The Harvard Admissions Lawsuit, the Model Minority Myth, and Me
Education is meant to eliminate power hierarchies, not strengthen them.
The first time I started drafting this newsletter I did this thing where I spent two paragraphs talking about the various kinds of labor — at home, in school, in clinics and boring day jobs and extracurriculars — I performed as a teenager. This was intended to prove how hard I worked in high school, to suggest the possibility that I earned a spot at Harvard. It was not productive, and it was very annoying. All you really need to know is that my parents also went to Harvard, and that’s probably why I got in.
I suppose it was frustrating to think that those labors, which mattered very much to me, didn’t matter to whoever was looking at my application. And now I am frustrated with myself for being frustrated by the anti-problem of the fact that I attended an Ivy League school, one way or another. How laughably privileged it is to be frustrated about having privilege.
The point is: Yes, I worked hard. But I probably still took the place of someone who deserved it more than me. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to quantify it, but I must assume the weight of my parents’ identity tipped the scales in my favor and away from someone who worked harder than I did. When I told my parents about these feelings they shrugged and said they never gave any money to the school; that my sister (a smarter and better individual than me in every respect) didn’t get in; that I shouldn’t waste time questioning something that was good for me. I’ll come back to that last part.
In 2014, the year before I graduated, a group of Asian Americans filed a lawsuit against Harvard, claiming the school was accepting an unfairly small amount of Asian-American students — that Asian-American admissions were being capped at too-low a number in order to make room for, say, black and Latinx students. A key distinction is that said group of Asian Americans mostly comprises a group of wealthy Chinese-American expatriates (someday, an issue of Token about how we tend to flatten and misconstrue what “Asian-American” means). The suit argued that Asian-American applicants received disproportionately low scores in “personal ratings,” in which they receive scores for traits like “courage” (???) and “likeability,” which was leading to highly qualified applicants being denied admission.
As an unlikeable coward myself (an Asian-American one, in case you’re new here), my first reaction to the personal ratings claim was, honestly, “fair.” I wouldn’t have let 17-year-old me into a nice restaurant, let alone a place of higher education. Jokes aside, if it is actually the case that the admissions office stereotypes Asian applicants as, I don’t know, socially incapable drones, this would indeed be a compelling instance of racial discrimination.
I don’t know if that’s actually happening. But at the heart of this lawsuit is something far more sinister and troubling.
His name is Edward Blum and he is the devil. He has worked to limit voting rights and access for people of color and is essentially staging a one-man war against affirmative action policies in education. Also he looks like this:
Blum’s recent work coalesced into an organization he founded called Students for Fair Admission. The group essentially recruits students who feel they’ve been denied admission to selective colleges because of their race.
This is intentionally misleading. It sounds like it’s meant to ensure that students have the same educational opportunities, regardless of their race, right? Wrong!!! Blum’s ultimate goal is “colorblind” admissions: the removal of race from the admissions process entirely, ending formal and informal quotas for racial diversity in higher education and effectively abolishing affirmative action. Nevermind that some demographics have been structurally blocked from opportunity — in the formal education system and beyond — for centuries. Blum does not represent the racially underserved and underrepresented: His first case to these ends was for Abigail Fisher, the numbnuts who, you may remember, filed a suit against the University of Texas in 2013 claiming that she was denied admission for being white, so the school could make room for students of color.
Blum and Fisher lost, at which point Blum apparently mused to himself, “perhaps I will find better luck and more sympathy if I work with an actual minority group.” There’s even video footage of him saying, “I needed Asian plaintiffs,” the same way I would say “I need to borrow your power drill” or “I need a toilet.” He won the support of some Asian Americans who feel their applications are and have been unjustly measured; it was Blum and Students for Fair Admission that ultimately filed against Harvard.
I am hesitant to throw generalities around; it is quite literally counter to what Token is meant to do. But as a member of the Asian-American community myself, I would like to posit that it may have been tempting to make this Faustian deal in a society that often makes Asian Americans feel isolated, unimportant, invisible. It can be lonely to be what we are: unbound by commonality of experience, still often trapped within the framework of the model minority, separated from a sense of heritage by language barriers and our parents’ distaste for what they perceive as dwelling on the past. It’s hard for us to know what role we can and should play in national discourse — what would be overstepping, what would be misplaced, and what our community’s goals should be, beyond hazy terms like “equality” and “representation.” Loneliness can breed a rootless anger. And then along comes this Blum figure, promising to defend our rights, assuring us that we have a justified cause, presenting a false rallying cry to a group that feels it has been silenced.
It’s so disappointing to see members of my community fall into this trap, to be baited into joining a white man’s campaign to dismiss the lasting, structural inequalities and violence that have historically kept brown and black people out of institutions like Harvard. Edward Blum and people like him do not care about the Asian-American community: They care about our potential utility as tools to further their neocon war against inclusivity.
Here is a question I struggle with: Did I become that tool? I believe in affirmative action; I believe that we need to address the reality that the resources that make a “strong” candidate for college admissions are disproportionately inaccessible to brown and black people.
So when my parents told me to essentially forget the conditions of my college admission, to not question such a blessing, I felt the echoes of white supremacy’s most effective strategy: to divide us into smaller, more manageable factions that battle for what is ostensibly a limited number of seats at someone else’s table. “We got ours, fuck everyone else.”
In my heart, I can’t blame them for this. They and their parents worked themselves to the bone upon their arrival here, eventually arriving at a place of stability and success in spite of outward racism and violence of levels I haven’t had to counter. But they could also do that because they did not face what brown and black people did and still do. For a lot of people, working hard gets you nowhere.
I have benefited enormously and unfairly from something that was no more than a matter of luck and chance, from a system checked by incredibly arbitrary and discriminatory measures and qualifiers, and I believe it to be a broken system. It is one that enables that age-old mentality that pits minority against minority, when in reality we should all be facing the same direction, against our white supremacist capitalist elitist oppressors.
They would like to keep us from imagining such a world to be possible. But if we can agree that the opportunities afforded to us should be available to all — if we can see Edward Blum’s campaign for what it really is — we can force the education system into serving the function it should. To level the playing field, to make us all more aware, more equal, more open. To teach us how to use MailChimp.
— Natalie, unlikeable coward
*Part II is coming from Ari next week!
My mom
She’s a first-grade teacher at a public school in Seattle, and she doesn’t know that I do any of this Token stuff, and she would kill me if I included a picture of her. But she’s recently been organizing with her local teachers’ union, as well as a coalition of local educators of color, to ensure that everything from curricula, to counseling, to teacher recruitment is inclusive and diverse. She’s started talking to me about racial justice in ways I couldn’t have really imagined coming out of her mouth just a few years ago. I’m really proud of her.
Michelle Jones
Michelle Jones was incarcerated for 24 years in the state of Indiana for a crime she allegedly committed when she was 16. While she was imprisoned, she became a published scholar of American history, wrote several dance compositions and plays, and was recruited by a number of highly selective schools to join their doctoral programs, pending her release. She was initially admitted to Harvard’s lauded history program. And then, in a truly stunning example of education being reserved for the few, not offered to the many, her admission was withdrawn after some members of the department “raised concerns” about her background. She’s now at NYU. Fuck Harvard.
