is one of those things where undoubtably you know more than I do — you have much more knowledge/experience in court precedent, and I don't disagree with the finer points that you're making, especially on the tradition of when to carry through with a nomination in the last year of a presidency. I am perfectly willing to have my opinion changed on the substantive dimension of this debate (funnily enough, I think this discussion is extremely relevant to court packing — and I think the narrative I describe above is a necessary precursor for Democrats to pack the court, which is the effective argument that Hasan makes). The broader note that I will make is that political narratives are constructed all the time and they are all the time threatening (maybe not against precedent, but sometimes), in which case the onus in our political system is on the oppositional party to establish a counter-narrative that is more persuasive and meets people where they are at. So to mirror the point I make near the end of the piece: if I am convinced by the Democratic narrative around the legitimacy of the court, I see this as either the fault of the Republican party not creating a more persuasive counter narrative (I would have been more persuaded if I had seen the precedent point especially, and this might be due to my echo chambers) or the fault of a two-party system that has convinced its voters that each of its parties are monoliths and made it extremely difficult to float between the two sides.
Additionally, and this might be unnecessarily pessimistic, our post-truth politics of today has parties from both sides tearing down the legitimacy of institutions by creating narratives that are varying degrees of misleading, so I would need to think more about just how consequential this anti-institutionalism is and what it really means. I think of populism on the right as one example, just as I think of privileged progressivism on the left as another.
Rationale for Affirmative Action
I do agree that the dissenting opinions took a bit of latitude in talking about the decision in broader terms. I again see this from a narrative perspective. It is inevitable that the losing side in political conflict will attempt to broaden the audience because it will help get more people on their side. I don't know whether I ascribe any value judgement to that necessarily — this sort of concept is why journalism is as vibrant an industry as it is, for example. It makes discourse more accessible instead of gatekeeping it behind technical knowledge. But it is a very important question that you touch on that is just how nuanced / simplistic media discourse gets before it does more harm than good, and this is a concern echoed by the premise of my substack even though we do come at this issue from slightly different perspectives.
Media
Hmm, this is interesting. I think our points, despite carrying different political valences, come out of the same frustration with the media obscuring debate and simplifying its terms in a way that is perhaps too reductive. For yourself, on the legal end. For myself, on mischaracterizing a wedge community implicated by the ruling.
I do think mediatization of politics can be really harmful, and as I've expressed before I really do wish less of our politics was based on who can create the best narrative. I almost arrive at a passion to learn about framing and see things through narrative in politics by necessity — a realization that the work I do in mathematical applications to politics has a fundamental limitation in a politics where truth is often frivolously demoted.
Inevitably, a set of opinions that numbers in the hundreds of pages on the back of this case, one of several incredibly consequential cases at the end of June, is not going to be accessible. Here's my thought about this though, and I'll talk about this more in my next post (probably):
We can analyze the idea of legalese / technical language as a system itself, a system that gatekeeps knowledge and censors disagreement by shrouding debate in technicalities that are reasonable but not accessible. This is how academia is often characterized and I would argue that our legal system is too. Narratives that place blame may or may not be misleading in that we don't actually know the degree to which the justices were intentional in the ways they are characterized as, but assigning intentionality has the important (again I wish this wasn't necessary) role of compounding indictment, in the same way that "intentional" murder gets more prisontime usually than unintentional manslaughter. So it might be the case that, in the system we inhabit, broad/symbolic/sweeping narratives oppositional to the court are the only way to communicate persuasively to the court to a need to be more accessible. We can debate about if this is an important need / good idea / should happen, but as is too often I do feel a level of recognition to perhaps the belief that less accusatory / tribalistic narratives will not drum up the broad support that almost always constitutes the response to a losing battle in politics.
A lot of rambling here, I'm sorry about that — but hopefully this makes sense!
Definitely an area we’ve chatted before, and certainly one I’d like to return to! I’ve been chewing on this through the weekend, and there are just a few things I think it’s worth throwing out there to add to the framing discussion.
I’ll wholeheartedly agree that the conservative movement has lost the narrative with the Court. We saw this last summer when it seemed as if conservatives didn’t even try to contest messaging after Dobbs, and we’re seeing it again now.
I think, to some extent, holding the Court leads to a failure of messaging. Because of the significance of the Court’s legitimacy, I’d say there’s a tendency to rest on one’s laurels. The dominant side on the Court sees their exercise of its power as inherently legitimate. Conversely, though not unique to this moment, Americans are increasingly skeptical of institutions during times of heightened social tensions and transformation. They often look to the Court as an arbiter of these disputes, but in reality, this just sets up long-game competition. It’s a system set up for painful, high-stakes losses and a deeper reactionaryism.
I’ll echo your remarks on the tendency to colloquialize legal issues through concentrated efforts and targeted campaigns. In many ways, the emergence of the current Court’s dominant legal framework mirrors this pattern as well. The simple, plain-text reading of the Constitution is perceived as a rejection of the complex legal theories of the 60s and 70s. But while this messaging works when out of power, seeing perceived norms be reversed because they originated in obscure and convoluted theory can come as a jarring change, particularly for young people given the absence of knowing anything different.
Something of an unrelated tangent, I’d say this also speaks to the rhetorical failure of legal discourse in the US. Originalism, textualism, judicial restraint, etc. all mean different things contingent on when and whom you are asking. But it’s easy to frame these loose terms that can be subscribed to.
I know you’ve got a new piece to be working on, so I won’t bog you down forever on these points. Let’s keep the conversation going offline. Thanks for sharing your thoughts here.
The point on 'holding the Court leads to a failure of messaging' is really enlightening — I think I'd agree with that. Politics is always this weird ebb and flow, where losing seems to just light a fire under you. Makes me wonder how much of our politics is driven by negativity (frustration, anger, fear), and whether this is good or not.
Always interested to hear your takes on the legal perspective of these rulings — and I wished I had research this issue from that POV.
And yes, I absolutely think that this lack of control that people think they have over what a 9-person court can decide for the country is painful and that this crutch is not a healthy and sustainable one.
Great work, Andrew! Not only do I think you’ve provided a much needed perspective, but you’ve also created a fluid, enjoyable read. I look forward to seeing your future articles.
This one was stellar, such an enjoyable read and perfectly puts into words the kind of discussions I've been having about this topic as well. Thank you for writing this.
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.
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.
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 far more appropriate to characterize active progressive advocates as being played by the system than disaffected students....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.
As usual, your writing remains a high point of my day-to-day life this summer, Andrew. I’d like to touch briefly on the two key narratives you reference and share some thoughts on underlying failures of the media as a truth-seeking institution. (Re-reading my notes here, I don't want to sound accusatory or strictly tie you to these narrative points you mention; these are comments on the narratives as they exist, not necessarily your views within their context. I think it's clear you come at this with much more nuance than the binding limited depth of discourse these issues are plagued by.)
Legitimacy
It is no secret that the Court—one of the few remaining institutions with broadly perceived legitimacy—has faced a monumental decline of institutional credibility. I tend to attribute this to short-term interests by activists and opportunists who use the once-resilient Court as a punching bag for quick political points.
The narrative of “appointments by illegitimate presidents” is stunningly dangerous. For starters, both of George W. Bush’s nominees were placed on the Court during his second term—a seat he won by 2.5 points and with 286 electoral votes. And regardless of one’s thoughts on the 2000 election (which I would contend was legitimate and fair, and am happy to discuss more at length), every reasonable argument about the electoral advantage of incumbency seems counterintuitive to Bush’s second term: he had previously endured 4 years of attempts to delegitimize his victory in the 2000 election, and the war in Iraq offered few if any incumbency advantages to the Bush team, who just 29 days before Election Day had been rattled by the Iraq Survey Group’s assertion that Saddam was not stockpiling WMDs.
Trump did, indisputably, win the 2016 election. The effect of foreign election interference was almost certainly not to a scale at which outcomes might have been changed. His popular vote loss may be cause for question, but the precedent of dismissing any action taken by a president who reached his office not only through the institutions we’ve agreed upon by society but did so without any particularly unique anti-institutionalism is deeply dangerous. Had, for whatever reason, the 2020 election been overturned by some legal or legislative technicality, then a legitimacy critique would certainly be valid, but there were no substantive irregularities to the process by which Trump ascended to the presidency in 2016.
Further, the appointments of Gorsuch and Barrett (and I’d contend it seems hypocritical to call both illegitimate) were in line with historic precedent. Across US history, 29 SCOTUS vacancies have arisen during the last year of a presidential term; in 19 cases, the Senate was held by the President’s party and in 10 cases, the opposite. Under each sets of conditions (unified government, split government), there has been exactly one deviation from the norm followed by Republicans between 2016 and 2020. When under split governance in the last year of a president’s term, you wait until the new election. When under unified governance, you confirm. And Republicans not only held the Senate in the 2018 midterms, they made gains, picking up two Senate seats and growing their majority to 53. Their mandate was clear and affirmed.
Rationale for Affirmative Action
The use of affirmative action as a mechanism for reparations or a tool for remedying systemic injustice was not a question before the Court. Not because they craftily circumvented it through legalese or avoided it’s rigorous consideration by belying reality, as Justice Jackson suggested in her dissent—this question was not on the table in June because it was settled in 1978.
Since Regents of Univ. of Cal. v. Bakke (a highly splintered decision featuring a nebulous body of 7 writings beyond the Opinion with few if any clear lines drawn between the majority and the dissenting minority), affirmative action in college admissions has been strictly tied to diversity interests. Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), the scope of this narrowly-tailored interest was further refined. The question at hand in the SFFA cases was whether this narrowly-tailored diversity interest was violative of Equal Protection, and the Court held yes. In no way was reparative policy before the Court—their opinion on that matter has been unwavering for 45 years.
However, reading the dissents from Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, it is not at first apparent that this question was not appearing before the Court. In their written-for-primetime prose, the minority of justices appointed by progressive presidents appealed to broad arguments that fit within a national climate.
On the Media
I immediately recognize that I read this as an outsider. My attention to detail while absorbing the wall-to-wall SCOTUS discourse over the last week has not been attentive to the framing of different racial and ethnic groups. My frustration has come from the near-absolute ignorance of legal questions with a preference for the practical, political, and pseudo-moralistic. But I’m not sure that the rift you’ve identified and the one I focused on are fundamentally separate. It is the absence of a meaningfully rigorous consideration of legal questions in the public sphere that opens the door to divisive scapegoating—at best a frivolous political tool, and at worst a nefarious weapon.
Obviously, one cannot expect the mass media to treat their audiences as legal scholars (or even just intellectually curious university students), but the trivialization of the judicial process to its purely consequential ends is a pernicious attack on the mechanisms which exist to preserve institutional legitimacy and protect individual rights. The judiciary is countermajoritarian, and necessarily so. I would hope the growing role of the Court would elevate public discourse on the complexities of Constitutional governance, on the responsibilities of the civically-engaged to ethically and morally consider the nuanced underpinnings of the republican system.
To overlook the political realities of the Court is foolish. But to conveniently forget the political history of the Court is willfully ignorant. When the media presents a narrative that “an illegitimate Supreme Court with purely evil intentions has exercised a unique and extraordinary disregard for precedent to harm a select group of people,” they not only craft a deceptive falsehood, they invite personal and political blame to be levied against others. They force sides to be taken. The confer a degree of tribalism upon an area of scholarship and adjudication which should exist not beyond the political, but in spite of it.
Thanks for this comment Matthew! No worries on sounding accusatory - always very willing to engage here.
On Court Legitimacy:
Your points here make me think we've definitely had some sort of conversation in the past about this. This is one of those things where undoubtably you know more than I do — you have much more knowledge/experience in court precedent, and I don't disagree with the finer points that you're making, especially on the tradition of when to carry through with a nomination in the last year of a presidency. I am perfectly willing to have my opinion changed on the substantive dimension of this debate (funnily enough, I think this discussion is extremely relevant to court packing — and I think the narrative I describe above is a necessary precursor for Democrats to pack the court, which is the effective argument that Hasan makes). The broader note that I will make is that political narratives are constructed all the time and they are all the time threatening (maybe not against precedent, but sometimes), in which case the onus in our political system is on the oppositional party to establish a counter-narrative that is more persuasive and meets people where they are at. So to mirror the point I make near the end of the piece: if I am convinced by the Democratic narrative around the legitimacy of the court, I see this as either the fault of the Republican party not creating a more persuasive counter narrative (I would have been more persuaded if I had seen the precedent point especially, and this might be due to my echo chambers) or the fault of a two-party system that has convinced its voters that each of its parties are monoliths and made it extremely difficult to float between the two sides.
Additionally, and this might be unnecessarily pessimistic, our post-truth politics of today has parties from both sides tearing down the legitimacy of institutions by creating narratives that are varying degrees of misleading, so I would need to think more about just how consequential this anti-institutionalism is and what it really means. I think of populism on the right as one example, just as I think of privileged progressivism on the left as another.
Rationale for Affirmative Action
I do agree that the dissenting opinions took a bit of latitude in talking about the decision in broader terms. I again see this from a narrative perspective. It is inevitable that the losing side in political conflict will attempt to broaden the audience because it will help get more people on their side. I don't know whether I ascribe any value judgement to that necessarily — this sort of concept is why journalism is as vibrant an industry as it is, for example. It makes discourse more accessible instead of gatekeeping it behind technical knowledge. But it is a very important question that you touch on that is just how nuanced / simplistic media discourse gets before it does more harm than good, and this is a concern echoed by the premise of my substack even though we do come at this issue from slightly different perspectives.
Media
Hmm, this is interesting. I think our points, despite carrying different political valences, come out of the same frustration with the media obscuring debate and simplifying its terms in a way that is perhaps too reductive. For yourself, on the legal end. For myself, on mischaracterizing a wedge community implicated by the ruling.
I do think mediatization of politics can be really harmful, and as I've expressed before I really do wish less of our politics was based on who can create the best narrative. I almost arrive at a passion to learn about framing and see things through narrative in politics by necessity — a realization that the work I do in mathematical applications to politics has a fundamental limitation in a politics where truth is often frivolously demoted.
Inevitably, a set of opinions that numbers in the hundreds of pages on the back of this case, one of several incredibly consequential cases at the end of June, is not going to be accessible. Here's my thought about this though, and I'll talk about this more in my next post (probably):
We can analyze the idea of legalese / technical language as a system itself, a system that gatekeeps knowledge and censors disagreement by shrouding debate in technicalities that are reasonable but not accessible. This is how academia is often characterized and I would argue that our legal system is too. Narratives that place blame may or may not be misleading in that we don't actually know the degree to which the justices were intentional in the ways they are characterized as, but assigning intentionality has the important (again I wish this wasn't necessary) role of compounding indictment, in the same way that "intentional" murder gets more prisontime usually than unintentional manslaughter. So it might be the case that, in the system we inhabit, broad/symbolic/sweeping narratives oppositional to the court are the only way to communicate persuasively to the court to a need to be more accessible. We can debate about if this is an important need / good idea / should happen, but as is too often I do feel a level of recognition to perhaps the belief that less accusatory / tribalistic narratives will not drum up the broad support that almost always constitutes the response to a losing battle in politics.
A lot of rambling here, I'm sorry about that — but hopefully this makes sense!
Definitely an area we’ve chatted before, and certainly one I’d like to return to! I’ve been chewing on this through the weekend, and there are just a few things I think it’s worth throwing out there to add to the framing discussion.
I’ll wholeheartedly agree that the conservative movement has lost the narrative with the Court. We saw this last summer when it seemed as if conservatives didn’t even try to contest messaging after Dobbs, and we’re seeing it again now.
I think, to some extent, holding the Court leads to a failure of messaging. Because of the significance of the Court’s legitimacy, I’d say there’s a tendency to rest on one’s laurels. The dominant side on the Court sees their exercise of its power as inherently legitimate. Conversely, though not unique to this moment, Americans are increasingly skeptical of institutions during times of heightened social tensions and transformation. They often look to the Court as an arbiter of these disputes, but in reality, this just sets up long-game competition. It’s a system set up for painful, high-stakes losses and a deeper reactionaryism.
I’ll echo your remarks on the tendency to colloquialize legal issues through concentrated efforts and targeted campaigns. In many ways, the emergence of the current Court’s dominant legal framework mirrors this pattern as well. The simple, plain-text reading of the Constitution is perceived as a rejection of the complex legal theories of the 60s and 70s. But while this messaging works when out of power, seeing perceived norms be reversed because they originated in obscure and convoluted theory can come as a jarring change, particularly for young people given the absence of knowing anything different.
Something of an unrelated tangent, I’d say this also speaks to the rhetorical failure of legal discourse in the US. Originalism, textualism, judicial restraint, etc. all mean different things contingent on when and whom you are asking. But it’s easy to frame these loose terms that can be subscribed to.
I know you’ve got a new piece to be working on, so I won’t bog you down forever on these points. Let’s keep the conversation going offline. Thanks for sharing your thoughts here.
The point on 'holding the Court leads to a failure of messaging' is really enlightening — I think I'd agree with that. Politics is always this weird ebb and flow, where losing seems to just light a fire under you. Makes me wonder how much of our politics is driven by negativity (frustration, anger, fear), and whether this is good or not.
Always interested to hear your takes on the legal perspective of these rulings — and I wished I had research this issue from that POV.
And yes, I absolutely think that this lack of control that people think they have over what a 9-person court can decide for the country is painful and that this crutch is not a healthy and sustainable one.
your subtitle sounds like breitbart LMAO "what the mainstream media isn't telling you"
Great work, Andrew! Not only do I think you’ve provided a much needed perspective, but you’ve also created a fluid, enjoyable read. I look forward to seeing your future articles.
Thanks for reading, and I'm really glad you enjoyed! :)
This one was stellar, such an enjoyable read and perfectly puts into words the kind of discussions I've been having about this topic as well. Thank you for writing this.
Glad you enjoyed! Hope summer is treating you well :)
Some lines that hit:
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.
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.
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 far more appropriate to characterize active progressive advocates as being played by the system than disaffected students....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.
Cheesing!