"It's really tapping into fear with zero evidence."Ĭhang was a student at Berkeley, part of a cohort of students fighting against Asian American exclusion in the decade after, in the 1980s. "Predominantly white, conservative political forces are leveraging this experience of being racially marginalized among Asian Americans to say, yeah, and by the way, there's this policy that you're not benefiting from," Poon says. Still a combination of real feelings of racial marginalization paired with personal experiences of children and students not getting into a very few spots at a very elite college, helped Blum tap into a narrative that affirmative action was targeting Asian Americans that they were "less equal." "There is no evidence that there's a practice of anti-Asian discrimination." "I've been pouring over the data for years," she says - including the admissions data of Harvard before the court in one of the case that just ended affirmative action. "I have experienced it firsthand."īut according to her research, affirmative action is not the source of that racism. "Is anti-Asian racism real? Yeah, absolutely," says OiYan Poon, a professor at Colorado State University who studies race-based admissions. "A mask that white privilege can wear in order to hide itself." A mask, he says, with the veneer of very real experiences of racism by Asian Americans. "In the case of university admissions over the past decade, Asians serve as this sort of mask for white privilege," Chang says. Fisher was an innocent victim unfairly losing out to people of color. Affirmative action, the argument went, was racist against white people. Fisher claimed she didn't get into the University of Texas, Austin because of the color of her skin.
And he's been laser focused on eliminating the use of race and ethnicity in college admissions.īlum had first cast two white women, most notably Abigail Fisher, to craft lawsuits intended to end affirmative action.
Holder, the Supreme Court ruling that rolled back voting rights, making it harder for ethnic minorities to vote.
"In admission to the American elite universities, it is no secret that Asians are less equal."īut Blum was trying to change that, Cao told the group.īlum is not a lawyer but according to the American Civil Liberties Union, he has a "long history of crafting legal attacks on civil rights." "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others," Cao said, to a smattering of laughter. He was introduced by the Houston Chinese Alliance's David Cao, who prefaced Blum's presentation with a quote from George Orwell's novella Animal Farm. In 2015 Edward Blum, the conservative activist behind the push to end affirmative action, stood in front of a group of a dozen or so mostly Chinese Americans in a conference room in Houston. The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down affirmative action in college admissions, declaring race cannot be a factor and forcing institutions of higher education to look for new ways to achieve diverse student bodies. People protest outside the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on Thursday.
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