DON’T DOWNPLAY ISSUE OF ANTI-ASIAN BIAS IN HIGHER ED

Even after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in which Asian Americans were the plaintiffs in the case of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Asians continue to remain a non-sequitur in the ongoing debate on race and equity.

In a recent column in The New Yorker headlined “Why the Champions of Affirmative Action Had to Leave Asian Americans Behind,” writer Jay Kaspian Kang sums it up perfectly. He writes: “Asian Americans, the group whom the suit was supposedly about, have been oddly absent from the conversations that have followed the ruling. The repetitiveness of the affirmative-action debate has come about, in large part, because both the courts and the media have mostly ignored the Asian American plaintiffs and chosen, instead, to relitigate the same arguments about merit, White supremacy and privilege. During the five years I spent covering this case, the commentators defending affirmative action almost never disproved the central claim that discrimination was taking place against Asian Americans, even as they dismissed the plaintiffs as pawns who had been duped by a conservative legal activist.”

The plaintiffs have indeed been duped, transformed into “model minority minions” tasked with protecting the status quo of White privilege and advancing the conservative MAGA agenda. However, by that same token, social justice warriors in favor of affirmative action are no less accountable for pushing the model minority forward in their messaging and putting the spotlight on Asians. Instead, Asians are portrayed as the culprit instead of the hero, problematic to the cause, shamed and demonized by a label coined by a sociologist in 1966, a label we never asked for.

The Asian race became synonymous with being a wedge to achieving racial harmony and a weapon used to gaslight other minorities. Affirmative action advocacy shifted its focus to scapegoating Asians rather than building solidarity with Asians. Despite believing in affirmative action, it is difficult for Asians to be complicit in this game of tug-of-war as someone else’s mascot or someone else’s cause. It’s painful to swallow this double-edged sword.

Social justice doesn’t begin or end with a stamp of approval from the admissions office, even from Harvard. This case failed to articulate the crux of the issue, about how model minority stereotypes may impact policy and decision making. Decades of Asian student activism from coast to coast clearly demonstrates this widespread problem of anti-Asian bias creating an environment of exclusion and invisibility in higher education for Asian students.

Cathy Park Hong, Pulitzer Prize finalist for her book “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning,” writes, “The indignity of being Asian in this country has been underreported. We have been cowed by the lie that we have it good.”

In 1995, at Northwestern University, a student hunger strike that lasted 24 days pressured the university to establish an Asian American Studies Program, which resulted in raising awareness and support from students from campuses all across the country. In 1999, the Asian American Studies Program was established as a minor, and as a major in 2016.

Here in San Diego, Sparky Mitra, opinion editor at the UCSD Guardian and Tommy Jung, an alumnus of UC San Diego, describe the never-ending battle with administration since 1984 involving Asian student activism. They wrote, “It would take 36 years of arduous advocacy before the Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies minor program would be officially established at UCSD.” The Asian Pacific Islander Middle Eastern Desi American (APIMEDA) Programs and Services would not exist today without faculty, staff and student participation. But the struggle continues as APIMEDA operates on a shoestring budget with one full-time associate director, one full-time program coordinator, three undergraduate assistants, and one graduate assistant and no designated center to support 13,000 students.

Since 2018, there has been a glimmer of hope with federal level support to address the lack of visibility and resources Asian students experience at their college campuses, known as the Federal Department of Education AANAPISI grant for Asian Americans and Native American Pacific Islanders and low-income individuals.

In 2021, San Diego Mesa College became the first institution in San Diego to receive both AANAPISI designation and funding to create programs that will serve Mesa’s 16 percent Asian Pacific Islander student population. But the ultimate test of empowerment is whether Asian American studies will join the ranks of other full-fledged institutionalized ethnic studies departments at Mesa, a familiar uphill battle historically faced by students and faculty in colleges across America.

At the end of the day, whether one is for or against affirmative action, we all share the same end goal of wanting justice. The plaintiffs in the Supreme Court cases believe meritocracy is the solution. Others disagree. In the meantime, Asian Americans continue fighting for visibility and inclusion from the classroom to the courtroom, long after the day they receive their college acceptance letters.

Asian Americans continue fighting for visibility and inclusion from the classroom to the courtroom, long after the day they receive their college acceptance letters. This has been mostly ignored.