Don't Trust An Asian American Who Went To Harvard Who Defends Harvard

Social self-interest masquerading as altruistic concerns for racial justice

Recently, I was in Rhode Island with my girlfriend, and while we were in Providence, I gave her a little tour of my alma mater. I hadn’t been to Brown since 2015, when it was my five-year reunion. It was an awkward affair, with too much time having passed for tenuous friendships/acquaintanceships to have lasted, but not enough time having gone by for us to have changed in any notable way. We were all mostly the same, but older and more distant. Then, less than a week later, the Supreme Court decision on Harvard and UNC’s admissions came out.

But most of the emotions surrounding this decision isn’t really about the ins and outs of the law. The popular debate is more about how important diversity is as a societal goal, and to what extent we need to institutionalize that endeavor. And critically, who benefits and who sacrifices the most? The SCOTUS decision even reflects this mindset as it focused entirely on the first prong of the strict scrutiny standard that asks whether diversity is enough of a compelling state interest, as opposed to getting in the weeds of the second prong that delves into whether that interest is sufficiently narrowly tailored.

For Asian Americans, this case was a no-win situation. Either we grinned and bore it while “personal scores” gave powerful institutional backing to racist stereotypes about us, or we became human shields for Edward Blum types that are using us. 

The common refrain among Asian American liberals has been about how important it is for Asian Americans to have supported the Harvard/UNC side in the case. Some cite a moral duty, to de-prioritize our interests for the greater good. Others say that affirmative action in admissions actually benefits Asian Americans. This is line with liberal dogma, which upholds diversity as an obvious good, and to question it is akin to questioning the value of fruits and vegetables. I’m sympathetic to this view in general, and it’s reflected in the friends I have, the women I date, and the viewpoints I read and watch.

But when it comes to race, this progressive diversity social model has a tendency to seek out the “best” from each community in hopes of forming a new diverse elite. A recent piece in The Atlantic plainly stated this in its headline, mourning the SFFA decision as the death of “elite multiculturalism.”

This tendency is especially true in the context of the hyper-competitive game for the scarce spots at elite colleges. Harvard relied extensively on the Khurana Report, which emphasized the importance of diversity in accomplishing Harvard’s mission of training future leaders, equipping graduates to adapt to a pluralistic society, better educated its students, and producing new knowledge stemming from diverse outlooks.

But clearly, Harvard’s definition of “diversity” is fixated on race. Only 4.5% of its student body comes from low-income backgrounds. Bertrand Cooper has written and given interviews about how little affirmative action at elite colleges actually affects poor black Americans, the very people these policies ought to help the most. I have to wonder whether these schools even want a lot of poor-but-brilliant black students, or whether they secretly fear them as too culturally different; rather, what they really want are black students from well-to-do backgrounds who’ll tell their friends to read Zakiya Dalila Harris. And there are few fervent attempts to diversify campus culture in terms of political ideologies or religious affiliations. 

So if you’re not tapped to be part of this multicultural elite, do you at least get the dignity of being seen as bold revolutionaries, fighting against the top tier of society? No, you’re just a racist now if you dare question Harvard & Co. More than solving any real problems of systemic inequality, the winners of the current order were seeking a foolproof way to protect their own highly coveted positions. The fact that the most visible Asian American defenders of race-based elite college admissions are those that benefitted most from it is a feature, not a bug.

People often pretend that their notions of politics and social justice are about dispassionate ideals, but most of the time, it just comes down to insiders vs outsiders. For Asian Americans, in this no-win situation, which shit sandwich you chose to eat depended on how much of a place you personally felt you had in the diverse progressive coalition. If you felt reasonably secure that you had an invite to the party, then yes, you could stomach some obvious unfairness because of your fervent faith that one day, you’d be rewarded for your loyalty, like Stanley Tucci in The Devil Wears Prada. But if you felt excluded from this beautiful mosaic of diversity, why go along with the charade? 

On Twitter, I saw some people sneering at the supposedly naive Asian Americans who’d opposed affirmative action in the hopes that they themselves would get into these elite schools with acceptance rates below 5%. But not all of the Asian Americans supporting the SFFA victory have those aspirations for themselves. For one, many of them are probably past college age anyway. They may be thinking of their children, but how many of them are actually parents? And even if they have long-term goals of raising a family, worrying about college admissions is so far down the timeline. Many of the SFFA plaintiffs got into colleges that are quite prestigious anyway. 

So what many really wanted was to just call bullshit on it all, to have the satisfaction of giving an official SCOTUS-endorsed “Fuck you” to the elites—and wannabe elites—that were just looking out for their own social ambitions under the pretense of racial justice. It’d be one thing if the Harvard/UNC defenders were those who themselves had opted out of the Ivy League game, thus holding their happy and successful selves up as examples of why such educations are overrated. But that’s usually not the case.

Take someone like Jeff Yang, one of the most obnoxious of these types and co-author of one of the most emotionally stunted books in recent memory. He not only attended Harvard, but is also a graduate of Saint Ann’s, a private school located in one of the most expensive NYC neighborhoods, an institution that’s so exclusive that Lena Dunham went there (no disrespect to Girls, a phenomenal show). In a recent Twitter thread, he berated those bad-personality Asian Americans that focused too much on grades and SATs, and held up his Harvard-accepted son as a refreshing counterexample:

Never mind that his son had also been the star of Fresh Off The Boat, the ABC sitcom that ran for 6 seasons, not to mention his status as a legacy of a prominent Asian American cultural talking head. Reminds me of one of Frank Caliendo’s Trump University get-rich-quick rules: “Have a rich father. If you don’t have one, get one!”

There’s also Jennifer Lee, a sociologist professor at Columbia who always pops up as a relief pitcher in these discussions. Holding multiple degrees from Columbia and having broken into the highly coveted ranks of academia, she is now a member of the American cultural elite like Jeff Yang. Where do their greater personal interests lie: in defending one of the few avenues of upward mobility available to Asian Americans (especially working-class ones that lack any social or cultural capital as an alternative), or maintaining their good standing among their culturally elite milieu, not to mention their continued employment? 

It’s absolutely bogus to act as if there aren’t personal social interests at stake here, ones that compel the Jeff Yangs and Jennifer Lees to act just as selfishly as some Asian American students or parents do in wanting to maximize their chances of gaining access to the very same institutions that the Jeff Yangs and Jennifer Lees themselves have gained. Yet the latter are derided as loathsome insects, while the former get to pretend to be self-sacrificing altruists.

Many have derided Asian Americans for letting ourselves be used as pawns in striking down affirmative action. But we were pawns before anyway. In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor briefly mentions the highly controversial personal score rating (that tasked Harvard’s admissions officers with calculating an applicant’s perceived leadership, maturity, integrity, reaction to setbacks, concern for others, self-confidence, likability, helpfulness, courage, kindness, and whether the student is a "good person to be around”) that Harvard allegedly used to suppress Asian American admission rates, only to say that since the lower courts sided with Harvard, the matter was over. 

But we’ve all seen how Harvard’s own lawyer refused to answer if Harvard genuinely believed Asian American applicants simply had worse personalities than applicants of other races (despite those same students showing no such deficiency in their letters of recommendation in the “school support rating”). We’ve seen how hard both Harvard and the District Court of Massachusetts tried to suppress an email that made Harvard look bad in terms of how it regarded Asian American applicants. We’ve seen how just half a generation ago, Asian American applicants were derided as merely being grade-grubbers that lacked outside interests. Now that they score very highly in extracurricular ratings, the new explanation is that they’re being insincere about those interests. If Asian Americans start scoring highly in the personal scores, the new allegation will be that they’re faking that too by crafting Ivy-friendly personalities upon birth.

The message is clear: we just don’t want that many of you. Not only that, but we’re going to do it surreptitiously, so you have to blame yourselves if you don’t get in. Try playing more sports or starting art clubs, you textureless math grind. Oh, you did that? Then try being more likable. Oh, you’re beloved? Now you’re a racist. So says Jeff Yang with his Hollywood son. And Jennifer Lee, while she divides her time between New York City and Newport Beach (and its wonderful waves for surfing). 

And to tell Asian American students that under the principles of an enlightened criteria as practiced by the most unassailably forward-thinking incubators of our nation’s leaders, we just don’t want that many of you? And for that message to be amplified by Asian Americans who’ve sat at that table for so long their chairs are about to buckle? 

Diversity (of all sorts) is a worthy goal in one’s personal life. Whether, or how much, it should be institutionalized is beyond my expertise. But Asian Americans also deserve to say something when we’re being asked to pay a price in pursuit of that ideal. If there’s a social quid pro quo going on, then it needs to be made more explicit. But of course, that will jeopardize the Asian Americans’ designated roles as the eternally grateful newcomer.

I mentioned my recent return to Brown because in many ways, I should be a fierce critic of the SFFA decision. I got into my dream school, so the system worked for me and my resume is set in stone. While my college experience was full of highs, it was also full of the lowest lows, which I’m sure was partly due to attending such a college. So I do think the less that Asian Americans pin our hopes on what these institutions have to offer, we’ll be better off. Ivy-striverism turns us more into self-haters, glorifying the prospect of being picked as a not-like-the-other-Asians Asian.

But that’s not exactly what many of the Asian American Harvard-defenders are doing. All they do is scold, even using yellow peril motifs to chastize Asian Americans for being the wrong kind of pawn. And we’re not hearing from those who chose alternative paths and are now providing guidance to the many stressed-out and demoralized young Asian Americans and their families.

I feel for those students and families that have no friends in this whole ordeal, with their closest allies being the slimy opportunists at SFFA who’ll happily let them take all the heat. At least there’s Jay Caspian Kang, who’s by far the best mainstream Asian American writer on this topic, just published a piece in The New Yorker, noting how Asian Americans have been a total afterthought (except as antagonists) in the discussions around this case, even in the SCOTUS decision, concurrences, and dissents. I’m glad he’s there to provide that viewpoint, though he does need to stop deleting his tastiest tweets. Please Jay, the world deserves to still see the rest of the below tweetstorm:

If anyone has screenshots of the successive tweets above, please send to me.

“Merit” is a suspect word these days, meaning just numbers and stats derived from unfair sources. Soulless nerdshit. And America’s most elite colleges—one of the few products of national pride—are too good for that. Maybe those Asian universities do that. Even the European ones. But not America’s crown jewels of higher education. They look into your soul to determine your worth.

The idea that any elite institution, especially one that can control the life directions of many bright young people, should have that much power is ridiculous. And since nobody will amicably agree on what’s a fair apportionment of the all-too-scarce spots in these elite colleges, the best solution is to neuter them. I saw some people on social media taunting Asian Americans, saying that these schools will never let us in anyway and they will just become full of rich white people. I hope that happens. These places used to be de facto social clubs. Then for a few decades, we decided they should become much more academically inclined. Now, many want to revert back to the social club model, either for a more diverse set or for the good old boys again. I doubt many, except for a naive or idealistic few, want them to turn all these elite schools into CalTech. So let’s drop the pretense and we can start treating these schools as more like the Gossip Girl prep schools, which have exclusivity but not reverence. Studio 54, dork version.