Reflections on Asian Americans and Affirmative Action Following SFFA v. Harvard

• In Event: Race and Diversity in Higher Education after Trump 2.0: Perspective from Four Books

Abstract

Objectives: What can the Asian American community divide over affirmative action tell us about the rollback of civil rights under Trump 2.0? I will discuss findings from [title redacted] that address Asian American conflicts over affirmative action and notions of educational equity, including how white-identified political operatives manipulated community grievances over anti-Asian racism in legal attacks to end race-conscious admissions. I argue that Trump 2.0 has grown this model of exploiting minority concerns to attack DEI policies within higher education and other public institutions, showing the troubling power of co-opting civil rights language to undermine opportunity and justice.

Perspectives: This book uses the affirmative action debate as a window to examine how Asian Americans are understanding race and higher education, with implications for understanding political struggles in the Trump 2.0 era. Following Asian American legal scholarship (Chang, 1993; Matsuda, 1987) and critical raceclass theory (Leonardo, 2012), I started with the premise that: “The voices that seem different-extreme, wicked or frivolous-may or may not be those things. Even if they are, however, the process of theory-building is advanced by listening and responding to them” (Matsuda, 1987, 358). Accordingly, this book features personal narratives from research participants and [author] to explore a wide-ranging perspectives on race and rights among this diverse population.

Methods/Data: This book is based on a 2016-17 critical race narrative inquiry study that included interviews with 36 Asian American identified leaders of Asian American civic organizations across the U.S. I use narrative analysis to draw connections between participants’ stories, taking into account how they developed their perspectives on education and opportunity, and comparing participant journeys rather than just their ideologies.
Results: [Author] found that the affirmative action divide embodies internal community struggles over Asian American identity and race relations in the U.S. more broadly. Asian American opponents of affirmative action, who represent a minority of the population, seek to reshape the civil rights agenda by weaponizing Asian American identity. The racialized narratives presented by Asian Americans opposing affirmative action have appeared in Trump 2.0 executive orders and the Dear Colleague letter attempting to ban DEI in educational spaces.

Significance: By tracing the evolution of conflicting narratives of identity, this book has numerous insights into how Trump 2.0 has been able to strategically co-opt civil rights concerns. The racialized debates over SFFA v. Harvard revealed the importance of engaging in expansive critical race theorizing that includes more in-depth analysis of Asian American experiences. Too often education scholarship on racism has been limited in its engagement in analyzing the racialization of Asian Americans. This has created a strategic vulnerability for bad actors like Trump and his allies to leverage against civil rights and higher education. [Redacted] will discuss how their book highlights how communities can reclaim a future-focused and cross-racial political agenda for racial equity in higher education, despite the ongoing attacks on diversity in higher education.

Author

• OiYan A. Poon, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign