Multicultural Anti-Racism: Anti-Blackness and Asian Americans in Students for Fair Admissions V. Harvard

Abstract

This article examines Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which the plaintiffs allege Harvard University’s admissions program discriminates against Asian Americans. By reframing anti-Black opposition to affirmative action within the progressive discourse of defending Asian Americans, SFFA mobilizes an anti-racist argument in hopes of achieving a post-racist outcome. I contend that this rhetorical gesture exemplifies a larger discursive strategy I call multicultural anti-racism, which appropriates the language of anti-racism and redeploys it in service of expanding racial violence.

Keywords:

• affirmative action
• anti-blackness
• Asian Americans
• Multiculturalism
• Post-Racialism

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Charles Athanasopoulos, Joseph LeDuc, Caitlin Bruce, Alvin Primack and the anonymous peer reviewers for their thoughtful feedback on this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Proposed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law are a type of legal document filed by one of the parties involved in a case to argue for how a court should rule on the facts and decision in a case

1. When referring to the group, Students for Fair Admissions, I use the acronym “SFFA” without italicization. When referring to the case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, I use “SFFA” with italicization.

2. Though I agree that the post-World War II era constitutes an important turning point, I differ slightly from Melamed in that I do not consider it a “complete” racial break that inaugurated an “epochal shift” in how race operates. One might trace, for example, precursors to contemporary multiculturalism as far back as the abolition of slavery and the concomitant rise of what Hartman (1997) refers to as “burdened responsibility” as proto-multicultural discourses that concretized anti-Blackness under the language of freedom and autonomy for ex-slaves.

3. It is worth noting that this impetus is not necessarily neutral. While Philip Howard (2004) warns that CWS often reinscribes liberal individualism and white privilege by reducing anti-racist work to individual attitudinal changes, Moon and Flores (2000) argue “race traitors” and abolitionists in CWS often re-center whiteness through a romanticization of masculine, “heroic whites.” On displacing whiteness’s universality, Robyn Wiegman (1999) names particularity as another function of liberal whiteness, such as Jim Crow era “Whites Only” signs. She contends the desire for a unique discipline dedicated to “whiteness studies” (as distinct from those interrogations of whiteness in fields such as ethnic studies) exemplifies how naming the particularity of whiteness does not necessarily resist its hegemonic power but can actually reify its political elasticity.

4. Two cases in 2003, Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger further clarified these dynamics. Grutter ruled the University of Michigan’s law school was permissible because the court found the diversity rationale to be compelling and the “holistic” admissions process to be narrowly tailored, while Gratz struck down a University of Michigan’s undergraduate affirmative action program on the basis it was not narrowly tailored (Eckes, 2018).

5. Of course, this is not to suggest that multicultural anti-racism exclusively involves white conservatives recruiting nonwhite subjects for their own benefit. In the case of NYPD officer Peter Liang, for example, Asian Americans organized protests and turned out to claim Liang had been victimized without recruitment by white people.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Corinne Mitsuye Sugino

Corinne Sugino is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Gonzaga University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Asian American racialization, anti-blackness, multiculturalism, and rhetorical studies.