Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Asian Americans ramp up to #DefendDiversity



ONE WEEK before a challenge to Harvard’s affirmative action program goes on trial, Asian American civil rights groups are joining others in launching a week of actions defending diversity.

“As a low-income, second-generation Chinese American who directly benefited from Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policy, I support affirmative action,” said Sally Chen, a senior at Harvard who will be testifying at the trial starting October 15th. “I am organizing for the #DefendDiversity Week of Action because it is impossible for any student at Harvard, or any other university, to attain the necessary education to become future leaders without race-conscious policies that make our campuses more diverse.”

Among the groups joining this week of activities are Asian American Advancing Justice, Asian American Legal Defense Fund, Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, Chinese American Progressive Action, Southeast Action Resource Action Center, and 18 Million Rising.

In a case filed by anti-affirmative action advocate Edward Blum and his group Student for Fair Admissions, the lawsuit alleges Harvard discriminates against Asian Americans in its admissions policies. He’s been joined by the Trump administration and the Department of Justice which has joined in support of the lawsuit.

The case has unfortunately pitted largely first-generation Chinese Americans against Asian Americans who recall the history of civil rights and the role affirmative action has played in advancing opportunities for all Asian Americans.

“Asian Americans students still need race-conscious admissions to access and benefit from higher education,” said Nicole Ochi, a supervising attorney at Asian Americans Advancing Justice-LA who represents students that will be testifying at the Harvard trial.


“We need to resist any narrative that co-opts Asian Americans’ historic and ongoing struggle with discrimination and distracts us from the true culprit that impedes our advancement:policies and practices that privilege the white and the wealthy.”

Chi Zhang, however, disagrees. He told the New Yorker that Asian Americans have been taken for granted.

“Chinese-Americans are sacrificed in the left agenda to achieve so-called equality for other minority groups,” he said.

He is part of a growing number of Chinese Americans against affirmative action.

A recent poll by Karthick Ramakrishnan, at U.C. Riverside, and Janelle Wong, at the University of Maryland, found that Asian Americans overwhelmingly support affirmative action, but since 2012, support among Chinese Americans has fallen significantly.

OiYan Poon, an assistant professor of higher education at Colorado State University, interviewed 36 Asian Americans opposed to affirmative action in 2016. When asked to describe their ideal admissions program, Poon says these opponents of affirmative action described “race-conscious holistic review, which is exactly what we have today,” she said. “Quite frankly, the public generally has no .. clue of how admissions work,” Poon told the New Yorker.

During the #DefendDiversity Week of Action, hundreds of participants will engage in a public education campaign where they will express the critical need for race-conscious admissions policies and the urgency of defending them in the face of a growing wave of challenges by conservative groups and the Justice Department under the Trump administration.

Participating groups will be:

Views From the Edge contributed to this report.
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