Where Affirmative Action Fails

by Gina Kong

I am rooting for the plaintiffs as an opponent of affirmative action.

My name is Gina and I am a senior in high school. I go to a highly ranked public school in a rich Midwestern city where some kids drive BMW’s and Range Rovers to school. Anybody who goes to my school has a certain degree of privilege and I fully recognize and appreciate my own. I get good grades, I’m active in a lot of clubs, I consider myself as a friend to many of my teachers: I am a good student. By numbers, I have a good chance among other candidates in the college admission process. But by race and taking race alone in isolation, because I am Asian-American, I do not.

Now you may be thinking, wow she’s Asian so of course she’s against Harvard on this, so unbiased. No, I have a lot of reasons why I’m against affirmative action beyond the fact that I’m Asian. Racism isn’t a term restricted only to the experiences of certain minorities, there seems to be some sort of misconstrued idea in America that racism is a black and white binary social construct. I am Asian, beyond that, I am South Korean, and I am proud to live in the United States. But the system is rigged against me and that is unfair.

Now, onto the meat of the issue: here is why affirmative action fails. The primary function of affirmative action can be broken down into two parts: giving a boost to underprivileged minorities and increasing diversity on campus. Most of my evidence will come from an article by Bhavya Pant from the University of Massachusetts Daily Collegian publishes in January 2019 that I encountered a couple weeks ago. It perfectly articulates all of my reasons on why I’m against affirmative action and I highly recommend anyone to peruse through it.

The most ethical argument for the proponents of affirmative action has to do with morality; society has to make up for it’s wrongdoings of the past, because giving a “leg up” to historically marginalized communities is a way to atone for past racial injustice. The question then turns to privilege. People argue that minority students tend to come from lower-income neighborhoods and consequently have a decreased access to quality education. This is true - those whose households have lower incomes simply don’t have the same access to educational opportunities as other students in higher tax brackets. What’s also true is that black, African-American, and Latinx communities are significantly overrepresented in inner-cities with terrible living conditions and significantly overrepresented in the population of America’s poor. This is awful. Disgusting. Atrocious. Vile. But, most of all, completely unjust as a result from centuries of racial oppression that still exists to many degrees in American society today. This is exactly what affirmative action was created to alleviate. But what needs to be cautioned against is exactly this. The homogenization of human experience. Claiming that because people are black/African-American/Latinx, they are this or that. Racial discrimination is a real and awful and scary but the educational opportunities that minorities lack access to have less to do with their race and more with their financial status. This is the very basis of stereotypes and prejudice, drawing connections when there aren’t any to see.

It’s a snowball effect. Thinking that black people are less hardworking, not because of their actual personality but because they’re black. Thinking that black people are threatening, not because of the possessions they have on their persons but because they’re black. Thinking that black people are poor, not because of hundreds of alternate causes but because they’re black. Homogenizing people and their own unique life experiences, not because of the time they spent on Earth but because of their skin color. Affirmative action uplifting minorities isn’t what I have a problem with, it’s that affirmative action institutionally homogenizes people into a value that is equated with their skin color. And isn’t that exactly what we’re trying to move away from as a country? From attaching the worth of a person to the color of their skin?

This principle also applies to Asian-Americans as well. The stereotype of “Asians being smart”, is formulated into some sort of attack rhetoric that tries to correlate “Asians being smart” to the privilege of educational opportunity that Asians must evidently get from somewhere. However, “Asian-ness” does not correlate to some inherent intelligence that signify privilege. In order to find an answer to that question, one must turn to the history of American immigration policies. According to an article by the New York Times quoting Jennifer Lee, a professor of sociology at Columbia University and the author of “The Asian-American Achievement Paradox”, a century ago, Asian-Americans were perceived as illiterate, undesirable, full of “filth and disease” and unassimilable. They were perceived as “marginal members of the human race,” and were denied the right to become naturalized U.S. citizens, and segregated to ethnic enclaves. But the change in perception came with the change in U.S. immigration law in 1965, which gave preference to highly educated and highly skilled immigrant applicants. This ushered in a new wave of Asian immigrants who were college-educated from their home countries. This resulted in “hyper-selectivity” as these new immigrants were not only educationally superior compared to their fellow countrymen, they were also “almost twice as likely to have a college degree than the average American. The hyper-selectivity has resulted in the stereotype that Chinese-Americans (and Asian-Americans more broadly) are smart, competent and hard-working. But they are also vilified for being too smart, too focused on academics, one-dimensional and lacking personal skills.” So no, “being Asian” is not some automatic passport to a world of higher intelligence, it has more to do with American history than with the inherent color of the skin or the shape of the eyes. This stereotype also ignores the intersectional experience of the Asian-American, ignoring the severe underrepresentation of some minority groups, such as Asian Americans, amongst the poor.

But, specifically in the Harvard case, one item has to be put into the light. According to a the latest government census estimates as of 2017, Asians make up around 5.8–6.0% of the population in the US. This is less than half of the African-American percentage (the largest racially minority at around 13.4%) and about a third of Hispanics/Latinos percentage (the largest ethnic group at around 18.1%) In the Harvard class of 2022, Asian-Americans made up almost 23% of the class. That means that Asian-Americans are vastly overrepresented, triple and close to quadruple the accurate general population percentage representations. But, the general population isn’t trying to get into Harvard. Those in the upper teenage circles of academia are trying to get into Harvard. As previously discussed, however, Asian-Americans are overrepresented in this demographic case because of discriminatory immigration law that hyper-selected intelligence. So, while Asian-Americans may be overrepresented at Harvard according to general population statistics, they are accurately, if not, underrepresented in the Harvard student population. But, affirmative action, a policy that claims to uplift minorities, simply can’t justify it’s treatment against Asian-Americans who, as cited by Pant, on average have to score 140 points higher on the SAT than white students, 320 points higher than Hispanic students, and 450 points higher than African-American students to gain entry into the same institution. Granted, Pant also states, SAT scores aren’t the only thing taken into consideration during the admissions process, but they certainly are the most reliable predictor. Thomas Espenshade at Princeton University revealed that if other things are equal, applicants who present higher SAT scores have a clear advantage in the competitive admissions process. The odds of being admitted for candidates whose scores are 1500 or higher are more than 60 times greater than the odds for applicants whose SAT scores are below 1000.

In short, the goal of affirmative action is admirable, as it wants to help financially marginalized students gain a fairer chance at college admissions. But using race as a marker of poverty is wrong and misconstrued. As Pant so aptly puts, “if helping poor students truly is our motivation, then let’s explicitly reward students who have overcome disadvantaged financial beginnings, irrespective of their race.” As the system stands now, the people who benefit the most are not those in both racially and financially marginalized communities, it is people who are rich and black/Hispanic/Latino. As the system stands now, the black guy I debated last week has less “privilege” than I do; the same guy whose peers compare the sizes of their boats like its nothing and whose family owns multiple multi-million dollar valued houses. As the system stands now, it is more beneficial in admissions to list Hispanic on your application because you’re 1/8 Hispanic than to be both the captain of the varsity soccer team and the captain of a nationally ranked Science Olympiad team…as an Indian male. (*sips tea*) As the system stands now, it is broken.

Then comes the diversity argument, as the very purpose of a university is to prepare students to enter a diverse society by immersing them in a diverse student body. But why does diversity only mean skin color alone? The purpose of a higher education institute is just that, to further my education. Diversity in the people around me should extend further than just the color of their skin, it’s should be of their diversity in thought. I would argue that a rich Asian-American is more similar in the diversity of their thought to a rich white person than to a poor Asian-American. This is due to shared financial commonalities, financial commonalities that birth more shared experiences than racial identities. Or, in other words, people belonging to the same race aren’t identical in their deposition. Professor Ilya Somin points this out as “students labeled ‘Asian American,’ seemingly include individuals of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian and other backgrounds comprising roughly 60 percent of the world’s population… It would be ludicrous to suggest that all of these students have similar backgrounds and similar ideas and experiences to share.” They don’t, and labeling them all, as what Harvard does, consistently as the most bland ethnic group is wrong and homogenizes the Asian-American experience.

Affirmative action is flawed, no doubt, and I don’t necessarily commend Edward Blum for being so blatantly obvious in taking advantage of Asian-Americans for his own means after the failed Fisher v. University of Texas case. But it is a flawed system and perhaps the ends justify the means. The simple fact is that the people affirmative action is meant to help aren’t being helped and it’s giving an unfair advantage to people that don’t need any help. Replace affirmative action with a system that scrutinizes the correlation between financial status and educational opportunity. Admit kids that are qualified and eager to learn.

Just give the kids a fair shot to go to college, man.