The Rise and Fall of Affirmative Action
The Rise and Fall of Affirmative Action
Many of these immigrants can be found on WeChat, which is something like a messaging app combined with Twitter, and was introduced in China in 2011. It quickly became the primary way that Chinese people engage with the digital world. “You turn [off] your WeChat in Beijing airport. Then you turn on in J.F.K., and everything comes on,” Wei said. “You never go out of China, because everything is in WeChat.” In the past few years, researchers have grown concerned about misinformation on WeChat, which has more than a billion users. Chi Zhang, a doctoral student at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication, told me about fake stories of Muslim terrorism, lawless sanctuary cities, and schemes to contaminate the blood supply, all designed to stoke fear among Chinese immigrants.In October, 2013, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” aired a brief segment that became one of the least likely geopolitical turning points ever. While asking children for their views on some of America’s biggest problems, Kimmel pointed out that China owned much of our debt. What should be done? A six-year-old said that we should kill all the Chinese. Rather than scolding him, Kimmel deferred to a late-night host’s most trustworthy tool: a bemused, knowing grin. The bit went viral in the Chinese media, where an abbreviated, translated version had Kimmel advocating genocide against Chinese people. The World Journal picked up the story. Kimmel apologized. The White House eventually had to weigh in, saying that the comments did not “reflect mainstream views of China in the United States.” Vincent Xie, who was inspired by the incident to start a WeChat account called Civil Rights, told me that it didn’t matter if Kimmel was joking. “Would he have made such a joke about African-Americans or Jews?” he asked me, in Mandarin.Among Chinese immigrants, particularly first-generation ones, the Kimmel segment became part of a story about how liberals in this country took Asian-Americans for granted—“the sense,” Chi Zhang said, “that Chinese-Americans are sacrificed in the left agenda to achieve so-called equality for other minority groups.”The following year, SCA-5, a bill that sought to overturn Proposition 209 and restore the consideration of race in school admissions, passed in the California State Senate. Polling data suggested that California voters were open to the bill. A survey from 2012 showed that Asian-Americans supported affirmative action by a three-to-one margin. But many Asian-Americans who had rarely participated in grassroots politics began mounting a campaign against SCA-5, which some called “Skin Color Act 5.” A post on a Web site for South Asian professionals called it “the most racist bill in the history of California.” The most fervent activism came from Chinese-Americans, who used WeChat as an organizing tool. For many lawmakers, unaware of WeChat, or the gateway effects of the Kimmel affair, this loud and aggressive opposition to SCA-5 came as a surprise. Much of the Chinese-American organizing was happening beyond the reach of mainstream media. Activists coördinated mailings to flood politicians’ offices, and staged demonstrations dramatizing their plight as an overlooked minority. In March, 2014, SCA-5 was withdrawn.Yukong Zhao, who lives in Florida, was one of the activists. Zhao arrived in the United States in 1992, and focussed on graduate school in urban affairs and business, finding a job, his visa and citizenship, and family life. He rose through the ranks at Siemens. During the financial crisis, Zhao noticed that many Chinese families had not lost their homes. He began exploring the cultural differences between Asians and everyone else, and self-published a book on the subject in 2013. After the Kimmel incident, Zhao became more engaged. He read about SCA-5, and published an op-ed denouncing it in the World Journal. The next year, he started an organization called the Asian American Coalition for Education. Later, the issue came closer to home. He told me that his son had been a victim of discrimination: despite superlative grades and test scores, he was not accepted to a “top” college. “He has a classmate, who is Hispanic—she got admitted by Johns Hopkins but he did not,” Zhao said.Zhao met Edward Blum through a Chinese reporter. “I noticed that when a black kid is wrongfully accused by the police, many African-American organizations stood up behind that kid,” Zhao said. “But, when Asian-American children are discriminated, no organizations stood up.” The work of conservative activists like Blum helped give context for what Zhao and others were already doing. “Asian-Americans are the most discriminated by this kind of race-based college admissions,” Zhao said. “We need to let the American society know our suffering.”Zhao was adamant that they weren’t “tools” of Blum. On the contrary, he continued, “the complaints against Harvard really originated in the movement against SCA-5.” In 2016, Zhao got more than sixty Asian-American advocacy groups to file complaints with the Department of Justice and the Department of Education, alleging discrimination by Harvard. (The Department of Education dismissed the complaint, but the Department of Justice opened an investigation in 2017. In September, it began investigating Yale’s admissions policies as well.)Though Joe Wei was broadly supportive of people like Zhao, he was apprehensive about what might result from their efforts. He wasn’t sure that newer immigrants understood the “history of struggle,” or the importance of diverse schools that weren’t “one hundred per cent Asian.” “I feel like, ‘Hey, stop it. Don’t push this hard,’ ” he said. “Because you don’t want to ruin everything. After all, we are latecomers. We are new to this country.”In May, 2015, about six months after filing the lawsuits against Harvard and U.N.C., Blum went to the Bay Area to speak to the foundation arm of a small organization called the Silicon Valley Chinese Association. He paid his own way, and talked to a couple of hundred Chinese people curious about his legal strategy. There was a buffet afterward.Blum believed that he was advancing a strong legal challenge to affirmative action, but he hadn’t yet found the kind of popular support that his movement needed. He wasn’t going to find it, he said, among his “buddies at A.E.I., Hudson, and Cato,” the conservative think tanks. At the time, the membership of Students for Fair Admissions had plateaued at “a few thousand,” he told me. After his visit to the S.V.C.A., the group’s leaders encouraged its members to spread the word. Many took to WeChat. Within three days, Blum says, about fifteen thousand people had joined S.F.F.A., crashing the organization’s Web site.Events like these, which went largely unnoticed by the press, began to reshape how Chinese immigrants understood affirmative action. But they confirmed what researchers like Karthick Ramakrishnan, at U.C. Riverside, and Janelle Wong, at the University of Maryland, have found: although Asian-Americans consistently support affirmative action, since around 2012 support among Chinese-Americans has noticeably fallen. Wong believes that the change in Chinese-American attitudes had to do “with the spread of information and misinformation” on WeChat. Although liberal WeChat accounts, like one called Chinese American, have emerged in response to the popular conservative ones, they are outnumbered.In 2016, OiYan Poon, an assistant professor of higher education at Colorado State University, interviewed thirty-six Asian-Americans who disagreed about affirmative action. She was surprised to find that thirty of them, on both sides of the issue, couldn’t accurately explain what affirmative action was. “Quite frankly, the public generally has no goddam clue of how admissions work,” Poon said. When asked for their ideal system for a place like Harvard, thirty-three of them essentially described “race-conscious holistic review, which is exactly what we have today.” Poon has worked as an admissions-application reader in the University of California system, and she was impressed by Harvard’s comprehensive approach, which required each application to be read and vetted by multiple people, and then voted on by a forty-person panel.“My anxiety about this case is really with folks who think they’re allies, and who say they support affirmative action,” Poon said. The opponents of affirmative action had so thoroughly dominated the terms of the debate that supporters were often unconsciously perpetuating a distorted vision of what actually happens—repeating claims that Harvard undervalued Asian students’ “personalities,” for example, an argument that ignores the complexities of the “personal” category. “They’re actually parroting some of the points that Ed Blum is making, and it’s killing me,” Poon said.Vincent Pan, the co-head of Chinese for Affirmative Action, told me that when he describes affirmative action in terms of employment opportunities, or hiring more Asian-American judges or college faculty, people overwhelmingly support it. He rued how narrow the discussion had become, confined to a few places at the nation’s élite institutions. He pointed out that there are more Asian-Americans in San Francisco’s community colleges than in all the Ivy League schools combined.While the Harvard admissions process sucks up the headlines, Asian-Americans have benefitted as much as anyone else from increased opportunities in education, employment, and government service. And the current terms of debate don’t capture the full complexity of the Asian-American community. Researchers believe that efforts toward “data disaggregation,” or the breaking down of large categories, like Asian-American, into smaller, more descriptive subgroups, could bring increased focus to poor, underserved populations, like Southeast Asians.The first time I spoke with Blum, he stopped me after I introduced myself and asked that I repeat my name. He wanted to get it right. “I’ve had a lot of practice over the past three or four years,” he said. Blum looks and sounds a bit like a gentler, more affable version of the sports pundit Skip Bayless, with a long face, deep-set, probing eyes, and a slight frown. In 1992, while living in Houston, Blum ran for Congress as a Republican. As he canvassed, he realized that the district had been drawn in a way that consolidated the black vote. Blum lost the election. He believed that this “racial gerrymandering” violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and he, along with fellow-plaintiffs from across Texas, sued the state. The case, Bush v. Vera, eventually went to the Supreme Court, which in 1996 struck down Texas’s redistricting plan. Since then, Blum has become known for pairing potential plaintiffs with novel legal strategies. He describes himself as a matchmaker.Blum is conscious of being cast as a villain. He told me that he had hoped that keeping the plaintiffs anonymous would “unshackle” the conversation, and allow people to discuss the issues of affirmative action or anti-Asian discrimination on their merits. But he has nevertheless become a focal point. His pretrial court filings have provided revealing glimpses into Harvard’s secretive process. A Web site devoted to publicizing the school’s side of the story singles him out by name. Rachael Dane, the Harvard spokesperson, reiterated the school’s position, that this was “a politically motivated lawsuit brought by Ed Blum and the organization he created.” What’s at stake, she told me, isn’t just the school’s admissions policy; it’s the ability of Harvard to pursue its stated mission, to “provide a diverse living environment” to “the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society.”Blum is confident that his legal team has constructed a compelling argument. He giggled as he described its opening brief, which cites the quotas of the twenties and thirties which kept Jewish students out of Harvard, as being “like a Michener novel,” with “bones in the ground.” “America agrees with us,” Blum told me, referring to a 2016 Gallup poll, conducted in the wake of the Abigail Fisher decision, showing that about two-thirds of Americans disagreed with the Court’s ruling. “Sadly, it’s the courts that have been dragging their feet.” He drew an analogy to gay marriage. “Our nation said, ‘You know, I know a gay couple. I know a lesbian couple. And I like ’em. I’ve gone out to eat dinner with them, they’ve been over to my house. Everybody likes ’em. If they want to get married, fuck, let ’em get married.’ That was a galvanizing moment. How did that happen? The Court didn’t lead America there. America led the Court there. That’s what this movement is about.”Blum saw the Harvard case as attempting to return to “the original vision of the civil-rights movement,” he said. “The longer this goes on, the more polarizing it becomes for our nation’s fabric. Stopping it restores what the nineteen-fifties and sixties civil-rights movement was all about.” Yukong Zhao had also echoed the traditional language of civil rights, saying that affirmative action was “against Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous words, right? He said, ‘I want my children to be judged by the content of their character, not by their skin color.’ ”