After Court Strikes Down Affirmative Action, MIT Data Vindicates Discrimination Claims Of Asian Students
After years of debate, we finally have definitive evidence to prove that affirmative action policies for college admissions have perpetuated discrimination against Asian American students. But “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) die-hards can’t accept it.
Last month, MIT became the first elite college to release its racial demographic data for the Class of 2028, showing that after years of static admission rates for Asian Americans, the percentage of admitted Asian students jumped up seven points — from 40 percent to 47 percent. In the days that followed, this proved to be a pattern across many college campuses, as more admissions data trickled in from other institutions, such as at Columbia University, where Asian Americans went up by nine points, and Brown University, where they went up by four points. In some cases, like at Yale and Princeton, the results were mixed, apparently vindicating proponents of affirmative action.
Yet the issue is more nuanced than it appears, as many of these colleges report that some percentage of students refused to disclose their race. Richard Sander, a law professor at UCLA, indicates that many of these are likely Asian American students who “know they’re the target.” And it is still possible that some colleges are subtly refusing to enforce the Supreme Court decision. The majority of the results, though, vindicate what many Asian Americans have known for decades.
The whole college-admissions landscape changed last year when the Supreme Court ruled on the landmark case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), overturning race-based affirmative action policies nationwide. The case hinged on Asian American students who were discriminated against by the admissions boards of elite universities, and the suit itself revealed that college admissions officers were routinely giving Asian applicants lower personality scores as part of a supposedly “holistic” process. Nevertheless, leftist activists pushed the narrative that Asian Americans that opposed affirmative action policies were actually “pawns” for white supremacist agendas.
Asians Aren’t Pawns
What the activists mean by “pawns” is that they claim that opposition to affirmative action is a stance aligned with white supremacist thought, and thus any Asian American who would take such a position is, in essence, a “useful idiot” for an agenda that doesn’t benefit Asians. Yet, as the recent admissions numbers show, anti-Asian discrimination was in fact the norm prior to the Supreme Court decision, blowing away the narrative that Asians were mere pawns for white supremacist interests.
One article published in The Nation after the Supreme Court decision, titled “Asian American Conservatives Have Become Key Allies of White Supremacy,” goes one step further, dispensing with the “pawn” narrative altogether to argue that “Asian American anti–affirmative action activists have not been simply ‘used’ by white activists and duped into this white supremacist policy. They are active, militant co-conspirators with white conservatives.”
The article also bizarrely states that “reversing affirmative action only strengthens the population of white students at the expense of Black and other minority students, including Asian Americans.” This sleight-of-hand tries to make it look like affirmative action actually helps Asian Americans by positing that affirmative action increases the population of minority students as a whole (as Asians are a racial minority group) while ignoring that Asian Americans aren’t the “right” minority group for such a boost — Asian Americans are in fact harmed by affirmative action, despite being a racial minority.
Righting the Narrative on Race and Education
So, then, why was there so much emphasis on the narrative of white supremacy in the first place? There are two reasons. First of all, the fact that Asian Americans have managed to academically outperform white Americans and all other racial groups shows that there is no white supremacist bias in standardized testing. Many colleges have dropped SAT requirements, and some law schools have been dropping LSAT requirements as well, due to leftist activists in the legal field (and there are a lot of such people in law school) claiming that such standardized tests have been used to lower the population of minority students.
It is worth noting that Asian Americans are minority students. Indeed, Asians make up far less of the American population than black and Latino people do. Because of this, many institutions of higher education and workplaces have switched to using the term “underrepresented minority,” which is defined specifically as every minority group besides Asians.
It is difficult to imagine a cabal of white supremacists sitting in smoke-filled rooms, strategically designing the SAT so that Asian Americans — a miniscule population at the time most standardized tests were synthesized — would, on average, perform better at the tests than white people, just so this supposed white supremacist cabal would have plausible deniability against future accusations of racism.
The other reason why many in our college-educated class accuse Asian Americans of collusion with white supremacists is because the livelihoods and egos of so many activists and administrative apparatchiks depend on such a narrative being true. Workplaces and institutions of higher learning are increasingly staffed in ever-greater numbers by various administrators in departments dedicated to DEI. Just like a janitor needs trash to exist to justify their job’s existence, DEI officers need evidence of white supremacy (or patriarchy, or some other form of alleged discrimination) to justify their continued employment.
In addition, social justice ideology reigns hegemonic in practically all humanities departments in the country, and the sunk-cost fallacy comes in: People need to believe what they’ve been taught to be true, or else they would have to realize they wasted precious years of their life dedicated to a falsehood. So if white supremacy is the bogeyman — or perhaps they’d say bogeyperson — they need to keep whacking it like a piñata, although they may have to have a “Latinx” do it to avoid accusations of cultural appropriation.
Indeed, while there is now definitive proof that affirmative action policies have discriminated against Asian Americans for decades, some people still need to believe otherwise to maintain their cushy positions and their sense of mental stability. But such falsehoods cannot be used to dictate policies that affect the lives of millions of Americans.
Sheluyang Peng is a graduate student in religious studies and a writer for Young Voices. Follow him on X @AxiomAmerican.
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