Why the Champions of Affirmative Action Had to Leave Asians Behind
An excellent piece by Jay Caspian Kang who writes candidly about affirmative action—”The original concept in pursuit of diversity was vital and righteous. The way it was practiced was hard to defend.” In reviewing the dissent by Jackson and Sotomayor, he argues, “These opinions betray the corruption of affirmative action’s original righteous, reparative promise, and the way in which a program that was designed for a racially binary America never got meaningfully updated for today’s multiracial democracy.”
“Asian Americans, the group whom the suit was supposedly about, have been oddly absent from the conversations…both the courts and the media have mostly ignored the Asian American plaintiffs and chosen, instead, to relitigate the same arguments about merit, white supremacy, and privilege…”
Kang points to Powell’s 1978 Bakke opinion as the beginning of the end of affirmative action— “ By arguing that the race of a candidate could be considered, but not as part of a reparative, quota-based program that tried to reduce the harms of slavery and injustice…[but] to produce a ‘diverse’ student body.” Kang argues, “Affirmative action…was doomed from that moment forward because it had been stripped of its moral force…It is easy and perhaps virtuous to defend the reparative version of affirmative action; it is harder to defend the system as it has actually been used.”
And how has it been used? “Most reporting on the subject—including my own, as well as a story in the Harvard Crimson—shows that descendants of slaves are relatively underrepresented among Black students at Harvard, compared with students from upwardly mobile Black immigrant families. It is easy and perhaps virtuous to defend the reparative version of affirmative action; it is harder to defend the system as it has actually been used.”
In practice, “Powell’s decision gave schools like Harvard…the leeway to corrupt the original spirit of affirmative action and turn it into a counting game for rich kids.”
Kang then gives some examples of what Harvard could have done if its interest in uplifting the least advantaged was in earnest, including investing in college prep academies, taking kids from community colleges, and expanding its class sizes.
That said, Kang does not expect universities to adhere to the spirit of the ruling. Instead, he anticipates further opaqueness and continued discrimination against Asian applicants— “I have no faith that the processes they use to do so will be any better than the broken system they’re trying to replace. The conversation will not.”
In seeking to understand the dissent’s view of Asians, Kang finds little agreement—Jackson practically ignores Asians entirely in her dissent, and Sotomayor makes the bold assertion that Asians should support the diversity narrative and that race-conscious admissions would be good for them— “These opinions betray the corruption of affirmative action’s original righteous, reparative promise, and the way in which a program that was designed for a racially binary America never got meaningfully updated for today’s multiracial democracy.”
