In June 2023, the Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action as unconstitutional. The Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard and SFFA v. University of North Carolina prohibited universities from giving preferences based on race but preserved their right to consider the impact of race on a student’s life. This means that a student cannot be benefited in college admissions just because of their skin color. While many have criticized the decisions for exacerbating systemic inequalities in education, I believe they have removed us from an era in which race-based affirmative action was used as a tool for institutionalized racism against Asian students.
A primary goal of affirmative action was to “balance the scales” by giving Black and Hispanic students, who are targets of systemic racism, a boost in college admissions. However, SFFAs petitioner’s brief revealed that affirmative action at Harvard was used to promote racism against Asian students. As the graph to the right shows, a Hispanic applicant in the first academic decile (top 10%) of their class was almost four times as likely to be accepted as an Asian applicant with the same academic standing, and an African American applicant in the sixth academic decile (just below average) had about the same acceptance rate as an Asian applicant in the top academic decile. While these statistics would make sense in a world where Asians are the most privileged race in America, this cannot be further from the truth. Asians have always been, and continue to be, on the receiving end of racism in the United States: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the World War II era internment of Japanese Say “No” to Affirmative Action JOHN WOO Associate Editor Americans during World War II, and recent influx of antiAsian hate crimes including the 2021 Atlanta Spa Shootings. The justification of “balancing the scales” was only true for some minority groups, and was used maliciously to cover up disadvantages against Asian students.
Furthermore, an additional goal of affirmative action was to promote racial diversity in colleges. This goal was inherently unequal in that it categorized students by race, negating a student’s individuality. Colleges want both racial diversity as well as the most qualified student body, which cannot both be achieved without choosing the most qualified students from each race. Therefore, students end up competing with students of the same race, meaning that affirmative action operates the same way that racial quotas would. A student is expected to be competitive when compared to peers of the same race, which means students face differing standards determined by their race. For example, Asian students are expected to have higher standardized test scores because other Asian students have on average higher test scores. Additionally, this implementation of affirmative action made college admissions a zero sum situation for minorities. While the admission rate for white students stayed inline with the average admission rate, Asian students’ opportunities were sacrificed in order to provide opportunities for Black and Hispanic students. Affirmative action did not solve racism or promote diversity, but rather shifted the effects of racism toward a scapegoat race— in this case, Asian students.
Interestingly, the colleges that are the strongest proponents of affirmative action, such as Harvard, are also those most guilty of practicing legacy admissions. Legacy admissions, to any extent, is a blatant tool used to systemically propagate racial and socioeconomic privilege across generations and keep access to quality education limited to the privileged, whose families have already attended the institution. Moreover, legacy admissions undermine diversity. Legacy admissions, in terms of socioeconomic class and race, disproportionately benefits wealthier, white students. In fact, according to a New York Times article published this September, elite colleges were 2.2 times more likely to accept a student whose families fall within the top 0.1% income bracket. The system of legacy admissions itself should be brought into question constitutionally, as it intentionally excludes non-elites.
Race-based affirmative action reveals a problem far greater in scope than college admissions, as it is a prime example of a top down approach to target systemic injustices. Rather than targeting the root cause of social inequality, race-based affirmative action unsuccessfully attempted to artificially “balance the scales” in later and non compulsory stages of a student’s education. In a society where the college one attends has massive ramifications, affirmative action used a flawed, racist, and top down approach to unfairly influence the lives of all going through the United States higher education system.
Looking forward, I hope the college admissions process becomes a discussion about a student’s passions, interests, and personalities, rather than an examination under the microscope based on race.