Event: Asian Americans & Affirmative Action | Understanding SFFA v. Harvard
Date: Tuesday, November 27, 2018
Where: Columbia Law School | 435 West 116th Street | New York, NY 10027
Jerome Green Hall: Room 103
When: 6:00PM
Speakers:
Jennifer Lee, Professor of Sociology, Columbia University
Jin Hee Lee, Senior Deputy of Litigation, NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund
Van C. Tran, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Columbia University
Vincent Wong, LL.M. Human Rights Fellow, Columbia Law School
Livestream: https://twitter.com/AAPolicyForum/status/1067558773781225472

This moderated panel features experts on affirmative action and Asian American issues, discussing the SFFA v. Harvard litigation in the context of historicizing challenges to affirmative action and the relationship between affirmative action and Asian Americans, as well as how race-conscious admissions at universities like Columbia or Harvard are actually done, dispelling myths and misinformation in the process.

This event is free and open to the public for those who register on eventbrite. A catered mixer will follow.

For questions about this program, contact Madeline Cameron Wardleworth, CISPS Post Doctoral Research Scholar at: madeline.cameronwardleworth@aapf.org or (212) 854-3049.

Co-Sponsored by: African American Policy Forum (AAPF), Columbia Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS), Columbia University Department of Sociology, Columbia Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER), Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP), Barnard Deptartment of Sociology, Columbia Law School Queer & Trans People of Color (QTPOC), Columbia Law School Latino/a Law Student Association (LaLSA), Columbia University Asian American Alliance.

Why this event?

The SFFA v. Harvard 3 week trial has just concluded at the District Court for the District of Massachusetts and is getting significant media coverage across the board, bringing Affirmative Action once again back into the forefront of national debate. The Harvard case builds off a long and well-coordinated set of legal and political challenges to affirmative action by Conservative legal strategist Edward Blum, including most recently the Fisher I and Fisher II cases challenging the University of Texas’s race-conscious admissions programs under the Equal Protection Clause.

This time however, instead of using white applicants, organizers of the legal challenge have positioned Asian Americans as the complainants, alleging unfair discrimination in Harvard’s admissions process. As opposed to the University of Texas lawsuit, which alleged violations of the Equal Protection Clause, the Harvard lawsuit accuses violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The Harvard lawsuit, which was initiated in 2014, was followed in 2015 by federal complaints to the Federal Department of Education and Department of Justice against Harvard by a coalition of over 60 Asian-American organizations, making substantively similar claims as SFFA. While these complaints were dismissed after investigations by the Obama admission, they have been re-opened by the Trump administration, which is devoting significant resources to investigating other universities for alleged discrimination through use of race-conscious admissions policies.

The Harvard case has been a divisive issue among many Asian American communities, particularly Chinese Americans. Asian Americans students and organizations from across the country have staked out positions on the case both politically and through legal amicus briefs. Recent competing rallies and demonstrations in Boston have also highlighted the nature of the heated and divided views within the Asian American community regarding the issue.

Unfortunately, the debate and media coverage on this issue has been rife with erroneous information and myths. Many supporters and opponents do not have a firm grasp of how race-conscious affirmative action is actually practiced in reality. A 2016 study by OiYan Poon and Megan Segoshi interviewed 36 Asian American groups that either publicly supported or opposed affirmative action, 30 of these groups (13 supporters and 17 opponents) presented outdated and unconstitutional myths regarding how affirmative action was practiced at these schools.

When asked to explain what they believed would be an ideal way for colleges to admit students, 33 of 36 said they preferred a review process take individual students’ contexts of opportunity into account. In other words, paradoxically, 33 interview participants all agreed in principle with the current state of race-conscious admissions policies. This points to the need and importance of education within the Asian American community on how affirmative action actually works, dispelling myths, building racial literacy, and enabling sustained dialogue between Asian Americans and other traditional supporters and beneficiaries of affirmative action, including other communities of colour.