Olivia Cheng Instagram – Posted @withregram • @zentronix Let’s be clear — it was never about discrimination against Asians.
Asian Americans — who, in the American racial hierarchy, have always been placed between complicity and justice — were mainly there for display, as mostly white lawyers on both sides asiansplained them to the Court.
In order to win, they deployed stage trickery – disappearing Asian Americans at just the right moment. From the District Court to the Supreme Court, Students for Fair Admissions produced exactly *zero students and Asian Americans* to testify.
Even after forcing Harvard to turn over nearly 100,000 pages of documents, they could not produce *a single individual case of discrimination.*
Harvard introduced four student witnesses, including Sally Chen, a low-income, first-generation Chinese immigrant student accepted in 2015, who said that only because of the school’s holistic admissions process was she able to tell her story, be seen, and valued.
Judge Sotomayor noted this in her dissent, writing, “At bottom, race-conscious admissions benefit all students, including racial minorities. That includes the Asian American community.”
From October to March every year, existential questions about self-presentation—Should I hide my Asianness? Should I be myself?—and stories of possible past admissions discrimination—Was it? Was it not?—ratchet up anxiety in households from Cupertino to McLean.
Perhaps more than any other group, Asian Americans are invested in the ideal of meritocracy and feel betrayed by the practice of it.
Yet polls conducted just before the decision still found anywhere from 53% to 69% of Asian Americans support affirmative action programs.
Diversity remains a core value for most Asian Americans, even if a loud minority contests it.
The spotlight will shift now to public magnet high schools like Thomas Jefferson High, Lowell High, and Stuyvesant High, where Asian Americans constitute a majority of students, and pro- and anti-diversity Asian Americans have been fighting over admissions policies.
To paraphrase the question the writer @HuaHsu once posed to affirmative action opponents, “How much is enough?” | Posted on 03/Jul/2023 21:21:09
