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William Han

Mephistopheles knocks again.
On Thursday, the United States Department of Justice accused my alma mater, Yale University, of discrimination against Asians and whites.
It’s the latest salvo in the ongoing fight in the US over affirmative action: the practice of preferentially admitting under-represented and underprivileged racial groups for the sake of diversity, and a part of America’s tortuous reckoning with its racial demons.
The US Supreme Court set up the framework in the landmark 1978 case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke – where it essentially ruled that it was illegal to set racial quotas, but found that it was legal to consider racial minority status as a factor in favour of admission.
Legal niceties have since run up against two obstacles. The first is arithmetics: every spot that Yale gives to a student of one race is a spot that it cannot give to a student of another. The second is the general perceived tendency of Asians to study hard and do well on exams.
As an Asian who studied hard and did well on exams, I must point out here that there is no such thing as an “Asian”. Half the world’s population comes from the vast land mass called Asia. There is the Indian and there is the Indonesian, there is the Korean and there is the Khmer: there is no Asian. Any similarities among them are purely in the eye of the (Western) beholder.
The cliché of the straight-A Asian student therefore obscures a multitude of differences between different families of different backgrounds from different communities. The children of Silicon Valley engineers who immigrated to the US as doctoral students from Taiwan obviously enjoy different prospects than the children of Hmong refugees. But America’s totalising gaze sees us as all the same.

In fact, it is precisely this tendency to see Asians as faceless uniformities that lies at the heart of the alleged discrimination against them. In his 2006 book, The Price of Admission, author Daniel Golden quoted a dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as describing an Asian-American student as “yet another textureless math grind”.
Things have not changed much since then. In 2014, a group of Asian-American students sued Harvard for discrimination – a lawsuit the Trump administration opted to support in 2018. In the course of the proceedings, a review of some 160,000 student files revealed that Asians consistently outperformed other groups on academic metrics but consistently underperformed in one key attribute: personality. Low personality scores reduced their chances of gaining admission.
Why Asian students dominate top schools – and it’s not tiger moms
Can it be that all these Indians and Indonesians, Koreans and Khmers, all these people whom Americans choose to call “Asians”, just happen to have bad personalities? What does it even mean to have a bad personality? It’s not encouraging that this use of “personality” as an admissions factor traces back to the early 20th century. Back then, elite colleges used the same mechanism to keep out Jews, who outperformed their Christian peers.
Hence the paradox of affirmative action: though intended to benefit racial minorities at the expense of traditionally privileged whites, the sheer number of academically excellent students of “Asian” heritage means that the system needs some way to push down their numbers. Otherwise there simply won’t be enough spots for other groups.
We know what happens without affirmative action. In 1995, the University of California system stopped employing it. The proportion of Asians rose dramatically, while the proportion of black and Hispanic students fell. At UC Berkeley, only 2.8 per cent of the incoming freshmen in 2019 identified as black and 21.1 per cent identified as white, while 43.1 per cent – not counting international students and those who declined to say – were self-described Asians.

But the Department of Justice’s move against Yale is not for the benefit of Asians. It is rather another instance of white American conservatives using the myth of the Asian “model minority” to attack the interests of other minorities. The argument boils down to this: if Asians can be successful in America, then there is no racism, and any minority who says otherwise is full of it. Thus the Trump administration, which never misses a chance to advance its white nationalist agenda, gets to use the debate over affirmative action to pretend that it’s fighting on behalf of Asians.
For bright Asian high school students worried about their future, not to mention their “tiger” parents, the anti-affirmative action argument is a siren song. Even if it’s transparent that white conservatives are only using Asians as their stalking horse, the possibility of improving one’s chances, Berkeley-style, is terribly tempting. Anxious Asians are presented with a devil’s bargain: advance your own interests knowing that it harms other minorities or “take one for the team”, as it were.
Yale discriminates against Asian and white applicants, US Justice Department says
Before accepting this Faustian bargain, let’s remember that wealthy white Americans have always enjoyed their own kind of affirmative action. As last year’s college admission scandal underscored, entry into prestigious US institutions is a game rigged in favour of the scions of the rich and powerful.
Additionally, all the prestigious colleges preferentially admit the children of alumni, so-called “legacies”. Because the student bodies of these universities were once almost exclusively white, legacies are far more likely to be white than not. But because legacy preference is not explicitly race-based, it’s not subject to legal challenge the way that affirmative action has been.

In Harvard’s class of 2022, 36 per cent of the students are legacies. That’s a far greater proportion than that taken up by Asians. The Faustian bargain presented to striving Asian meritocrats would disappear if only legacy preference did as well.
Barbara Bush, daughter of President George W. Bush, was in my class at Yale. George W. Bush was in the class of 1968. His father, President George H.W. Bush, graduated in 1948, and his father, Senator Prescott Bush, did so in 1917.
Donald Trump allegedly paid someone to take his SAT for him, securing his admission to the University of Pennsylvania. Daniel Golden’s The Price of Admission features Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner as a case study of a rich family buying a spot at Harvard – in Jared’s case, for US$2.5 million.
And Attorney General William Barr, whose department is pushing Yale to dismantle its affirmative action apparatus, went to Columbia. Guess where his daddy went? Columbia, of course.
These are the people who, bearing gifts, have come knocking. I think I know my answer.


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For Asian-Americans, the Trump administration’s attack on affirmative action presents a Faustian bargain

Students walk on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Photo: Reuters

FILE - In this May 24, 2010 file photo, future graduates wait for the procession to begin for commencement at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. An investigation has concluded that Yale University professor Eugene Redmond sexually assaulted five students at a research facility on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts and committed sexual misconduct against at least eight others. The report by former Connecticut U.S. Attorney Deirdre Daly was released Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2019. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill, File)

FILE PHOTO: U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr listens during a roundtable discussion with law enforcement hosted by U.S. President Donald Trump in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington, U.S., June 8, 2020. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo

(FILES) In this file photo the US Department of Justice building in Washington, DC, on July 22, 2019. - The Justice Department accused Yale University on August 13, 2020 of violating US civil rights law by illegally discriminating against white and Asian American applicants. The department's finding -- which Yale rejected as "meritless" -- came after a two-year investigation into the undergraduate admissions process at the prestigious Ivy League university in New Haven, Connecticut. (Photo by Alastair Pike / AFP)

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US Attorney General William Barr is sworn in before testifying at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington on Tuesday. Photo: AP

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) asks a question of Attorney General William Barr during the House Judiciary Committee hearing in the Congressional Auditorium at the US Capitol Visitors Center July 28, 2020 in Washington, DC. - In his first congressional testimony in more than a year, Barr is expected to face questions from the committee about his deployment of federal law enforcement agents to Portland, Oregon, and other cities in response to Black Lives Matter protests; his role in using federal agents to violently clear protesters from Lafayette Square near the White House last month before a photo opportunity for President Donald Trump in front of a church; his intervention in court cases involving Trump's allies Roger Stone and Michael Flynn; and other issues. (Photo by Matt McClain / POOL / AFP)

Yale discriminates against Asian and white applicants, US Justice Department says

The Justice Department investigation into Yale’s conduct began in response to complaints from Asian-American groups. Pictured, the Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut. Photo: AP

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Mothers participate in a demonstration outside the Justice Center during a protest against racial inequality in Portland, Oregon, U.S., July 18, 2020. Picture taken July 18, 2020. REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs

A man is struck by a police officer during a protest against racial inequality in Portland, U.S., July 18, 2020, in this still image obtained from a social media video. THE PORTLAND TRIBUNE/via REUTERS THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. MANDATORY CREDIT. NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES.

Demonstrators use garbage cans, umbrellas, and other materials as makeshift shields during a protest against racial inequality in Portland, Oregon, U.S., July 19, 2020. REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs

This Week in Asia

Opinion

Comment

The Department of Justice accuses Yale University of discrimination, a move that may seem to benefit Asian students
But it’s just another instance of white American conservatives using the Asian ‘model minority’ myth to attack the interests of others, says William Han


Accusations of discrimination against Asian students by Yale University are just another instance of white American conservatives using the Asian ‘model minority’ myth to attack the interests of others.


United States

US Politics

Education

Racism and other prejudice

Asian-Americans

Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


Opinion | For Asian-Americans, the Trump administration’s attack on affirmative action presents a Faustian bargain

The Department of Justice accuses Yale University of discrimination, a move that may seem to benefit Asian students But it’s just another instance of white American conservatives using the Asian ‘model minority’ myth to attack the interests of others, says William Han

The Department of Justice accuses Yale University of discrimination, a move that may seem to benefit Asian students

But it’s just another instance of white American conservatives using the Asian ‘model minority’ myth to attack the interests of others, says William Han