Asian American students were victims of racial discrimination

In March 2022, several months before the Supreme Court heard arguments on whether using race in college admissions is constitutional, I wrote a column in this space that said, “Cases involving schools and affirmative action historically have been about minorities on one side of the divide and white kids on the other. Minorities have been portrayed as victims; whites, as the privileged ones. But now we’re witnessing something new: disputes with minorities on both sides of the line — Black and Hispanic kids on one side, Asian Americans on the other.”

I went on to say that, “It’s raising a question that must make liberals and progressives, who see themselves as the champion of racial minorities, uncomfortable. Is it fair to discriminate against one minority, Asian Americans, to increase enrollments at some of America’s top schools for other minorities, Blacks and Hispanics?”

I think I was on to something when I wrote that, but now it looks like I gave liberals too much credit. If the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision last week knocking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions has made liberals “uncomfortable,” I haven’t found evidence of that.

At the New York Times, the liberal editorial board didn’t seem at all troubled that it was a racial minority — Asian American applicants at Harvard and the University of North Carolina — who were the victims of racial discrimination. The Times wrote, “In striking down affirmative action in higher education on Thursday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority said it had to do so because the Constitution forbids any form of racial distinction. With a single opinion, the justices overturned decades of precedents that upheld race-conscious admissions policies as consistent with the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and ignored the reality of modern America, where prejudice and racism endure.”

President Biden said, “The court has effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions, and I strongly, strongly disagree with the court’s decision. … Discrimination still exists in America. Today’s decision has not changed that.” 

Al Sharpton said on MSNBC said that the court’s decision was “tantamount to sticking a dagger in our back.” Progressive Democratic Rep. Summer Lee (Pa.) said, “As a Black woman who had the audacity to attend college, I am disgusted that our country just enshrined racial inequity in higher education and economic immobility into law.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her minority opinion, wrote that the Supreme Court “cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.” And Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the Supreme Court, wrote, “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”

Nothing is simple when it comes to matters of race in America, so negative reaction to the Court’s decision is understandable. But Asian Americans, as Justice Clarence Thomas noted, “can hardly be described as the beneficiaries of racial advantages” given how they’ve been historically marginalized and racially targeted in this country. During World War II, the U.S. government actually rounded up more than 100,000 Japanese Americans and locked them in so-called internment camps. Their only “crime” was that they were Asian American at a time when we were at war with Japan.

But some liberal and progressive intellectuals have invented a way to make it easier to pretend that Asian American students weren’t victims of discrimination at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, and, more than that … that they weren’t even a minority in America! They simply changed the definition of the word “minority.” They came up with a new term — “white adjacent” — to describe Asian Americans who do well. In other words, as far as some on the left are concerned, Asian American students aren’t real minorities. “The idea that Asians are too ‘successful’ to be considered ‘persons of color’ relies on the racist assumption that success is a ‘white’ trait,” is how Patricia Pan Connor put it in the American Conservative in 2021.

Whatever the merits might be for racial diversity on college campuses — and there’s differing opinions on that — Asian American students were in fact victims of racial discrimination. And as I concluded in my column in this space last year: “Whatever their intentions, it sure appears that we’re witnessing a new kind of discrimination based on race these days, one created by woke progressives, the same people who keep telling us how much they care about minority children — apparently as long as those children aren’t Asian kids who do ‘too’ well in school.” 

Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He was a correspondent with HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” for 22 years and previously worked as a reporter for CBS News and as an analyst for Fox News. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Substack page. Follow him on Twitter @BernardGoldberg.