Weaponizing Deservedness: How Asian American Opponents of Affirmative Action Protect the U.S. Meritocracy Myth

• In Event: Education and the Production of "Asian American": Institutional Racial Logics, Community Negotiations, and Their Implications

Abstract

Purpose

Asian Americans have recently emerged as central figures in debates around affirmative actions. While most Asian American political advocacy groups have reaffirmed the value of affirmative action policies to Asian American communities, a smaller number have organized against affirmative action. These organizations argue that affirmative action policies discriminate against Asian Americans because they depart from “objective,” more quantitative forms of evaluating students, particularly the SAT and other standardized admissions tests. While seemingly race-neutral, these arguments pivot on racialized assumptions about deservedness and what constitutes valid forms of assessment. This paper will argue that anti-affirmative action Asian American groups rely on assumptions about the objectivity and race-neutrality of standardized testing to structure their vision of a fundamentally meritocratic education system, and thus reshapes discourse about the place of Asian Americans within affirmative action debates.

Framework

We use critical race theory (Annamma et al, 2017) and antiblackness (Dumas, 2016; C. J. Kim, 2018) along with theories of racial relationality (Molina et al, 2019) to locate the arguments of these organization within broader governing structures of white supremacy and antiblackness. We also ground our examination of these groups’ emphasis on merit, deservingness, and racial victimization in theoretical critiques of neoliberalism (Brown, 2003; Harvey, 2006; Ong, 2006) and the neoliberal purposes of education (Lipman, 2011; Hursch, 2005). Connecting these central bodies of theoretical work enables us to analyze both the raced and neoliberal dimensions of Asian American opposition to affirmative action.

Methods

This paper employs a critical discourse analysis of public content produced by three organizations—Asian American Coalition for Education, Asian American Legal Foundation, and 80-20 Educational Foundation—to consider the framing of affirmative action as a threat to U.S. meritocracy. These organizations are largely led by highly educated, upper-middle class first-generation Chinese immigrants. The organizations were selected because of their leadership in opposing affirmative action. Our dataset includes legal documents filed by the three organizations and other publicly available texts produced between January 2018 and November 2020 (e.g., newsletters and webpage content). Authors used successive rounds of thematic coding, and an iterative approach to data analysis, which included moving between data, reviewing literature, and writing analytic memos.

Conclusion & Significance

Despite educational scholarship challenging the veracity of testing and assessment metrics in U.S. schools and revealing their relationships to racialized, classed, and gender-based hierarchies of power (Au, 2013; Liu, 2011; Guinier, 2015), these organizations maintain that only tests reflect objective, unbiased, and thus race-neutral evaluations of the students most deserving of admissions to elite schools. By mobilizing ideas about the importance of “objective” admissions criteria, these organizations project faith in elite U.S. educational institutions as implicitly and necessarily meritocratic, and position affirmative action-style policies as a threat to a race-neutral U.S. democracy. While some of these ideas may have been developed before their migration to the United States (Warikoo, 2022), when mapped onto the U.S. racial landscape, these Asian Americans’ meritocracy-based framework both advances their individual social-political position and reshapes contemporary affirmative action discourse around Asian American victimization.

Authors

• Gabrielle Marisa Hernandez, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author

• Eujin Park, Stanford University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Stacey J. Lee, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Non-Presenting Author