Colorblind in a Colorful World

from the 1998 film Pleasantville

If you look at the Wiki page for Edward Blum (pronounced bloom), you will see that next to his name is the word “litigant” in parentheses, indicating that his defining trait is that he participates in a lot of lawsuits.

But look at all these different cases he’s been a part of:

  • George W. Bush, Governor of Texas v. Al Vera (1996)

  • Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Eric Holder, Attorney General (2009)

  • Abigail Fisher v. University of Texas (2013/2016)

  • Shelby County, Alabama v. Eric Holder, Attorney General (2013)

  • Sue Evenwel v. Greg Abbott, Governor of Texas (2016)

Notice anything curious?

For everything that he’s brought to court, his name has never appeared a single time in any of them. In fact, there was little information about this mysterious character until his current high-profile cases Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina that he was finally pulled out of obscurity because everyone wanted to know who’s really behind this effort to get affirmative action obliterated (which is very likely to happen this very summer). So just who is Edward Blum?

An investment broker (i.e. someone who helps people with lots of money make even more money), Blum noticed in 1992 that the incumbent of his congressional district, a Democrat named Craig Anthony Washington, was running for re-election unopposed, so Blum decided to run on the Republican ticket against the congressman.

Craig Washington at a televised debate in 1989, picture from Historic Images

Capturing less than one-third of the total votes, Blum was soundly defeated and subsequently claimed that he had been the victim of racial gerrymandering, that district boundary lines had been drawn in such a way that gave too much voting power to minorities (Blum’s underlying assumption is that non-white voters wouldn’t vote for him because he’s white).

Gerrymandering is indeed a dirty tactic employed all too often in politics, and The History Channel has a short but excellent video on this critical topic:

Even without knowing the politics of it all, though, you can still understand what it is if you look at these simple visual comparisons:

Because the way voters are divided into districts can have a profound effect on election outcomes, gerrymandering happens all the time, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly. Here’s a real world example of how congressional districts actually look versus what you would expect them to look like if they were drawn compactly:

See those jagged and weirdly shaped districts in the state? That’s a pretty strong sign that there’s some gerrymandering going on to tip the scales unfairly.

Upset that he lost, Blum decided to sue the state of Texas, claiming that 24 of the state’s 30 congressional districts had been racially gerrymandered. However, he didn’t actually file a lawsuit on his own behalf because Edward Blum isn’t stupid. He knows that the optics of a white guy suing on the grounds of reverse racism right after losing an election would look really, really bad. So instead, he wanted to find a very particular person who shared his grievances to be the face of this case, someone who wouldn’t be subject to immediate scrutiny.

Enter Al Vera: a high school government teacher who was Hispanic yet resented being drawn into a new congressional district that increased Hispanic voting power. Jackpot! Now Blum had a convenient patsy immune to allegations of racism that he could use as the face of the trial. Afterwards, Vera faced heavy backlash, with the Hispanic community calling him a traitor, all while Edward Blum slipped by unscathed and unnoticed.

Now, none of this is to say that Vera was in any way wrong. In fact, even though the Supreme Court ultimately decided to strike down only three districts, both Blum and Vera were absolutely right that there was some blatant gerrymandering going on. Whether they would have made a difference in the outcome of the election Blum lost in isn’t relevant because how can anyone possibly look at the shape of this district and think that this wasn’t purposely drawn in a way to include and exclude specific voters?

Outline of Texas' 30th Congressional District that was struck down in Bush v. Vera

The greater significance here is that this mild yet undeniable success would mark the beginning of Edward Blum’s quest to challenge the consideration of race in all systems of America, but never directly—instead, he would always try to find the right person (with genuine grievances) to use as an intermediary for his own machinations. As Blum himself admits:

💬 I find the plaintiff, I find the lawyer, and I put them together

And with this strategy, he would take aim at the education system, starting with elementary school. Yes, childless Edward Blum decided to take on racial considerations in elementary schools when he found a mother who was upset that her 8-year-old white daughter was denied admission to the school’s gifted program which required whites to have a minimum IQ of 130 whereas underrepresented minorities only need an IQ of 115.

First of all, IQ tests don’t even measure intelligence, so this is a ridiculous requirement anyways. All IQ tests do is measure your willingness and ability to take pointless tests much like another test that so many of you are familiar with. If you don’t believe me, here’s a notable IQ test that’s only three questions long, from a 2005 study created by an MIT professor:

Before I tell you the correct answers, I want to point out that the true solution to this is who the hell actually cares? Do you really think that being able to solve these questions means you’re smarter? Better? More gifted? Outside of school and the testing environment, when would you ever need to do something like this? There are so many more important things to a person’s intelligence than being able to do silly test questions, things like practical intelligence and social intelligence and patience and self-discipline and empathy and the list goes on.

I’m sure you’re getting impatient by now, so the correct answers are five cents, five minutes, and forty-seven days. If you feel bad that you didn’t get them all right, don’t worry because the vast majority of people who would be considered intelligent by most also missed the mark:

What’s important to note here is that if I presented you with another set of three similar questions testing the same concepts but with different numbers, you would get so many more of them correct because now that you’re familiar with the game and you’ve been prepared for this test, you know what the questions are like, what traps to avoid, and what you’re really supposed to be doing. Sound familiar? This brings me to my second and more essential point:

📢 If being prepared for a test increases your likelihood of doing better on the test, then those who have access to test prep will have a greater chance of succeeding than those who do not.

If this were not the case, then there would not be so many students flocking to SAT test prep centers. We all know that anyone who goes through test prep is significantly more likely to improve their performance. But what exactly does it take to get test prep?

Well for starters, money, obviously. And usually, the prep schools that offer the most resources and personalized attention will command the highest tuition rates. So already you can see that higher test scores (and subsequently, “intelligence” as many would foolishly be inclined to think) favor families who have the money for it. And I don’t even just mean the class fees, either—I’m talking about the money to just live in the kind of big city that would have these kinds educational and extracurricular opportunities to begin with because of course a small town or rural area isn’t going to have nearly as many opportunities.

Notice any similarities between these two maps?

And with money comes, of course, time: those who have short commutes because they live closer to educational facilities and/or have a personal driver, as opposed to those who need to walk and take the bus, which could waste an extra hour roundtrip; students who have all their meals taken care of because they can afford to keep paying those egregiously exorbitant Uber Eats prices; and even adolescents who don’t need to work some sort of part-time job or help with their parents’ work or take care of some sibling or other family member.

See how many factors influence your performance on a test that purports to measure your intelligence? For minorities in America who have been historically denied the ability to accrue the wealth and advantages that the privileged enjoy, the odds are stacked even more against them when they have to face not only systemic inequities but also people’s implicit biases.

This isn’t to say that Asians don’t face prejudice, discrimination, or implicit biases as well, but in the context of academia, those biases can work in our favor:

Asian American precollege students benefit from “stereotype promise”: Teachers assume they are smart, hard-working, high-achieving and morally deserving, which can boost the grades of academically mediocre Asian American students.

We found that teachers’ positive biases of Asian American students sometimes led them to place even low-achieving Asian American students on competitive academic tracks, including honors and Advanced Placement classes that can be gateways to competitive four-year universities. Once there, we found that these students took their schoolwork more seriously, spent more time on their homework than they had previously and were placed in classes with high-achieving peers, thereby boosting their academic outcomes.

None of the white, Black or Hispanic adults we interviewed were treated similarly. Hispanic students in particular experience the opposite effect in school, as my work with Estela Diaz shows. The Hispanic students we studied received little encouragement from their teachers to attend college and even less information about how to get in.

Meritocracy as equality will remain a myth so long as basic needs and educational opportunities are not provided to everyone fairly. This is hardly a novel or revolutionary concept, but far too many people, misty-eyed for a bygone era they didn’t even live through, are firmly convinced that the days of China’s Imperial Examinations (科舉) ushered in some magical utopia where the lowest of plebeians could, through sheer diligence and perseverance, compete on the same level as the wealthiest and most powerful members of society on this ancient standardized test to ascend to the highest echelons of status and power.

"Examination Hall, Peking, China" from Royal Photograph Gallery

Here are what a couple of scholarly texts have to say on the matter (emphasis mine):

📘 As their children grew, large families who could afford to do so employed house teachers or sent their sons to family or clan schools. Some of these family schools developed into academies offering such attractive courses as mathematics and law. Other students continued their education in local government schools, usually located in Confucian temples. The goal of all this effort was to raise sons who could pass the prefectural and perhaps even the metropolitan examinations and obtain an official position, which would bring honor and wealth to the whole family.

— The Age of Confucian Rule by Dieter Kuhn pp. 125-126, Harvard University Press (referencing pp. 94-95 of 『宋代文化史』 by 姚瀛艇)

The 1604 Optimus Drunk in an Examination Cell from A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China by Benjamin A. Elman (pp. 178, University of California Press), original image source: 明狀元圖考 (Illustrated survey of optimi during the Ming dynasty) by 顧鼎臣 and 顧組訓

And, more to the point (okay yeah I know it’s a long wall of text but I swear it’s sufficiently interesting to warrant reading because you never read about this kind of stuff in school):

📙 But for a man to continue his studies without interruption for such a long period required a degree of economic support that was simply not available to poor people. Furthermore, although no examination fees were charged, taking the examinations was nevertheless a very expensive process. Aside from the travel and lodging expenses incurred during a trip to the provincial capital, everyone had to pay for thank-you gifts for the examiners and tips for the staff, and could not avoid sharing the costs of banquets and other kinds of entertainment. The expenses of those who went on to take the metropolitan and palace examinations became very high indeed. During the late Ming period, in the sixteenth century, it is said that these costs came to around six hundred ounces of silver. Converted into modern currency on the basis of the amount of rice that money would have bought, this sum today would enable a couple to take a trip around the world in comfort.

Thus, although there were no examination fees, a poor man, even if he had some travel funds, could not attain what for him was an inaccessible peak. However, such inequity is hardly peculiar to the Chinese Examination system. Perfect justice is impossible at all times by the very nature of the world; and even today, when the principle of equality in educational opportunity is accepted, there is no country in the world where everyone actually receives the same education. In our opinion today, participation in the Chinese examination system was too expensive for the candidate, when the whole burden of obtaining an education rested on the individual and his family, while the government did not concern itself about operating a school system to offer education for everyone.

— China's Examination Hell by Ichisada Miyazaki (tr. Conrad Schirokauer) pp. 118-119, Yale University Press

All of this should sound all too familiar today: families spending vast amounts of resources on tutors and prep schools to boost their children’s chances of succeeding on an all-important examination and of obtaining admission to a lofty position that cements their prestige. Any parents who actually delude themselves into thinking that educational outcomes aren’t influenced by wealth are more than welcome to put their money where their mouth is by abstaining from enrolling their children in any sort of specialized programs or prep classes outside of school. Have fun with that.

A meritocracy that rewards the most educated is not a system of fairness so long as access to educational opportunities themselves remains inherently unfair. For all the problems a meritocracy purports to solve, it creates just as many if not more.

With so much on the line, it’s only natural that people would resort to less than stellar behavior. If everything that you thought you wanted, everything that seemed to be worth having in the world—a financially secure future, renown and stature, honor to you and your family, the love of your parents, the relief that all the years of tears and sweat that you invested finally aid off—it can be hard to resist temptation. I’m not just talking about today. This was already a thing long ago, when bribes, secret codes, and nepotism ran rampant during the Imperial Examinations.

Imperial Examination Cheat Sheet Socks displayed at the 江南贡院 (Jiangnan Imperial Examination Museum in Nanjing), photo taken by Museum Fatigue

Cheating methods back then were pretty formidable.

Because when financial success, self-worth, life purpose, your family’s love—seemingly everything you want and worth having in the world—hinges upon your academic results, you’re tempted to do whatever it takes to win, no matter how unethical, because the alternative can result in dire consequences.

So many Asians are fueled by these hopeful aspirations but in equal—perhaps even greater—measure they are plagued by fears of failure. Edward Blum knows this all too well, and these fervent emotions are exactly what he seeks to capitalize upon. This isn’t some crazy conspiracy: he literally admits to this himself:

EDWARD BLUM: “I, um, I... needed plaintiffs. I needed Asian plaintiffs, and finding plaintiffs to challenge the Ivy League admissions policies—-Harvard in particular—is not an easy thing to do, so I started, uh, designed three websites: harvardnotfair.org, uncnotfair.org, and uwnotfair.org”

Yes, that’s right, he “needed Asian plaintiffs.” Not because he cares about Asians. Not because he cares about students. He straight up just wants some convenient faces for his lawsuit. And it doesn’t get much more blatant when you look at those three websites he started/designed:

I kid you not, this is literally the first thing you see when you go to these sites lmao GEE I WONDER WHO HE COULD POSSIBLY BE TARGETING?????

Let’s not be coy here. It’s obvious that what the message says, “It may be because you’re the wrong race of ethnicity” what it really says is, “It may be because you’re Asian.”

Funnily enough, he wasn’t able to file a lawsuit against the University of Wisconsin-Madison because no suitable candidates ever appeared. Perhaps the Asian he used for that website’s front page looked way too happy. That’s not an Asian who was denied admission; she definitely looks like she’s on her way to a promising career. C’mon, Blum, give us a more miserable looking Asian please. Pluck our tender, pitiful Asian heartstrings harder, please.

Ahh yeah, there we go, now that’s the despondent expression of an Asian who was rejected from her desired schools, I guess for being Asian.

In classic Edward Blum style, the About page makes zero mention of him or anyone specific involved in this effort. Instead, he hides behind the innocent-sounding “Students for Fair Representation.” And he’s sure as hell not going to mention that the reason he’s able to represent their clients in court for free is because he’s being bankrolled by a dark money fund (the identities of donors are kept a secret) called Donors Trust which has funded several extremist efforts, including anti-climate change propaganda and claims of election fraud.

All of this is to say that Edward Blum is not the champion of Asian rights or equality, and this lawsuit is just another battle in his crusade to erode whatever progress has been made since the Civil Rights movement began seventy years ago.

However, none of this is to say that Asians never face harsher requirements to get into certain schools. Blum may have an insidious agenda but some universities could also be discriminating against Asian applicants. It’s important to recognize that both things can be true!

In fact, when Edward Blum—err, sorry, Students for Fair Admissions—sued Harvard for the same thing all the way back in 2014 (yes, that’s how long they’ve been at this for), Harvard decided to actually look into the issue because of all the flak and bad publicity they were getting. Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Research (OIR) investigated nearly 200,000 applicants worth of data and found some undeniable discrepancies which SFFA is now very cleverly using as evidence of discrimination against Asians in the current Supreme Court case.

This chart shows what percentage of applicants would have been admitted to Harvard based on the selected criteria. For example, in the leftmost bar, if admissions were decided solely based on academics, then 43% of admitted students would have been Asian. Before you get any ideas about how this is what truly fair admissions should be, pause and take a brief moment to actually exercise some critical thinking as to why admitting people purely on academic performance is a very bad and very stupid idea.

There’s a few things stand out here:

  • Asians, despite having 43% 31%, and 26% admission rates in the first three criteria models, ultimately ended up well below all of those with only 19%

  • African-Americans and Hispanics, despite having the lowest percentages in the first three models, ultimately ended up with admission rates well above what would be expected

  • The actual admittance rates are essentially just Harvard’s existing student demographics

Before you start lighting the torches and grabbing your pitchforks, we must take a step back and put the current situation in context.

You might be surprised to know that Harvard discriminated against Jewish applicants in the past. This isn’t a Harvard thing or even an Ivy League thing: antisemitism was widespread and considered pretty normal in America just a few decades ago (even today, those sentiments persist around the world). One reason is the usual xenophobic bigotry many have for immigrants in general (they’re shady, dirty, stealing our jobs, etc.) and another, bigger reason is that the Bible basically says the Jews had Jesus put to death, so Americans, who are predominantly some flavor of Christianity, would always hold a grudge.

Antisemitic anti-immigrant cartoon (1890)

As UC Berkeley Professor of Sociology and Harvard Ph.D. Jerome Karabel writes in his book The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton:

[Harvard] President A. Lawrence Lowell was no friend of the Jews. But even had he been free of anti-Semitic sentiments, he would have had reason to worry about the consequences for Harvard of its growing Jewish presence on campus. For at a certain point, the arrival of the Jews would mean the departure of the sons of the Protestant upper and upper-middle classes whom Harvard most wished to enroll. Far more than an expression of cultural prejudice, Harvard’s preference for these young men — which it shared with all the other leading private colleges — was quite rational from an organization perspective. After all, who but the sons of the Protestant elite would provide the “paying customers,” the gentlemanly atmosphere, and the future leaders in business and government — not to mention generous donors — on which Harvard’s claims to preeminence ultimately rested?

Basically, the more Jewish students that schools admitted, the more white, wealthy Christians would leave or look for other schools instead. This wasn’t just some misplaced fear; it was very much a real thing:

For anyone who doubted the existence of a “tipping point” of Jewish enrollment beyond which the WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant] elite would abandon a college, Columbia served as a sobering example. Located at the epicenter of European immigration, Columbia could hardly ignore New York's vast Jewish population, which dwarfed that of any other American city.

[...]

By 1914, the "Jewish problem" was so great at Columbia that its dean, Frederick Keppel, openly acknowledged the widespread perception that the large number of immigrants had made it ‘socially uninviting to students who come from homes of refinement.’”

[...]

To Lowell, Harvard's rising Jewish enrollment posed a threat to these crucial relationships, making it imperative to bring the ‘Jewish invasion’ under control.

[...]

Lowell explained that his main concern was that the sheer number of Jews would cause the flight of the protestant elite and thereby ‘ruin the college’:

The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate, not because the Jews it admits are of bad character, but because they drive away the Gentiles [non-Jews], and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also. This happened to a friend of mine with a school in New York, who thought, on principle, that he ought to admit Jews, but who discovered in a few years that he had no school at all. A similar thing has happened in the case of Columbia College; and in all these cases it is not because Jews of bad character of come; but the result followed from the coming in large numbers of Jews of any kind, save those few who mingle readily with the rest of the undergraduate body. Therefore any tests of character in the ordinary sense of the word afford no remedy.

Lowell’s personal preference was ‘to state frankly that we thought we could do the most good by not admitting more than a certain proportion of men in a group that did not intermingle with the rest, and give our reasons for it to he public.’ But he also anticipated quite presciently that ‘the Faculty, and probably the Governing Boards, would prefer to make a rule whose motive was less obvious on its face, by giving to the Committee on Admission authority to refuse admittance to person who possessed qualities described with more or less distinctness and believed to be characteristic of the Jews. For Lowell, however, it was crucial that "the Faculty should understand perfectly well what they are doing, and that any vote passed with the intent of limiting the number of Jews should not be supposed by anyone to be passed as a measurement of character really applicable to Jews and Gentiles alike.’

Thus, putting their plan into motion, Harvard would then issue this statement in 1926:

The whole record does include evidences of the candidate’s character, personality, and promise .... Race is a part of the record. It is by no means the whole record and no man will be kept out on grounds of race. [I]f there should result in fact any substantial change in the proportion of groups in the College following application of [this] test, this will be due, not to race discrimination or any quota system, but to the failure of particular individuals to possess as individuals those evidence of character, personality and promise which weighed with other evidences render them more fit than other individuals to receive all that Harvard has to offer. Of course there will be criticisms. It will be said that Harvard is discriminating on grounds of race. That will not be true.

It’s important to see the parallels here: the school deems there to be too much of one demographic that is upsetting their carefully curated school culture, so measures must be taken to curb that demographic. However, they can’t just blatantly say “no more Jews/Asians” because that would be too blatant; rather, they go about it by allowing an admissions committee to filter out these people through more underhanded means. It’s an impressively effective strategy, honestly, leaving it to the subjective judgment of admissions officers so that you can’t pinpoint anything specifically related to race.

It’s even more shady when you see that it’s not the interviewers giving low scores but actually the Admissions Office at the top that doesn’t have to explain or justify anything to anyone:

⚠️ Importantly, Harvard tracks two different personal ratings: one assigned by the Admissions Office and another by alumni interviewers. When it comes to the score assigned by the Admissions Office, Asian-American applicants are assigned the lowest scores of any racial group. [...] By contrast, alumni interviewers (who actually meet the applicants) rate Asian Americans, on average, at the top with respect to personal ratings—comparable to white applicants and higher than African-American and Hispanic applicants.

This glaring discrepancy has not gone unnoticed internally, as this e-mail written by an alumni interviewer to Harvard shows:

“[M]y feelings towards Harvard have been slowly changing over the years. I’ve been interviewing for the college for almost 10 years now, and in those ten years, none of the Asian American students I’ve interviewed has been accepted (or even wait-listed). I’m 0 for about 20. This is the case despite the fact that their resumes are unbelievable and often superior to those of the non-Asian students I’ve interviewed who are admitted. I’ve also attended interviewer meetings where Asian candidates are summarily dismissed as “typical” or “not doing anything anyone else isn’t doing” while white or other minority candidates with similar resumes are lauded.”

Pretty sad. So how does Harvard respond to this? Take a look at this exchange between one of the Supreme Court justices and Harvard’s lawyer Seth Waxman:

JUSTICE ALITO: -- Mr. Waxman, let me stop you there because you referred to the personal score, and that's a score that Harvard gives based on character traits such as integrity, courage, kindness, and empathy, but the record shows that Asian student applicants get the lowest personal scores of any other group.

What accounts for that? Is it -- it has to be one of two things. It has to be that they really do lack integrity, courage, kindness, and empathy to the same degree as students of other races, or there has to be something wrong with this personal score.

MR. WAXMAN: That's -- that is -- I mean, I want to get to what the evidence was there, but that -- that syllogism, with all due respect, is wrong. There was, for example, a study that was done in 1983 that looked at why it was that female applicants to graduate school at the University of --

JUSTICE ALITO: No, just address this.

MR. WAXMAN: Okay. Here's --

JUSTICE ALITO: The personal score that's given to Asian applicants to Harvard, why do they -- why are they given a lower score than any other group?

MR. WAXMAN: Okay. So the answer to why they -- as a group, why there is a slight numerical disparity with respect to the personal rating of Asian Americans, but -- and also a slight numerical disparity to the advantage of Asian Americans with respect to the extracurricular rating and the academic rating was the answer that their expert gave with respect to the latter two, which is that the only way that you can -- the only model that can be created to figure out what was going into the personal rating couldn't look at almost anything that admissions officers look at in those ratings.

It can't -- there's no way that it could model what the guidance counselor letters said, what the teacher letters said, what the essays said, what the interviewers' letters said. In other words, what they --

JUSTICE ALITO: Well, I thought the interviewers did not rate the applicants lower than other -- than other applicants based on race.

MR. WAXMAN: There --

JUSTICE ALITO: There was not the disparity in what was done by -- what was said by the interviewers.

MR. WAXMAN: The -- with respect to the alumni interviewers --

JUSTICE ALITO: The alumni interviewers.

MR. WAXMAN: -- based on -- based on the subset that was included here, that their subset, by the way, excluded all ALDC applicants, that is, even though they acknowledged that there was not only no evidence of discrimination against Asian American ALDCs, but they did better, they eliminated from their -- their model applicants that represent on average 30 percent of the admitted class --

JUSTICE ALITO: I -- I -- I still -- putting aside the teacher recommendations or guidance counselor recommendations, which I'll come to, I still haven't heard any explanation for the disparity between the personal scores that are given to Asians. They rank below whites. They rank way below Hispanics and really way below African Americans.

What -- and you're talking about hundreds and hundreds of applicants, maybe thousands. What is the explanation for that?

MR. WAXMAN: So the explanation that was -- I can't do better than the findings of fact in the trial court as affirmed. And I -- and I -- but I want to make two points very clear with respect to your question.

We -- all of this evidence was -- all of this was on display and in front of the trial court for, this Asian American part of it, for well more than a week, maybe two weeks.

The district court found, considering all of the evidence, that there is "no credible evidence that corroborates the improper discrimination suggested by SFFA's interpretation of the personal rating," page 264.

JUSTICE ALITO: Well, all right. I'll try one more time. The district court found "a statistically significant and negative relationship between Asian American identity and the personal rating assigned by Harvard admissions officers."

MR. WAXMAN: That's correct. And what she said is the record will not allow a full explanation of that because, if the -- the -- this -- this -- there is -- there was no evidence with respect to what teachers said, what guidance counselors said, what these students wrote -- wrote about.

But what we can say with respect to the allegation of discrimination in this case, which was the -- the -- the definition of discrimination that was at issue in Bakke and Grutter and Fisher and which their expert, which their lawyer got up at opening statement and said: When we talk about discrimination in this case, we're talking about discrimination in admissions outcomes.

And here again, the district court found and the court of appeals also concluded that there was no evidence of discrimination in admissions outcomes against Asian Americans
--

JUSTICE ALITO: If you -- if you --

MR. WAXMAN: -- whatever you think about the personal rating, which is, after all, simply a number that --

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Justice -- Justice Alito would like to ask a question.

MR. WAXMAN: I'm sorry.

JUSTICE ALITO: Go ahead.

MR. WAXMAN: I'm not trying to filibuster you.

JUSTICE ALITO: Finish your -- finish your sentence.

MR. WAXMAN: Okay.

JUSTICE ALITO: Then I will ask one more question on this.

MR. WAXMAN: I just -- I -- I want to make one other thing clear to the extent that it's not clear from the record. The personal rating, like the academic rating and the extracurricular rating and the athletic rating, is a number that is put down by a "first reader." That is, the file comes in, it's not usually complete, and just as a matter of triage, one of the 40 admissions officers goes through and gives these numerical numbers.

It is -- the testimony was it is not considered in any way once the subcommittees and committees meet. It "fades into the background." It is not the basis of admissions decisions.

And so not only did the court find as fact that those -- that that slight disparity was not evidence of discrimination even in the personal rating, it had no effect with respect to outcomes.

JUSTICE ALITO: It makes no difference whatsoever?

MR. WAXMAN: It's --

JUSTICE ALITO: It doesn't affect --

MR. WAXMAN: -- it's not that it makes no difference whatsoever. Look at what the expert testimony was, and I realize we're --

JUSTICE ALITO: Does it make a difference or doesn't it make a difference?

MR. WAXMAN: It doesn't make a statistical difference in admissions outcomes --

JUSTICE ALITO: Then why do you do it?

MR. WAXMAN: -- as both courts found.

JUSTICE ALITO: Then why do you do it?

MR. WAXMAN: We said -- I mean, as --

JUSTICE ALITO: If it doesn't matter, why do you do it?

MR. WAXMAN: We do it as a matter of triage. Right now, Harvard is getting -- last year got 61,000 applications for 1600 slots. And it is an entirely rational way of figuring out where -- how you're going to allocate your attention to ask an admissions officer, as the file is being developed, just go through in a very rough way and rate a particular application based on what you can see on these four metrics.

The fact that Asian Americans got a marginally, on average, a marginally lower personal rating score is no more evidence of discrimination against them than the fact that they got a marginally higher rating than any data can show on academics and extracurriculars. It doesn't mean that they're either smarter or people think they're smarter.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Thank you, counsel.

Wait wait wait, did you catch that? According to Harvard’s lawyer, there’s no evidence of discrimination when you look at admissions outcomes which factor in ALDCs.

ALDC are applicants who receive special preferences for being at least one of the following:

  • recruited athletes

  • legacies (at least one family member—ideally a parent—who attended the school)

  • Dean’s interest list (family donated a significant amount of money to the school)

  • children of faculty and staff

Now, if all these people who want to get rid of affirmative action say it’s in the name of fairness and equality, does it sound fair and equal that people who have family in Harvard or who can donate oodles of dollars will have a significantly higher chance of getting in? And when I’m talking about oodles of dollars, I don’t just mean thousands or even hundreds of thousands:

Trial Exhibit P106 of SFFA v. Harvard
Harvard trying to determine how much preference to give a kid who’s affiliated with but not blood-related to someone who gave millions of dollars to Harvard. Notice how a major factor they take into account is not just how much was donated but how likely they will receive even more donations in the future from these rich people.

There’s a word for this: nepotism

Nobody likes it when company bosses promote or hire their own family members into high positions because everyone understands that’s flagrant favoritism. So why do we tolerate this in universities where we expect students to be judged by how hard they worked?

I’ll give athletes a break because they do work hard, and it’s not realistic to expect them to have amazing academics when they devote all their time and energy to performing at the top level. Of course, it is worth noting that according to this study on ALDC preferences in Harvard, contrary to what you might have expected in terms of who benefits most from athletic preferences, “Removing preferences for recruited athletes leaves the number of African Americans essentially unchanged, with increases for Hispanic and Asian American admits” because “recruited athletes at Harvard tend to be advantaged and disproportionately white in part because of the varsity sports Harvard offers, including fencing, sailing, and skiing. These sports are expensive to play and are only offered at elite public and private secondary schools.”

But sure, let’s look at the impact of just LDC (no athletes) on admissions:

Well, well, well. Look at who really gets to bypass the meritocratic ideals of education. The whole study is very much worth reading, but here’s the main findings:

To further put the size of LDC preferences from our preferred model in context, consider a white typical applicant with a baseline probability of admission of 10%. If this applicant were switched to a legacy, holding all other characteristics fixed, the admission probability would rise to 49%. Switching the same typical applicant to a double legacy or dean’s list member would increase the likelihood of admission to 65% and 75%, respectively. Yet, shifting this typical applicant into the disadvantaged category only increases the admission probability to 36%. Similar calculations of the impact of LDC preferences can be executed for other racial groups. While the broad patterns are the same, the LDC bumps for African American and Hispanic applicants are more muted.

The relative importance of other applicant characteristics, such as academics, matter differently for LDC applicants. For example, no white, Hispanic, or Asian American typical applicants were admitted in the bottom decile of academic preparation as measured by SAT and high school GPA. Yet, white LDC applicants in the bottom decile of academic preparation were admitted at a higher rate (6.35%) than the average across all typical applicants (5.46%).

So white applicants who are related to someone affiliated with Harvard are 5 times as likelier to get in, and that jumps to 6.5-7.6 times likelier if they’re related to two people affiliated with Harvard or if their families donated money. Even more shocking, white LDC applicants in the lowest tier of academic performance had a higher chance of getting in the average applicant with far better academics. And don’t forget: white students make up 40+% of the student body while other non-Asian minorities make up no more than 10%.

Affirmative action is and has never been the problem. Look at who’s really benefitting from special treatment in this messed up system!

The study concludes with:


📌 Overall, our results show that only one-quarter of white ALDC admits would have been admitted if they had been treated as a typical applicant. Each of the ALDC preferences primarily benefit white students. Over 43% of white admits are ALDC, compared to less than 16% of admits for each of the other three major racial/ethnic groups. Indeed, due in part to the nature of the sports that Harvard offers, recruited athletes alone make up over 16% of white admits. We show that removing legacy and athlete preferences shifts admissions away from white applicants with other racial groups either increasing or staying the same. Also, since ALDC applicants tend to come from privileged backgrounds, it is likely that fewer high-income applicants would be admitted. Harvard—and other institutions that use holistic admissions criteria—may benefit from employing ALDC preferences, both through donations and enhanced amenities for its student body. But given that the beneficiaries of these practices come from quite advantaged backgrounds, and the further evidence that these preferences appear to be increasing over time, exposing the scope of these practices may lead them to be reevaluated.


Countless media outlets have reported on this, even since long ago, but somehow people still don’t get the message or would just rather pick on minorities they don’t like. All this nonsense about affirmative action being the worst thing in the world blinds people to the reality of who’s watching and laughing at this spectacle from a distance.

[W]hite students are rendered third-party bystanders to race-conscious admissions policies which could, in turn, help bolster a belief already held by many white conservatives that they’re “victims” of an unjust system that artificially awards extra “points” to certain communities of color while taking away those same “points” from them. And focusing on affirmative action ignores the many practices of systemic favoritism in place — like legacy admissions and athlete recruitment — that disproportionately help white students. Eliminating those would likely boost the enrollment numbers of students of color

This isn’t a coincidence, nor is this the first time that minorities have been pitted against each other to keep the dominant demographic at the top. The history of Asian-Americans being used as a wedge against other minorities is a long one that remains just as relevant today.

Washington, United States. 31st Oct, 2022. A demonstrator holds placard reading “I am not a wedge” during a rally at the Supreme Court in favor of the use of affirmative action in college admissions on the day that arguments are being heard on cases related to affirmative action in college admissions.


Compare what was written in this Seattle Times column from 1970…


…to this piece written in 2017:

Asian-Americans, like Jews, are indeed a problem for the “social-justice” brigade. I mean, how on earth have both ethnic groups done so well in such a profoundly racist society? How have bigoted white people allowed these minorities to do so well — even to the point of earning more, on average, than whites? Asian-Americans, for example, have been subject to some of the most brutal oppression, racial hatred, and open discrimination over the years. In the late 19th century, as most worked in hard labor, they were subject to lynchings and violence across the American West and laws that prohibited their employment. They were banned from immigrating to the U.S. in 1924. Japanese-American citizens were forced into internment camps during the Second World War, and subjected to hideous, racist propaganda after Pearl Harbor. Yet, today, Asian-Americans are among the most prosperous, well-educated, and successful ethnic groups in America. What gives? It couldn’t possibly be that they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard work, and thereby turned false, negative stereotypes into true, positive ones, could it? It couldn’t be that all whites are not racists or that the American dream still lives?

What Dr. Joseph T. Okimoto, a member of Seattle’s Asian Coalition for Equality, wrote back then in response to Reddin’s column strikes at the heart of the matter as powerfully in 1970 as it does today in 2023:

On the surface the column appears benign. In fact, it might appear to be flattering to the "colorful" ethnic community. But beneath the surface, and not too deep at that, lie certain social attitudes which betrays a long history of discrimination against Orientals.

[…]

While it might have been fashionable among patronizing whites to heap praise upon a "colorful" ethnic group a decade ago, the present-day usage of such phrase is entirely inappropriate and insulting to those who feel the stereotypes are no longer true.

Characteristics such as industrious, polite, well-behaved, friendly, docile, etc., are traits which evolved out of a century of racism against the yellow man in a society which regarded him as inferior. These stereotypes, therefore, are associated with a position of inferiority imposed upon the Oriental by a racist society and are continually used by the society to keep the Oriental in his inferior place.

Whether the stereotypes are positive or negative, as long as they are associated with a less than equal status, they are a great disservice to the ethnic community.

[...]

There is a noticeable lack of Asian-Americans in the economic mainstream as evidenced in the ethnic makeup of the executive positions of large corporations such as Boeing, the banks, the department stores and other commercial interests.

[Another example of this would be how some people think racism doesn't exist because many sports are dominated by black athletes making millions. But how many of those sports teams are actually owned by nonwhites? And how many nonwhites are actually at the top running these sport associations?]

The above phenomena represent a racially based exclusionary policy which deprives the Asian-American (and other nonwhites) of true first-class citizenship.

[...]

The implication of the sentence, “There's probably a valuable lesson here, someplace,” [or in the case of the 2017 piece, "It couldn’t possibly be that they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard work, and thereby turned false, negative stereotypes into true, positive ones, could it?"] is quite clear. It is an attempt to suggest that other minority groups should somehow follow the Asian-American example.

It is my belief that our racist society has managed to keep minority groups in social inferior positions, in part, by playing one group against another.

A southern white once said to me: "Why can't the Negro be like you people?" The message was clearly a put down of the black man by a racist who used my ethnic group to discredit the blacks, a manipulative maneuver which any decent man would resent with vehemence!

What this attitude ignores is the great sociological difference between minority groups as well as the severity of racism direct against them. Rather than call attention to the qualities of the minority group, it would do well for our society to examine its continuing racist practices against all nonwhite groups.

[...]

What minority groups see in our society are white institutions, such as the press, which abound with racist policies and attitudes. Changes within these institutions are necessary before meaningful resolution of the racial crisis can occur.


Or, as Chinese-American writer Frank Chin said so succinctly in 1974, “Whites love us because we’re not black.”

meme I made of The Bullshit Weaver by Denis Lushch

Regardless of whether affirmative action is repealed when the Supreme Court makes its decision at the end of June, many schools will always find ways to ensure that they can maintain a certain level of campus diversity because diversity is proven to be essential.

Writing in support for race-conscious policies, the American Psychological Association—the largest organization of psychologists in the world—concludes unequivocally:

The educational benefits that flow from campus diversity also have lasting impacts that benefit students and society long after graduation. Sufficiently diverse campuses promote the development of a student’s cultural competence and “pluralistic orientation: the ability to see multiple perspectives; the ability to work cooperatively with diverse people; the ability to discuss and negotiate controversial issues; openness to having one’s views challenged; and tolerance of others with different beliefs.” These skills are essential for citizens to engage productively in a flourishing democracy. They are also necessary, as this Court noted in Grutter, for businesses to remain competitive “in today’s increasingly global marketplace.”

Social scientists have observed societal benefits in other areas too—underscoring the widespread, positive impact of diverse educational experiences. Doctors who have studied in diverse medical schools and work on diverse teams provide better medical care, especially for racial and ethnic minority patients. Police officers who have trained and served in diverse communities are less likely to use unnecessary or excessive force. And members of the armed forces who have trained in diverse teams are more likely to build bonds with racial and ethnic minority colleagues—directly impacting national security interests.

That is, the educational benefits that flow from diverse campuses are by no means limited to the lecture hall or dorm room. They continue to enrich our communities, enliven our constitutional values, and strengthen the Nation.

When we empower one minority, we empower all minorities, but we’ll always end up victims if we never focus on the true sources of unfairness and injustice. Abolishing affirmative action isn’t going to advance any sort of equality, but maintaining affirmative action isn’t a real solution, either. True equality begins with investing in places that lack access to essentials: healthy food, stable housing, quality healthcare, and a computer with internet access. These aren’t luxuries; they’re basic necessities that must be met before it’s possible to even care about anything else.

Public school districts are also sorely in need of proper funding to ensure that students and teachers have access to modern facilities, updated learning materials, and enrichment resources like hands-on workshops and computer labs.

It’s a lot of work to be sure, but it’s far from an impossible task, and it’s what every society should strive towards. Only by coming together to put our self-interests aside by exercising our privileges to aid those less fortunate than us can we establish the kind of fairness and equality we seek in our educational institutions and in our lives. 🪶

Shangwuen LiuComment