Fact Under Fiction: Asians, Affirmative Action, and College Admissions

AI Reproduction Of The Original Image Used , A Picture Of - AS WAS SAID AS FOLLOWS AT THE TIME - The Moakley Courthouse in Boston, where the pending lawsuit against Harvard College will go to trial on October 15th.

By Chimaoge Ibe | October 6, 2018

Note: This article was originally published by The Harvard Political Review (HPR) on the date listed above. It was later taken down from the HPR’s website, likely in retaliation against me for exposing organizational misconduct. As a result, I have republished my article here.

I Published This Article Under My Government Name . I Have Also Previously Republished This Article On Chimaoge's Comments' Medium Account And TWICE On My Personal X(Formerly Twitter) Account . Here Are The Links To Those Republications -

X Article One https://x.com/chimaogeibe/status/1793545845675020533?s=46&t=qm4WNeYXJ5QhvClShU8xBw
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Medium https://medium.com/@chimaogescomments/fact-under-fiction-asians-affirmative-action-and-college-admissions-3d158173ffaa

A recently filed lawsuit alleges that Harvard University’s affirmative action policy discriminates against Asian-American applicants in college admissions. This lawsuit cites the lower “personal ratings” given to Asian applicants relative to students of other races, as well as Asian applicants’ higher grades, test scores, and extracurricular ratings as proof. However, the arguments put forth by Students For Fair Admissions, the plaintiffs in this case, are just the latest iteration of a decades-old claim that affirmative action policies in general discriminate against Asians.

As a black Harvard undergraduate who belongs to student organizations that have sided against SFFA, I was initially skeptical of both this lawsuit and the larger narrative. To begin, the lawsuit against Harvard was brought not by Asian-American people, but instead by Edward Blum, a white man who has a history of opposing laws meant to help minorities. Also, Asian-American students are overrepresented in our nation’s college populations as compared to their proportion of the general population, while other minorities, who are typically seen as the sole beneficiaries of race-conscious admissions policies, are actually underrepresented.

Nonetheless, Asian-American people have been oppressed throughout history, and they continue to suffer from oppression today. However, the specific claim that affirmative action unjustly discriminates against Asian students rests on faulty premises and draws attention away from the real sources of discrimination they face in the college process. This narrative lends credence to racist ideas that hurt other minority groups, and could ultimately harm all non-white people.

The Unacknowledged Hierarchy

When people say that race-conscious admissions policies discriminate against Asian students, they are essentially saying that universities’ mostly white admissions committees are discriminating against Asian applicants in favor of other minorities such as blacks and Hispanics — the supposed sole beneficiaries of affirmative action policies. This claim seems dubious given that Asian people are generally held in higher regard as compared to other minorities.

This difference in perception and treatment stems largely from the model minority myth which, although ultimately harmful to Asian people in an absolute sense, has perpetuated certain positive stereotypes about Asian people that have translated into a higher status relative to other non-white people.

Dr. Edward Burmila, a political science professor at Bradley University who has previously written about the influence that scientific racism — the belief that scientific evidence provides justification for racism — still has on American society, told the HPR that all non-white people were once held in equally low regard; however, those beliefs later changed to give Asian people a more privileged status: “Over time…the [myth] of the model minority [developed],” Burmila said, noting that the myth consists of the idea that Asian people “are okay” because “they acclimatize to American society, and white society.”

Although Burmila believes that Asian peoples’s relatively privileged status developed recently, ideas about Asian people’s relative superiority existed long before then. For instance, Samuel George Morton, a prominent 19th century scientist, theorized that Chinese people and Southeast Asians were more intelligent than Native Americans and Africans due to their supposedly larger cranial capacity. Also, Enlightenment philosophers posited that Africans were inferior to Europeans due to their “failure” to develop writing systems. Asians, many of whom came from societies with writing systems, would also be superior to Africans according to this logic.

These centuries of racist history drive present day attitudes about Asian people relative to other minorities, which cause differences in implicit bias and perceived intelligence. These in turn can be linked to differences in rates of police killings, income, upward mobility, and access to education. These ideas have even led to differences in the proposed treatment of various immigrant groups; when President Trump labelled majority black countries “shitholes” and proposed limiting immigration from those nations, he also expressed openness to allowing immigration from certain Asian countries. Set against this history of exclusion, it seems highly unlikely that those who control college admissions, the vast majority of whom do not belong to underrepresented minority groups, would take the unprecedented step of discriminating against Asian applicants in favor of other minorities.

The many Asian individuals who perform well in school and on standardized tests are certainly intelligent and industrious, and their success should be commended. Contrary to what many people claim, however, Asian people as a group are not innately smarter or more hardworking than other minority groups. Therefore, the differences in achievement between Asians and other minority groups cannot be attributed to innate intelligence or work-ethic. This racial gap in grades and test scores actually reflects Asian people’s privilege relative to other minority groups — as well as their higher share of well-educated immigrants — not racial differences in “merit” as narrowly defined by many people.

The notion that race-conscious college admissions unjustly disadvantage Asian applicants is logically flawed — the true injustice would be failing to acknowledge the widespread cultural perceptions and systemic inequalities perpetuated along racial lines that disadvantage minority groups differently well before the college admissions process even begins.

The Forgotten Facts

The idea that Asian applicants are discriminated against in favor of other minorities in the context of college admissions is not the only shaky premise that this case rests on. This argument also assumes that without race-conscious admissions, universities would deny significantly fewer Asian-American applicants. Despite what opponents of affirmative action claim, academic research does not support this premise.

Opponents of race-conscious admissions often cite data from a 2009 book by two Princeton sociologists as “proof” of discrimination against Asian applicants in college admissions. This data seems to show that Asian applicants require higher test scores to be admitted into highly selective universities than students of other races. However, the principal author of that book, Dr. Thomas Espenshade, has always maintained that his research does not in fact prove discrimination against Asian applicants in the college process.

Moreover, some academics, like Dr. Julie Reuben, a historian and professor at Harvard’s School of Education who has studied the role of affirmative action policies throughout history, doubts that a relationship between race-conscious admissions policies and the admissions chances of Asian applicants can be deduced so easily. In fact, Reuben claimed that “it’s very hard to get reasonable estimations of the impact of affirmative action on Asian applicants for a number of reasons.” Reuben also said that she did not think anyone currently engaging in public debates on affirmative action had done the proper data analyses to reach a credible conclusion on the issue.

Other scholars do believe that the impact of race-conscious admissions policies on Asian applicants can be measured, but their research contradicts the claims of affirmative action opponents. In a 2016 study, researchers at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s School of Education concluded that there were too few underrepresented minority applicants to have a statistically significant impact on the admissions chances of white and Asian applicants.

In fact, they found that eliminating all black and Latinx applicants from Harvard’s admissions pool would only increase white and Asian applicants’ admissions chances by one percent. These findings make sense not only for the reasons that the researchers gave, but also because the law only allows universities to use race in college admissions to a very limited degree.

Other research also undercuts the myth that affirmative action unjustly disadvantages Asian applicants by suggesting that race-conscious admissions policies actually help Asian applicants. Professor Mari Matsuda, a professor at the William S. Richardson School of Law and an activist who has opposed efforts to end race-conscious admissions policies in the past, attested to the aid that affirmative action has historically given Asian applicants in an interview with the HPR: “There are people in the professions today, including myself, who would not have gotten the opportunities they had if doors hadn’t been busted open by Asian-Americans,” Matsuda said. “So many law schools, for instance, when affirmative action was introduced, went from being all white and male, to including women for the first time, and including Asian-Americans for the first time.” Matsuda also noted that students from underrepresented sub-groups of the Asian-American community need race-conscious admissions, and that Asian-Americans have historically benefited from affirmative action policies in employment.

Given the high degree of uncertainty among academics as to the actual impact of race-conscious admissions policies on Asian applicants, it is baffling that opponents of the policy continue to argue that they have objective proof that race-conscious admissions policies discriminate against Asian applicants.

The Untouched True Culprits

While there is scant objective evidence that race-conscious admissions policies unfairly discriminate against Asian-American applicants, other sources of discrimination against them do exist in the college admissions process. The lower “personal ratings” given to Asian Harvard applicants are not the result of affirmative action policies as Edward Blum and his allies claim, but are more likely due instead to simple anti-Asian racism on the part of Harvard’s admissions officers. In fact, the idea that Asian people have poor social skills and “lack personality” are classic anti-Asian stereotypes.

This type of anti-Asian racism would go unchecked without a properly applied affirmative action policy. If individuals like Edward Blum who masquerade as advocates for the Asian-American community truly cared about helping Asian college applicants, they would be working to combat anti-Asian bias among college admissions officers — not obsessing over affirmative action.

Moreover, many people have noted over the past few decades that elite universities like Harvard discriminate against all non-white applicants, Asians included, through their admissions preferences for legacy students and athletes. Dr. Ling-chi Wang, a prominent Asian-American civil rights activist who has also opposed efforts to dismantle affirmative action, told the HPR about his past unsuccessful efforts to end this discrimination. In the 1980s, he noticed a disparity between white and Asian rates of admission to Ivy League universities and contacted the U.S. Office of Education’s Civil Rights division. His complaints triggered a ten year investigation, wherein the Justice Department found a significant disparity in the admissions rates of white and Asian applicants for nine out of those ten years.

According to Wang, the Justice Department Investigation found two sources of the disparity. “Number one, Harvard admitted about 600 athletes a year in the freshman class. They were admitted on a different basis rather than through academic criteria,” he said. “Then secondly, they also found that Harvard…admitted a significant number of alumni children. Especially [those of] the donors.” Wang said that those two factors accounted for the entire disparity.

Despite these findings, the government at the time sided with Harvard and did not pursue a case against the University for racial discrimination. The past and present refusal of supposed advocates for Asian-American people to combat this proven source of racial discrimination while simultaneously pursuing questionable campaigns against affirmative action suggests that they do not actually care about Asian-American people. Their lack of support for Asian-American activism makes these individuals appear as if they are using Asian people — who generally support affirmative action policies — to harm other minorities without addressing the true sources of inequities in the college admissions process.

The Uncertain Future

The narrative that affirmative action unjustly discriminates against Asian-American college applicants rests on false premises, ignores centuries of history and runs counter to a plethora of modern data. This falsehood perpetuated by predominantly white individuals pursuing apparently racist agendas puts non-Asian minorities at risk while drawing attention away from the real oppression that Asian people face.

Nonetheless, this argument continues to gain traction in American society. If lawsuits like the present one against Harvard succeed in destroying affirmative action, and the fiction that affirmative action discriminates against Asian applicants becomes accepted as fact, the United States will have once again succeeded in inflicting suffering upon its non-white citizens, Asian people included.

ORIGINAL Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/NewtonCourt

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This Blog Is A Branch Of The Media Company Network Chimaoge’s Comments , Which Is Part Of The Media Company OziIbenwuku. It Was Created By And Is Run And Operated By Me, Chimaoge nke Rom, aha mbu Maoge, Onyeishi Kalu Akanu ( THE HEAD OF THE GREATEST MAN ALIVE ! ) . That Is My Metaphysically Correct Name ! My Government Name Is Chimaoge Chijioke Ibe, And I Have Also Used The Surname 'Ibenwuku' In The Past . In Other Words , I Have Published Materials Under The Full Name Chimaoge Chijioke Ibenwuku Before , Particularly When I Was In College . ‘Ibenwuku’ Is The FULL VERSION Of The Last Name ‘Ibe’ . ‘Ibenwuku’ Was Shortened To ‘Ibe’ At Some Point In The Past By My Patrilineal Progenitors . This Is Further Complicated By The Fact That The Practice Of Using So Called “ Last Names “ Or “ Surnames “ Was Forced Upon My Lineage By White People In The First Place . Overall , EFULEFU IHE ! ( Treason ! )

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Fact Under Fiction: Asians, Affirmative Action, and College Admissions

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