After years of debate, we finally have conclusive evidence proving that affirmative action policies in college admissions have perpetuated discrimination against Asian American students, but staunch advocates of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) can’t accept it.
Last month, MIT became the first elite university to release racial demographic data for its Class of 2028 admissions. After years of stagnant Asian American admissions, the data showed a seven-point increase in the percentage of Asian students admitted, from 40% to 47%. In the days that followed, admissions data trickled in from other schools, including a nine-point increase in Asian American admissions at Columbia University and a four-point increase at Brown University, revealing a pattern on many college campuses. Some schools, such as Yale and Princeton, had mixed results, clearly vindicating advocates of affirmative action.
But the issue is more nuanced than it seems, with many universities reporting that a certain number of students have refused to disclose their race. Many of these are likely Asian American students who “know they’re being targeted,” says UCLA law professor Richard Sander. It’s also possible that some universities are subtly refusing to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision. But the results largely establish what many Asian Americans have known for decades.
The college admissions landscape changed last year when the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University (2023), overturning race-based affirmative action policies across the country. The case concerned Asian American students who were discriminated against by the admissions committees of top universities, and the lawsuit itself revealed that college admissions officers routinely gave Asian applicants lower personality ratings as part of so-called “holistic” screening. Nonetheless, left-wing activists pushed the argument that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action policies are actually “pawns” of white supremacy.
Asians are not pawns
By “pawn,” activists mean that opposition to affirmative action is a position consistent with white supremacist ideology, and therefore Asian Americans who take such a position are essentially “useful idiots” for policies that do not benefit Asians. But as recent enrollment figures show, anti-Asian discrimination was in fact the norm before the Supreme Court’s decision, blowing away the narrative that Asians were merely pawns in the interests of white supremacy.
An article published in the Nation after the Supreme Court decision, titled “Asian American Conservatives Have Become White Supremacy’s Vital Allies,” goes a step further and discards the “stooge” narrative altogether, arguing that “Asian American anti-affirmative action activists are not simply ‘used’ by white activists to be duped by this white supremacist policy; they are active and militant accomplices in conspiracy with white conservatives.”
The article also oddly states that “repealing affirmative action will only increase the number of white students at the expense of other minority students, including black and Asian American students.” This subterfuge tries to make it seem as though affirmative action actually helps Asian Americans by assuming that it increases the minority student population overall (because Asians are a racial minority group), but ignores the fact that Asian Americans are not the “right” minority group for such an increase. In fact, Asian Americans are harmed by affirmative action despite being a racial minority.
Correcting the narrative on race and education
So why was the white supremacy narrative so emphasized in the first place? There are two reasons. First, the fact that Asian Americans outperform white Americans and all other racial groups academically demonstrates that standardized tests are free of white supremacist bias. Many universities have dropped the SAT requirement, and some law schools have also dropped the LSAT requirement, because left-wing activists in the legal profession (and law schools are full of them) argued that such standardized tests were used to reduce minority student enrollment.
It is worth noting that Asian Americans are underrepresented students. In fact, Asians make up a much smaller percentage of the U.S. population than Blacks and Latinos. This has led many higher education institutions and workplaces to use the term “underrepresented minorities,” which specifically defines all minority groups other than Asians.
It is hard to imagine a cabal of white supremacists sitting in a smoke-filled room strategically designing the SAT so that Asian Americans, who were a tiny minority population at the time standardized tests were mostly integrated, would, on average, perform better on the test than white people, thus giving this cabal of white supremacists plausible deniability for any future accusations of racism.
Another reason why many of our college-educated class accuse Asian Americans of conspiring with white supremacists is that the livelihoods and self-worth of many activists and government officials depend on such narratives being true. Workplaces and higher education institutions are increasingly staffed with various administrators with departments dedicated to DEI. Just as a janitor needs the presence of trash to justify the existence of his or her job, DEI officials need evidence of white supremacy (or patriarchy, or some other alleged discrimination) to justify their continued employment.
Moreover, social justice ideology has become so hegemonic in nearly every humanities department in the country that it creates a sunk cost fallacy: people need to believe what they are taught to be true, or they will be forced to realize they have wasted precious years of their lives on falsehoods. So if white supremacy is the devil, or one might say the devil incarnate, they need to keep smacking it like a piñata, except maybe they need to get a “Latino” to do it to avoid accusations of cultural appropriation.
While there is certainly conclusive evidence that affirmative action policies have discriminated against Asian Americans for decades, some people still must believe otherwise in order to maintain their comfortable position and sense of psychological security, but such falsehoods should not 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 at X @AxiomAmerican.
