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Well, it happened.
In 2014, Students For Fair Admissions filed a lawsuit against Harvard over its racially discriminatory admissions process. Almost ten years later, the Supreme Court finally ruled in SFFA’s favor and struck down race-based affirmative action, although they did leave small loopholes in the ruling that could allow colleges to continue their discriminatory practices.
This Supreme Court decision isn’t the end of the debate over affirmative action. It simply begins a new chapter in American racial discourse.
Immediately after the decision dropped, many on the left tried to divert the conversation from race to legacy admissions. What about the legacies? they cried.
Yet the Supreme Court can only rule on what is constitutional or not, and the ruling in SFFA v. Harvard was made on the grounds that Harvard violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment by discriminating on the basis of race. There is nothing in the Constitution and its amendments about the legality of legacy admissions. Such a case would need to be brought separately to the Court, with an argument that legacy admissions are unconstitutional, in order for the Court to rule on it.
And who says that the anti-affirmative action crowd is pro-legacy? Many of us are from immigrant families. Asian rarely benefit from legacy admissions at all, unlike Black and White students that have been here for centuries.
As of right now though, the legacy deflection serves as a way for liberals to avoid talking about the elephant in the courtroom: race.
Students For Fair Admissions is an organization composed of Asian students that were discriminated against by college admissions boards. They were the plaintiffs that finally dismantled decades of systemic racism against qualified students simply because of the color of their skin.
Yet many on the Left have completely avoided talking about Asians at all. When the New York Times editorial board discussed affirmative action, there was not a single mention of the race of the plaintiffs that made up the lawsuit itself.
And when Asian Americans were brought up, it was about how we are actually “pawns” for White people…
…or that we “carried the water” for them.
As if Asians have no reason to be against a policy that discriminated against us the most!
As you can see from the above graph, after controlling for academics and extracurriculars, admissions officers established a caste system for an arbitrary “personality metric”, where Asian students scored at the very bottom, followed by White students, then Latino students, then Black students. This is nothing new, of course, as Harvard and other colleges did the same to Jewish applicants a century ago.
But the narrative that has been brewing in mainstream liberal media is that Asians don’t have any agency of our own. That when we want to tear down affirmative action, it must be because we want to please some White supremacists. This notion is so absurd yet widely accepted in the discourse today. I can tell you firsthand that the Asian parents pushing their children to study eight hours a day to have a shot at a good school aren’t even thinking about other races. Many of them live in immigrant enclaves that are nearly all Asian.
Truth is, the plaintiffs in this case just wanted merit-based standards. That’s it. No racial preferences at all. If every Black applicant scored higher than every other applicant, I would have no problem with Harvard being 100% Black. As I wrote in a previous essay, I have no problem with the NBA being 70% Black even though America is only 12% Black, because they got in by merit, and that’s what matters. We should apply the sports metaphor to every other aspect of life: whoever performs the best deserves the spot.
But the claim that Asians are aiding and abetting White supremacy really disturbed me. According to the the Asian American Advocacy Fund, a progressive Asian organization,
The white supremacist agendas behind these lawsuits use the small number of Asian Americans against affirmative action as pawns in their efforts—weaponizing the model minority myth to divide our communities. Affirmative action policies have played an important role in securing Asian American access to higher education.
The irony is too much to bear here. Only 21% of Asians support using race in college admissions. It’s the Asian NGOs that depend on donations and coverage by the liberal establishment that are in support of it. Thus, it’s organizations like the AAAF and Stop AAPI Hate that actually are the pawns and stooges.
It turns out that this narrative doesn’t just apply to Asian Americans, but also to Black Americans, American Muslims, and Latino Americans. I went and complied a bunch of articles where minority groups were being called “White supremacists” for simply not agreeing with the mainstream progressive party line. I tweeted it out, and it went viral as major commentators like Jordan B. Peterson and Glenn Greenwald retweeted me.
And sure enough, here we have the new frontier in American racial discourse: the specter of multiracial White supremacy.
So besides Asian Americans, I saw this tweet from Ro Khanna and Jen Psaki talking about how the GOP is trying to “pit” Muslims against trans-identifying people, and Black Americans against Asian Americans.
Yet… what are they even saying? Could there any reason at all that Muslims would be against gender ideology? You know… like the fact that the word “Muslim” means someone who practices the Islamic faith? And that in Islam, transgenderism is prohibited? So isn’t it painfully obvious that Muslims would be opposed to something as haram as gender ideology?
And what’s this about Asian and Black Americans? Apparently, both these groups are “people of color”, and thus are supposed to share the same interests. But “POC” was always a shoddy term. POC simply means someone who is not White. When you construct an identify group out of not being another identity group, the bonds tend to be weak. For example, I am not a truck driver. Imagine if I started going around trying to start a coalition of “people that are not truck drivers”. It would be a very diverse coalition. There’d be SUV drivers, sedan drivers, cyclists, scooter-ers (scooterists?) or whatever you call them, walkers, joggers, and so on. Yet such a coalition would no doubt be very weak, because the only thing we’d have in common is not being a truck driver. Also, the rest of us would probably be annoyed by the cyclists and kick them out of the coalition.
So “POC” barely holds up as a term, because it’s far too broad to ever create a movement out of, as it defines itself solely based on not being another identity group. Every Asian professional has a story about how people don’t see them as real “POC”:
Once, in a volunteer advocacy meeting I was in, good people called for the need to find a person of color (POC) to speak at an event to have diversity. Personally, I don’t like the term person of color as I do not want to be called “yellow,” but that seems to be the nomenclature that’s in vogue now. I assumed they were referring to a “Black or Brown” person; nonetheless, I spoke and said, “I am a person of color.” The virtual room went dead with silence. I know these people. They know me. We were all on camera, and somehow, they didn’t see me as a POC. This did not surprise me as Asians are rarely acknowledged as a minority group that faces discrimination or disparity in our society.
Instead, Asians and Whites are increasingly being lumped together.
And let’s not forget how Trump supporters have multiracial whiteness.
And as Joe Biden once said, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black”.
So what does this all say about the future of American racial discourse? It’s simple. If you’re a minority that supports the “wrong” ideas, you’ve achieved multiracial whiteness. The future of White supremacy in America is shaping up to be quite racially diverse. They must have a great DEI program.
White Supremacy Is Now a Multiracial Movement
“Only a racist would say they’re colorblind. We’re anti-racist so we definitely see color. That’s how we know Asians have terrible personalities.” - Harvard Admissions Board
Maybe they have a point because I was born to be a neurosurgeon. Forget my ok grades and my lack of time commitment to studying, not to mention my shaky hands. My middle-class parents didn't buy me designer clothes and yearly vacations, and this kept me from studying. I mean, who can do their homework when they share a room with their sisters and wear their hand-me-downs? White supremacists, including Asian white supremacists, hang out in classrooms to prevent POC from paying attention in class and doing homework. I can remember seeing them steal hw assignments out of backpacks and erasing assignments on the board. They sneak into homes and turn on televisions in order to hypnotize POC children and keep them from reading and studying. I admit there were other students (white and middle-class) that did study and get straight As, but perhaps I was mistaken for a POC and there was mind-control used on me to limit my academic commitment. This must be the explanation because I know I was meant to be a neurosurgeon.