Racial Politics, Resentment, and Affirmative Action: Asian Americans as “Model” College Applicants

ABSTRACT

This article uses philosophical analysis to clarify the arguments and claims about racial discrimination brought forward in the recent legal challenges to affirmative action in higher education admissions. Affirmative action opponents have argued that elite institutions of higher education are using negative action against Asian American applicants, so they can admit other students of color instead by using race-conscious affirmative action. We examined the surrounding controversy, while positing that the portrayal of Asian Americans as a model minority in this debate foments a politics of resentment that divides racial groups. Our analysis centered on how key concepts such as racial discrimination and diversity may be central to this politics of resentment. Given persistent threats to access and equity in higher education, it is important to gain conceptual clarity about the racial politics of anti-affirmative action efforts.

KEYWORDS:

• Affirmative action
• Asian Americans
• college access
• model minority myth
• politics of education
• race

Notes

1. See http://harvardnotfair.org/legal-issues.

2. Herein, by the term “Asian American,” we mean Americans of Asian descent including people with Asian Indian, Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Guamanian, Hmong, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Pacific Islander, Samoan, Taiwanese, Thai, or Vietnamese heritage.

3. We acknowledge this is a contested term. All people have “color.” Herein, we use the terms “students of color” and “people of color” to signify currently racialized people in the United States, for lack of a term that better identifies this group.

4. In fact, the lawsuits name discrimination against both Asian American and White applicants.

5. See, as examples of such simplistic understandings, Unz’s (2012) and Murray’s (2012) arguments.

6. We use the term “Latinx” to represent groups with Caribbean, Central American, Mexican, and South American descent. This term is more inclusive and honoring of intersectionality than other terms commonly used, such as “Hispanic,” “Latino,” or “Latin@,” which uphold, respectively, the Spanish language, masculine hegemony, and the gender binary.

7. While the Harvard lawsuit is pending, the 2006 civil rights complaint against Princeton lodged by a Chinese American student who had been waitlisted was dismissed in September 2015 (Liu, 2007–2008). A 2015 civil rights complaint against Harvard lodged by a coalition of Asian American groups was dismissed as well (though they revised the complaint and submitted it as an amicus Brief in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (2013) in 2015).

8. According to Gibson and Jung (2002), the 1950 decennial Census reported the Asian population as 321,033, comprising 0.2% of the total population. This classification included only Japanese, Chinese, and Filipinos, the three largest Asian ethnic groups at the time. In the 1980 Census, the racial category “Asian and Pacific Islander” appeared for the first time, adding Korean, Hawaiian, Vietnamese, Asian Indian, Guamanian, and Samoan. The 2010 Census question on race included check boxes for six Asian groups—Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese—along with a box for “Other Asian,” with a prompt for detailed responses such as “Hmong, Laotian, Thai, Pakistani, Cambodian, and so on.” From these responses, the Census Bureau tabulated data on 24 specific Asian groups plus “Other Asian, not specified” (Hoeffel et al., 2012).

9. We understand that there is no guarantee that students of color will yield diversity of thought, but it is more likely if the student body is racially and culturally diverse (Moses, 2006; Anderson, 2010).

10. Recall that we put aside the empirical question of whether elite colleges and universities are in fact using negative action against Asian American applicants. We are not arguing that they are; empirical research is needed to ascertain that. Instead, we are supporting our argument that they should not be using negative action against Asian American applicants.