Many have heard of the endless debates of whether affirmative action is ethical or not, but what does this term actually mean, and how does it apply to Asian Americans? Affirmative action is defined as “any measure, beyond simple termination of a discriminatory practice, adopted to correct or compensate for past or present discrimination or to prevent discrimination from recurring in the future”. The term ‘affirmative action’ was first coined in 1961 by former President Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925, stating that, “the contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin,” and was later extended into other areas like employment. According to Britannica and AAAED, this system was created to benefit certain groups in areas like education, government contracting, and employment — including people considered to be minorities regarding “race, disability, gender, ethnic origin, and age.”
With the United States’ complex and contentious history, full of instances of oppression, inequality, and discrimination, it is said that millions of individuals and families still suffer with the effects and consequences of the unjust actions of past American leaders. Due to these injustices — including, but not limited to, the mass-killings of the Indigenous people of America, the inhumane Atlantic Slave Trade, the exclusion acts and violence against Asian Americans — and the minority number of individuals, these groups are still negatively impacted to this day. Impacts of these past actions are still prevalent in American society today through acts of implicit bias, blatant racism, and underrepresentation. According to Minority Rights, the seven main groupings of “minority and indigenous groupings\’\’ are “Latinos (including Puerto Ricans), African Americans, Asian Americans, Arab and other Middle Eastern Americans, Native Americans, Native Hawai’ians and other Pacific Islanders, and Alaska Natives.” This is just one area of the minorities affirmative action is directed towards helping. Affirmative action not only benefits minority groups relating to race; it also benefits communities such as “women, persons with disabilities and veterans.”
However, affirmative action does not exactly benefit Asian American individuals’ chances of getting into colleges or landing a job. Why is this? Are Asian Americans not a minority as well? Previously in this article, one of the injustices listed were “the exclusion acts and violence against Asian Americans” — which is just one example of oppression Asians have faced in America; Asians also make up 7% of the nation, and Asian Americans make up just 5.7% of the nation. Asian Americans are minorities in America, however affirmative action’s role on their admissions/job opportunities differ due to their history of immigration.
As mentioned previously, Asians used to be thought of as people who did not belong in America, and had no worth besides playing the role of underpaid workers. They were “confined to ethnic enclaves, barred from White schools, and denied U.S. citizenship, Asians were not extended the right to become naturalized citizens until the passage of the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Naturalization Act in 1952.” However, now, Asian Americans are notorious for being extremely studious, and have the “highest educational outcomes and highest median household incomes of all U.S. groups.”
So what created this big change? Is it really because “all Asians are good at math,” or that Asians are “just smarter?” These stereotypes may be what pops into one\’s mind at first, but these clichés are actually not the case. Asian immigrants’ stark educational level jump was actually predominantly due to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, or McCarran-Walter Act, which was “a system of immigration control to replace the discriminatory national origins system.” According to the Office of the Historian, this system repealed the previous system that excluded Asian immigration and prevented “Asians from becoming naturalized American citizens.” However, this law also did not allow for immigrants working in “agriculture, construction, and domestic service,” since they were deemed “unskillful” professions. In summary, the McCarran-Walter Act allowed for the “model minorities” myth to first culminate, as the majority of Asian immigrants came after the law was enacted; Asians immigrating to America were legitimately manipulated to consist of just “highly educated Asian immigrants who fulfilled high-skilled labor shortages in the United States.” According to Daedalus, this “hyper-selectivity,” Asian Americans have “an edge over other U.S. groups–including native-born Whites–in the domain of education.”
The Students for Fair Admissions, or SFFA, is a “nonprofit membership group of more than 20,000 students, parents, and others who believe that racial classifications and preferences in college admissions are unfair, unnecessary, and unconstitutional.” This program essentially feels that affirmative action should be abolished, and that it is unfair to every American applying to college. Founded by Edward Blum, a white, male legal entrepreneur and strong opponent against affirmative action, the SFFA preaches that the affirmative action system is unfair, and is why you cannot get into top schools like Harvard. There were many back-and-forth arguments and cases made — with Blum putting the spotlight on Asian Americans as “victims” of affirmative action — however, the most notorious and controversial is the case against Harvard, and their bias against Asian Americans. SFFA’s argument was essentially that “admissions officers categorically rated Asian applicants poorly on character traits such as “likeability,” “courage,” and “fit,” and used these subjective measures as the basis for denying admission to academically and morally deserving applicants.” This sounds extremely biased and unfair to Asian Americans when it is put this way, however, this is actually not the case.
This is because the character traits are actually not based on one’s individual personality, but on factors like the applicants’ “ intended major and career, the neighborhood in which they grew up, whether they were raised by a single parent who did not attend college, or raised by two parents who graduated from Harvard,” as well as factors like “whether the applicants are refugees, whether they had to work to support their families during high school, whether they hail from a rural background, and so on.” Although this process is not perfect, it allows the applicant to have a chance to be seen as an individual with unique circumstances, instead of simply their grades or standardized test scores. Secondly, Asians and Whites only have a difference of 0.05 points on a 6-point scale in terms of personality ratings — with Asians receiving an “average rating of 2.82, while White applicants, an average of 2.77.” This shows that Asian Americans applying to Harvard are actually not rated unfairly less than White applicants. Harvard also highly favors legacy applicants; according to College Transitions, “36% of Harvard’s Class of 2022 can claim a relative that previously attended the university”.
According to Daedalus, SFFA fails to consider “legacies, recruited athletes, and the children of faculty and donors from their analyses,” who have much higher chances of making it into Harvard than applicants who are not of said group. There are few Asian applicants in these prioritized groups, and Harvard’s legacies are “largely White, and the number of White legacy admits exceeds the number of Asian, Black, and Hispanic legacy admits combined.”
However, this does not mean Asian Americans do not face any discrimination in college applications or in America as a whole. There is still the possibility and continued research of “included variable bias” in Harvard’s analysis of personality, as well as this bias in other colleges and organizations. Whether or not affirmative action is the solution for fixing the past injustices of the United States may take many more years to figure out — no one answer will be able to remedy these complex social issues. However, what we do know is that even if the path is longer and more difficult, we should continue to fight for the right path for the future generations of America.