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We Support Affirmative Action and Believe In Race-Conscious Admissions

6 min readJul 11, 2023

Written, Edited, and Informed by, alphabetized by surname: Tommy Chang, Hanseul Kang, Jenny Korn, Shirley Mak, Sonia Park, Shruti Sehra, Daranee Teng

We are a growing collective of Asian and Pacific Islander American (APIA) education leaders committed to learning and working in solidarity with other marginalized groups and antiracist communities. Three years ago, we formed to commit ourselves to learning, organizing, and working towards educational equity and justice. We write together now to share our disapproval of the Supreme Court’s majority decision to reject 40 years of precedent of race-conscious admissions policies at our nation’s private and public universities. This statement addresses multiple audiences, including the broader public, Asians and Asian Americans against affirmative action, and individuals that blame Asians for so-called “ending affirmative action.”

Asians Did Not End Affirmative Action

We call out mainstream media’s biased and inaccurate over-portrayal of Asian Americans who support the SCOTUS decision — such depiction is disconcerting and misleading. In a moment that calls for solidarity, the current narrative is designed to draw attention and be divisive to perpetuate the Model Minority Myth that espouses false narratives of Asian American exceptionalism at the expense of Black and Brown communities. Asian Americans have been weaponized as a tool to further white supremacy from as early as the 1960s, when the term “model minority” was coined by white sociologists to describe Asian Americans as successful due to stereotyped acquiescence, pitting Asian Americans against other communities of color, minimizing Asian Americans as a marginalized group, and ignoring systemic discrimination plaguing our communities, while concurrently depicting Asians as immune to racism. The pitting of communities of color against each other draws on historical playbooks for how to maintain oppression and reinforce systemic racism. This tactic obscures real inequities within higher education, including admissions preference for legacy candidates, athletes, and children of donors, which disproportionately favor white students at selective schools.

As Asian Americans speaking for ourselves, we assert our reality that 69% of Asian Americans support “affirmative action policies designed to help Black people, women, and other minorities gain better access to higher education,” with this support remaining consistent since 2014.

Asians did not end affirmative action. Asians were not the plaintiff. The plaintiff was Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), an organization led by Edward Blum, a white, conservative man who has challenged affirmative action and voter rights for the past 30 years. No Asian American students testified in support of SFFA in the Harvard trial. In fact, no students at all testified in support of SFFA, and SFFA did not present any applications of rejected Asian American applicants they claimed were discriminated against. These are the facts that we highlight to counter anti-Asian sentiment related to affirmative action. Collectively, we resist participating in using the Harvard case to pit communities of color against each other, and we push everyone to do the same. Now, more than ever, interracial solidarity is necessary. Let us continue to work together toward racial justice through race-conscious solutions.

Interracial Solidarity, Now!

Asian Americans stand unwaveringly with other communities of color and honor the history of solidarity that has led to race-consciousness in admissions, which have enabled all of our communities to thrive. Affirmative action has long been a policy used to help level the playing field for people of color, acknowledging that we don’t live in a color-blind world, but one in which historical and present-day inequities persist for those who are not part of the majority. We know that people of color continue to face systemic barriers both at school and at work, and allowing race to be one small part of the holistic evaluation of candidates increases the likelihood that underrepresented groups continue to gain access to institutions and privileges that can change the trajectory of their lives and our collective future. APIA communities have benefited significantly from these policies over many decades, and many subgroups within our community–particularly those from Pacific Islander and Southeast Asian communities–continue to benefit from these policies.

We stand together as a group with a clear message. As Asian Americans, we refuse to be used as a racial wedge and reject the division that so many are trying to drive within and among communities of color. The recent SCOTUS decision has emboldened us to continue our collective work to ensure that colleges and universities are places of racial, cultural, and socioeconomic diversity that create equitable opportunities for transformative teaching and learning.

One of our core commitments is stated as follows: “We commit to working in solidarity and across differences toward educational equity and justice. We commit to evaluating how white supremacy cultural norms play out in our work environments in policies, systems, and structures.” As we contend with the ongoing tide of decisions that erode civil rights handed down by the Supreme Court, we recommit to action through renewed efforts to mobilize our APIA communities to use our voices and our votes to resist racial injustice against all communities of color.

Signed,

We Support Affirmative Action and Believe In Race-Conscious Admissions

Written by APIA Education Leaders