Artwork: Hannah Lui
Race-conscious affirmative action is one of the most contentious issues regarding higher education. As an Asian-American, I strongly believe in ensuring diversity but I believe that race-conscious admission practices do more harm than good and there are race-neutral practices to ensure diversity that should be used.
Simply put, the color of your skin shouldn’t make you more or less likely to get into college. Your merits and skills should be why you get into a certain school. As the Supreme Court wrote in the 2000 anti-AAPI discrimination in voting rights case, Rice v. Cayetano: “Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.” Fundamentally, affirmative action requires colleges to look at a person’s race and make substantive judgments about that person, which is by nature discriminatory, because it judges someone based on the color of their skin. You would not want a person offered a job because they are Asian, white, Black, or Hispanic; you would want them getting a job because they are the most qualified for the job.
When colleges admit students on the basis of race, they are treating racial groups homogenously and assume they all have similar or the same experience. Justice Clarence Thomas writes in his concurrence that an individual is and should be bigger than their race. He argues that affirmative action stereotypes POC groups: “All racial groups are heterogeneous, and blacks are no exception… Eschewing the complexity that comes with individuality may make for an uncomplicated narrative, but lumping people together and judging them based on assumed inherited or ancestral traits is nothing but stereotyping.”
Justice Thomas is accurate in his judgment here; as an Asian-American, I have not lived the same life as my other Asian peers and we can not be simply grouped because we have the same skin color. By lumping people together and grouping them because of the color of their skin, colleges are diminishing the experiences of each individual. I, as a Chinese-American, do not have the same experience as a Korean-American or an Indian-American, or a Filipino-American.
Additionally, affirmative action easily reinforces harmful stereotypes. The underlying assumption in justifying affirmative action is that certain racial groups need more help in getting into selective schools, which leads to the idea that some races are just better than others and that is why we need to be helping them. In reality, equal opportunity is offered to people of all races and this mindset only further pushes down minorities by telling them that they are in need of extra help instead of actually helping them out.
In the same vein, to ensure a fully merit-based system, we must abolish legacy and children of donor-based admissions, as both Democrats and Republicans have advocated for in the wake of the Supreme Court decision; college admissions should be based on your merits and experiences not who your parent is and how much they can donate. In a simulation conducted by Students for Fair Admissions, a world where Harvard eliminated legacy admissions and emphasized the socio-economic status of applicants resulted in increased admission rates for POC candidates.
Finally, on a college campus, diversity should be valued based on a student’s experiences and contributions, rather than on the color of their skin. Renu Mukherjee, a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute, emphasizes in the New York Times that diversity in higher education “should encompass all aspects of a student’s personhood that could contribute to the educational environment.” This means that colleges should consider the unique stories of individuals and the experiences they have had to genuinely ensure intellectual diversity in their institutions. Through this emphasis on intellectual diversity, colleges will ensure the necessary diversity without employing harmful practices.