The Distraction & Distortion of Affirmative Action

My take on the Supreme Court ruling and why it's the least important part of the story.

The infamous “white hands” political ad from 1990 where a white man supposedly loses out on a job due to affirmative action.

Before we get started, I’m going to link these basic facts on Affirmative Action:

1. The majority of studies on Affirmative Action (AA) largely finds it improved Black, Hispanic and Native American earnings. The higher dropout rate study on Blacks at Berkeley under Affirmative Action was a correlation issue, dis-confirmed by many subsequent studies challenging it using a variety of methodologies. No study has actually shown that Affirmative Action increased dropout rates.

2. Ending Affirmative Action at the University of California had virtually no impact on Asian American or Black earnings for future graduates but declined Hispanic earnings.

3. Under AA, Asian students eligible for top-tier universities were admitted to equivalent-level top tier schools but were less likely to get their first choice over their second.

4. The idea Asians must score high SAT scores is pushed by certain college recruiters and a common misunderstanding of one ultra viral 1990s study on SAT scores by race. The author of the study has repeatedly stated it doesn’t conclude discrimination because it lacks additional educational and income variables: “I understand the worry of Asian students, but do I have a smoking gun? No.”

5. The majority of Asian Americans support reparations for Black people but do not favor considering race in college admissions. A slight majority of Asian college graduates do favor race considerations — 47% support, 42% against, 11% undecided.

If you want to argue about the merits for and against Affirmative Action you must contend with these facts. It also must be made clear that many Asian Americans, if not most Asian Americans, understand their identity is being weaponized and they’re consistently uncomfortable with it. Regardless of what some individuals may do, no race is responsible for the actions of a few individuals.

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The Supreme Court was stuck between a rock and a hard place. The most right-wing Supreme Court in modern American history has done everything they can to roll back the Civil Rights Movement. Ruling after ruling rolling back the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. Their next old foe, Affirmative Action, had a catch-22 in that while rolling back Title VII of the Civil Rights Act was alluring, a careless ruling that would blanket outlaw race-conscious admissions would imperil their general doctrine that discrimination is a right. Case in point: the Supreme Court followed up the next day by permitting private businesses to discriminate against gays.

So the conservative justices produced an ultimately useless ruling on Affirmative Action in college that sounded impactful to conservatives on paper — “Victory! Another provision of the Civil Rights Act destroyed! Affirmative Action is dead!” — but in practice means: “you have to explain how aspects of your race disadvantages you rather than assume it does.” Which universities that factored race into admissions were already doing. I predict little will change or elite universities will cut their Black enrollments in half and act like the court made them do it.

Despite the national uproar, the ruling was all but worthless and served to further discredit the court’s almost totally gone facade as a body evaluating constitutionality. So uncommitted to any moral or legal consistency was the ruling that Justice Roberts exempted military academies from it. Unlike Harvard and Yale, the Armed Forces targets and needs Black people and Latinos for recruitment so that can’t be obstructed.

More concerning to me was how effective the long game conservatives have played against the Civil Rights Movement that most of America doesn’t even know what Affirmative Action is anymore. Affirmative Action is the label made during the Civil Rights Movement to refer to the end of race discrimination in hiring and reparation efforts such as outreach to diversify institutions that had long banned Blacks, American Indians and women. This was because both federal, state and private employers, along with universities would explicitly and implicitly reject Black applicants.

Hiring Blacks or enrolling Black students often caused our nation’s most prolific race riots and union-strikes by white laborers well up to the 1960s. This kept Black people in poverty and caused most Black people to miss out on the economic boom of the post-war economy. During the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Congress understood that simply ending race discrimination in hiring and college admissions wouldn’t reverse institutional practices set in place under discrimination that de-facto segregated people. So Affirmative Action, or Title VII, pushed private and public institutions to conduct diversity outreach — but was explicitly not a quota system.

Conservatives have long understood that Americans have short term memory especially when it pertains to Black suffrage. In the aftermath of the Civil War, reparations for Black American who endured centuries of bondage was widely understood by the public. Conservatives stood against the principle of racial equality and rolled back all reparations for emancipated slaves after Lincoln’s assassination, thus keeping Black people in de-facto slavery through sharecropping and rural poverty. After that generation passed the next generation had largely forgotten the cruelty of slavery and reparations were no longer politically tenable.

Conservatives continued this game with Affirmative Action, standing firm against any corrective measures to the centuries of Jim Crow via explicit segregation in labor, housing and education that were becoming untenable to defend. The issue of Affirmative Action in the 1960s and 1970s was largely of private property rights as everyone — left and right — understood why Affirmative Action was being proposed. They lived through the era of Black high schoolers being rejected for their race from university and the subsequent loss of middle class status. Like reparations, all conservatives had to do was hunker down and wait.

Since the Civil Rights Movement, the United States has changed from a largely White and Black country to a mixed country due to the passage of the 1965 immigration act. Emerging minorities like Asian Americans — 96% of whom came or were born after the 1965 immigration act — find themselves disproportionately rejected at prestigious white-majority universities that are resistant to becoming Asian majority. Because U.S. domestic education and immigration tests sugar coat racism as a bygone issue, subsequent generations of Americans that only know of Martin Luther King as a street name or a feel-good quote have no idea what Affirmative Action is. Which was the conservative long game all along.

The practice of discounting Asian applicants to maintain white majority schools has incorrectly been labeled as “Affirmative Action.” 40% of the white population at Harvard, the largest ethnic group at Harvard, was admitted through legacy admissions which is decidedly not Affirmative Action. Even the act of considering race in applications and scoring Asian students poorly over stereotypes is not Affirmative Action.

Throughout all of American history, race has been considered for your employment and enrollment — nobody refers to that as Affirmative Action. Affirmative Action was and is primarily about seeking out, recruiting and encouraging high performing minorities to apply. Yes, some universities initially did use race and gender quotas which are wrong and were rightfully struck down in previous lawsuits long before the Supreme Court ruling.

Instead, colleges adopted long range diversity targets to recruit qualified minority candidates to achieve racial and gender equality. With varying degrees of success but its not a quota and bouncing Asian applicants to maintain wealthy and white majority schools is not Affirmative Action. Private universities both enroll wealthy white students for their alumni associations and do outreach to enroll a often under-representative count of Black and Hispanic students. Conservatives and their useful associates have entirely focused an uneducated public’s ire — that increasingly has no memory of why Affirmative Action was started — on the latter.

The anti-Affirmative Action coalition frequently notes that college advisors are telling Asian students if they were Black they would be admitted to the top universities. But the problem with these vast generalizing statements is that race is a lot more complicated than a handful of categories. Black scholars at Harvard have estimated that around 60% of Black students are not of enslaved ancestry but are black students of African or Caribbean immigrant origin, or are mixed race. Black Americans of immigrant origin are just 10% of Black America and socioeconomically they perform similarly to Asians Americans with their recent immigrant heritage, high earnings and high educational attainment than their historically enslaved counterparts. (As Amy Chua, infamous Tiger Mom wrote about). Black Americans of slave ancestry that are not mixed with another race are under-represented at Harvard.

Note too that this conversation has largely focused on northeast Asians who generally come from high income backgrounds or have a more civil immigration pathway. Not about southeast Asian, central Asian, Middle Eastern and Pacific Islander Asian Americans who are frequently of refugee origin, diversity lotteries, low incomes and whose children do not perform as well in K - 12. These Asians also benefit from Affirmative Action and are often more enrolled than Black Americans, yet Chinese American pupils are not being told en-masse they’d get into Harvard if they were Nepalese or Laotian.

But more importantly, the obsession over the racial composition of Harvard’s admitted student body often leaves out that it’s just 2,000 students. That’s 2/3rds the size of my local high school. 2,000 is the size of a single computer science course at UC Berkeley. At Stanford, the incoming class is 1,700. At Yale, 2,200. Princeton, 1,800. There’s 19 million college students in the United States — 15 million of them undergraduates — and all this noise is over 0.4% of them at Ivy Leagues. Even the top competitive universities with relatively low admission rates account for just 4% of college enrollment. The vast majority of universities, accounting for over 96% of college enrollment, admit the majority of their applicants or a plethora of them.

Even if American universities were to adopt a strict exam university entry system, assuming 100% of all Ivy League seats goes to Asian Americans (which is obviously absurd), 93% of Asian undergraduates still wouldn’t be attending Ivy Leagues. It would also still attract much controversy like the SAT does because the United States is a diverse nation where many racial groups arrive on completely different footing — even within races such as Asian Americans.

I do believe private, elite universities and their alumni are wary of becoming Asian majorities rather than golden escalators for wealthy white children. Even in the University of California, a lot of angst about “out of state enrollment” by white parents is really just code for “Asian enrollment.” But the material issue is that America’s top schools aren’t large enough to accommodate more enrollment and that’s by design.

Ivy Leagues have resisted growing their student bodies proportional to population growth despite the tremendous public funding they receive as private institutions. That is the #1 cause of high SAT scoring Asian students not being admitted to Harvard and Yale — its just a few thousand seats they’re competing for. Yale enrolls fewer students today than it did a half-century ago. Similar enrollment issues plague the University of California, which should not only be adding more UC schools (its added one since 1970) but growing their flagships with more classrooms and dorms.

Growing the elite schools reduces the economic premium on their perceived prestige derived from its artificial scarcity. These universities exist to educate the wealthy and pipeline them into an elite status with a few bones thrown to minorities and the backbone of graduate-level research conducted by foreign students often overlooked in discourse. That’s why I think Affirmative Action at elite colleges is really not that important regardless of whether you support it or not. Yes, it improves the future earnings of Black students who attend there but these are microscopically few Black students within tiny student bodies. Their high earnings are products of elite networking, Harvard’s true product, not the undergraduate curriculum. Black Harvard alumni have an outsized impact in media and cultural conversations, but they do not represent the average Black college student.

In a country where half of Black students are being failed in reading and even more in mathematics compared to their non-Black peers, Affirmative Action for Harvard shouldn’t even warrant such national discourse. Affirmative Action at Ivy Leagues is not a corrective measure for the national failure of grade schools to educate Black children. And out of fairness, outside the highly educated Black media circle, I don’t see it eliciting much conversation among average Black Americans who aren’t deluded about their prospects of attending any Ivy League.

Rather than fighting race wars about the racial composition of elite universities, we should be challenging the existence of these publicly subsidized, private institutions to exist in their elitist, limited state. We should be fighting for our highest ranking public colleges to match their enrollment with population growth. This would lead to a degree of racial solidarity so, like clockwork, conservatives must obfuscate it by finding a high scoring Asian and blaming a Black kid for why they didn’t get into Harvard. People who fall for this race war stuff are suckers, being played off in Black vs. immigrant minority wars like each generation before.

Right-wingers push a narrative to Asian Americans about how the Civil Rights Act is actually being used to discriminate against them. Of course most don’t fall for it but a loud, proudly ignorant few do. Then conservatives push a narrative to Black people that Asians are just ungrateful immigrants continuing 400 years of anti-Black oppression and taking away jobs and income that belong to Black people.

The populist far-right spearheaded by the likes of Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson and Senator Tom Cotton view Asians as a new yellow peril against white hegemony. Particularly in Asian-heavy industry like technology with their attacks on H1-B visas or their stunt campaigns of human trafficking immigrants to Black neighborhoods to spark Black xenophobia.

We must fight all of it because America should be a nation of all colors, religions and national origins. But we are a nation of many original sins that perpetuate inequality that cannot be ignored simply because more people weren’t around to experience it. Policies like Affirmative Action were created by Congress in the bloody aftermath of protests facing JFK and LBJ, and the cities destroyed by riots facing Nixon. That’s not ancient history — it was my parent’s generation — and the same exact racial inequality that flared up protests in 2020.

Affirmative Action for the last half century was explicitly about Black (and minorities and women broadly) vs. White Supremacy (not against white people, recall King’s Poor People Campaign included poor whites). Re-casting it as Blacks vs. Asians is yet another distraction. It’s all just divide-and-conquer stuff, using the next immigrant group to bash Black America over the head with and provoke a reaction, as it was for the Hispanics in the aughts, the Koreans in the ‘90s, the Jews in the ‘50s, the Italians in the ‘40s, the Irish in the ‘20s and so on.

Participants of these race wars who speak loudly are serving some very old interests in this country but won’t win in the end.

Correction: the Black Harvard composition citation originally misdirected to the paper on legacy admissions. This has been fixed. Moreover, the 1990s SAT study didn’t conclude discrimination on SAT scores is a myth, just that it hasn’t been proven discrimination was caused by SAT scores. Failure to reject null hypothesis.