“The primary victims” of race-conscious admissions “are now Asian Americans,” claims the Students for Fair Admissions in a supplemental brief filed to the Supreme Court in December asking the high court to ban colleges that consider applicants’ race from receiving federal funding. However, a growing number of Asian American students at Harvard are spearheading efforts to defend affirmative action at Harvard and throughout higher education.
The Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Society’s Education and Political Committee is one of 25 Harvard student and alumni organizations that have filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold race-conscious admissions. Chelsea Wang ’25 and Kylan Tatum ’25, co-chairs of AAA, are organizing university-wide educational efforts in collaboration with Harvard graduate student Asian American organizations, as well as a protest in Washington on the day of the Court’s oral arguments.
“It’s disingenuous for Edward Blum to use Asian Americans as pawn pieces,” Wang argued, referencing founder and president of SFFA’s comments that he “needed Asian plaintiffs,” according to a video released by the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. “He has been against affirmative action for a very long time, and he didn’t seem to be interested in the perspectives of Asian Americans until very recently, when he lost a similar case with a white plaintiff.”
“We don’t want to be used like that,” Wang said of AAA’s opposition to Blum’s case.“We believe in diversity and racial justice. And we believe in solidarity and helping other people of color.”
Although the theme of racial solidarity, the cooperation by one community of color in support of another, underlies many Asian American student and alumni organizations support of affirmative action, Wang explained that “historically, Asian Americans have been used as a wedge between other people of color. We are pointed to as examples of self-made success.”
AAA co-chair Kylan Tatum ’25 described this “weaponization of Asian American socioeconomic and educational success against other ‘problem minorities” as the ‘Model Minority Myth,’ which has been criticized as harmful to students of color by depicting “the social position of other minority groups through frameworks of laziness or inherent inferiority instead of as a product of institutionalized barriers to success.”
Tatum sees the difference between supporters and opposers of affirmative action as a question of equity versus equality. Proponents of equality in admissions advocate for identical policies in the applicant considerations, while proponents of equity would argue that equal consideration of applicants does not suffice when applicants are afforded unequal opportunities. Under the notion that equality was the original goal of affirmative action, SFFA argues that race-conscious admissions lead to a racial overbalancing that harms certain racial groups.
Muskaan Arshad ’25, an Asian American supporter of affirmative action and intern for the Coalition for Diverse Harvard, argues that equity trumps equality. “If certain racial groups and people have been overwhelmingly oppressed for centuries, you can’t pretend everything’s equal and everyone’s on an equal basis. That’s a complete lie,” she said.
Wang, Tatum, and Arshad argued that affirmative action policies could even help Asian Americans in the college admissions process.
“Sometimes it’s easy to forget that Asian Americans aren’t a monolith,” Wang said. “There are a lot of low-income Asian Americans, multiracial Asian Americans, Asian Americans with diverse ethnic backgrounds—who actually are helped by affirmative action.”
“I think one of my favorite things about being Asian American is that our cultures are so collectivist,” Wang added, expressing that affirmative action policies recognize and honor her Chinese culture.“I think if we don’t support affirmative action, we are giving that up. We’re becoming individualists. We’re trying to push down others for our own benefit.”
Tatum argued that the SFFA has abused the label “Asian American” in an attempt to portray them “as a monolithic group universally disadvantaged by affirmative action policies.” She explained that “certain subgroups that fall under the umbrella term of ‘Asian American’, such as low income or multiracial groups, are severely underrepresented in institutions of higher education.”
According to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, using socioeconomic factors to designate certain applications as “disadvantaged” helps combat the monolithing of Asian American applicants. AAA’s brief states that “being Asian American within the disadvantaged category is correlated with a greater likelihood of admission (a pattern that is absent or only minimally present for Black or Latinx applicants, respectively).”
Wang, Tatum, and Arshad pointed to a lack of evidence in application scoring techniques as the primary reason they oppose SFFA, which introduced very few admissions files as evidence.
The ultimate benefactor from the lawsuit would be white people, “people who have historically had a space in this school,” added Arshad. According to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund in an amici curiae brief, the result would actually widen the gap “by disproportionately benefitting white applicants and discriminating against some Asian American applicants… As a result, the gap between the white and Asian-American shares of the admitted class would widen if race-conscious admissions were eliminated.”
Considering how a ruling against affirmative action would affect higher education, Arshad thought of “all the people that are benefited from admission that are just so smart, so intelligent—from diverse spaces and races and ethnicities—just not having the chance to get that education. I think that it would be a huge detriment to America, to the world, to Harvard.”
Madeline Proctor ’25 (maddieproctor@college.harvard.edu) edits News for the Independent.