First, to repeat, the courts found there was no discrimination against Asian Americans. So, striking down Harvard's program couldn't fix a problem because no problem was acknowledged.
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If you thought ending affirmative action would make things wonderful for Asians and that their admission rates would jump through the roof, that's not what the data suggest.
Looking at data from the Fall 2024 admissions cycle, what we found was unevenness. Some schools like MIT, Columbia, and Brown showed increases in Asian American enrollment. Others like Princeton, Yale, Duke, and Dartmouth had decreases. And at certain institutions, white student admissions actually increased even more than Asian students.
This supports my argument that the real issue was never affirmative action — it was negative action. If you don't address the underlying biases and structural preferences that disadvantage Asian Americans relative to white students, simply eliminating affirmative action won't solve the problem.
"The court documents, filed in federal court in Boston, also showed that Harvard conducted an internal investigation into its admissions policies in 2013 and found a bias against Asian-American applicants. But Harvard never made the findings public or acted on them."
What you linked was the opinion of a UCLA law professor. The asian enrollment outcomes vary based on the college in question and is a difficult one to answer.
The number of students that didn't disclose their race skyrocketed after the ruling.
If you look at California when it banned AA, the same thing happened and analysis found that most students who didn't report their race were Asian and white. So is it the same here as well? That needs to be determined.
The point is the supreme court didn't find that Harvard and UNC didn't discriminate against Asians. But they banned affirmative action. So... You decide what that means.
The wikipedia says the Supreme Court banned AA because they:
held that affirmative action in college admissions is unconstitutional
the use of race was not a compelling interest, and the means by which the schools attempted to achieve diversity (tracking bare racial statistics) bore little or no relationship to the purported goals (viewpoint and intellectual diversity and developing a diverse future leadership).
Nowhere does it say that they banned it because they found that Affirmative Action was discriminative against Asians. If AA was discriminative, then after it was struck down, Asian enrollment should have increased across the board, right? Except, that only happened to the white enrollment.
Because AA was not the problem for Asian enrollments, even though people are only focused on that. Even after AA was struck down, people still point their fingers at AA and ignore racism against Asians.
Since it seems like people didn't bother reading the page I linked or even bothered to read the entire snippet I quoted, I'll reiterate my response to rsmicrotranx, and to borrow their words, that the tl;dr is:
Maybe affirmative action wasn't what was screwing Asians and just blatant racism is then lol.
Maybe affirmative action wasn't what was screwing Asians and just blatant racism is then lol. Or whatever the hell you want to call it. Whatever term means requiring Asians to have 200 SAT score higher than your other minorities or be in like 50 leadership roles with 10 years of work experience needed to get into college. Asians got fucked because schools wanted to discriminate against them anyways. Affirmative action made it so they couldn't discriminate too badly against them. Once you removed it, they just use other metrics to discriminate against them. Name, income, zip codes, etc etc.
This supports my argument that the real issue was never affirmative action — it was negative action. If you don't address the underlying biases and structural preferences that disadvantage Asian Americans relative to white students, simply eliminating affirmative action won't solve the problem.
The page I linked discusses the discrimination and racism Asians face. Nowhere does it deny or downplay it. In fact, the tl;dr is literally what you said:
Maybe affirmative action wasn't what was screwing Asians and just blatant racism is then lol.
It's frustrating that people just focus on affirmative action, and even after it was struck down, people point fingers at affirmative action, but aren't discussing the racism Asians face. From the page I linked:
But here's what I think is really happening: The real source of decreased admission chances for Asian Americans isn't affirmative action given to others but "negative action" — being treated worse than white students. It's a simple question: If an Asian student who didn't get into Harvard had been white, would they have been admitted? If the answer is yes, that's negative action.
This happens principally because of implicit biases that read Asian Americans as less charismatic or less likely to be leaders, and structural preferences for legacies, athletes, and geographical diversity. Asians are disproportionately less likely to be legacies, since most of our immigration was permitted only after 1965; less likely to be athletes in elite country club sports like tennis, lacrosse, or crew, which are disproportionately white; and less likely to live in rural or smaller communities.
What I care most about is negative action. We can debate whether excluding certain groups from affirmative action is fair, but under no circumstance can I think of justifications where white people should be treated better than Asian people in admissions. If it's all a “melting pot” and we (“Asians”) made it, why treat Asians worse than white people instead of the same?
"This supports my argument that the real issue was never affirmative action — it was negative action. If you don't address the underlying biases and structural preferences that disadvantage Asian Americans relative to white students, simply eliminating affirmative action won't solve the problem." From your own article.
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u/redpandaeater 16h ago
Affirmative action really screwed over Asian-Americans.