Now that all the data is in, a small group of Asian Americans should hang their heads in shame. The group with the ironic and hypocritical name, Students for Fair Admissions, was corralled by anti-affirmative action advocate Ed Blum and effectively duped and used to sue Harvard over race-based admissions.
The result? After six years of litigation that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, we are further from equity and fairness than we’ve ever been.
Emil Guillermo
Admissions processes that included race as a factor may not have been perfect. But what we are left with is that old familiar “colorblind” option that gets us no closer to the promised land.
Colorblind is the term anti-AA types hijacked from Dr. Martin Luther King to describe their solution to fair admissions. They pretend to “not see color.” In truth, it’s just blind racism. A way to dodge real responsibility. Blindness is used as the excuse for failing to achieve fair admissions.
After all the litigation we’ve essentially replaced a purposeful process intended to help make student populations more diverse, with a process that leaves it up to chance.
It’s a different game now, that makes it better for whites, who after years of being dominant in student populations were faced with diminished numbers. You can’t have diversity and have the same pie share. How do you feel good about going from 70-80 percent of a student population to less than 50 percent?
So the anti-affirmative action types had to litigate and force the race blind alternative. Of course, they never touched the form of affirmative action which survived the Harvard suit, that is affirmative action for legacies of the wealthy and the gifted athletically.
But they dumped what was working and replaced it with something better for whites. Not so great for everyone else. Students for Fair Admissions used Asians who claimed discrimination to get a better deal for whites.
The Harvard numbers
The numbers for Harvard help us realize that what we had before wasn’t so bad if the goal was racial justice and equity.
What we have now is….. Who knows?
It’s inconclusive, with the racial stats are all over the place, leaving the best way to describe the aftermath for now is “nuanced.” That’s a big word for “it’s complicated.”
After the first affirmative action numbers were released from other institutions, Harvard finally released its numbers last Wednesday. What they show is Black student enrollment declined from 18 percent to 14 percent. That’s more significant than it sounds. Asian Americans who sued saw the Asian American number stay at 37 percent, same as last year. Hispanic enrollment increased from 14 to 16 percent. That’s 65 percent for the big three. That leaves whites, but Harvard doesn’t give their total. And you can’t infer it must mean a white population at 35 percent, because the rules have change as to disclosure of race or ethnicity.
The number who declined to state rose from 4 to 8 percent this year. What we have is just as imperfect as what we had. We just have more ways to game the system and allow whites to hide their shame.
At Harvard there’s also a real hit in the Black student population, the outrageous outcome of the new system. Fairness and equity? Maybe for whites, not for the students from underrepresented groups. Still, the reported results from other schools vary so much. More selective schools seemed to do better because Black students accepted those schools as their first choice. Other schools did worse.
Instead of fixing the affirmative action we had, anti-AA activists swung the pendulum the other way with this system that blindfolds us all.
Hopi Hoekstra, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences sent a message to the Harvard community and admitted: “We anticipate its full impact on the class composition at Harvard College may not be felt for several more admissions cycles.”
Or maybe never under this new colorblind system. Under the cry for meritocracy, we dumped fairness and equity.
At this point, we are further from those ideals than we’ve ever been in the last 50 years. And that’s just the way opponents of affirmative action wanted it. That Blum and his cronies were forced to use and dupe some Asian Americans in the deal is the real shame. They were proxies for whites to hide what drives the real motives in this whole thing: white preservation and racism. Calling Blum and his methods colorblind makes them acceptable and untouchable.
But the first set of numbers show just how wrong they are.
Emil Guillermo is an Asian American journalist and commentator, and a former adjunct professor.
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