Many Asian Americans support affirmative action. The recent Supreme Court cases obscure that.

“The cases rely on a narrative that doesn’t reflect the diversity of views among Asian Americans.”

“Edward Blum, the white conservative strategist behind SFFA, first began filing legal challenges to affirmative action in the 1990s. Those efforts culminated in an anti-affirmative case Blum supported that featured Abigail Fisher, a white woman, as the plaintiff. That effort ultimately failed in 2016 when the Supreme Court ruled that the University of Texas could still consider race as part of its admissions process.

“I needed Asian plaintiffs,” Blum said afterward, according to a legal filing from Harvard, in the case decided Thursday. Potential plaintiffs arrived through websites Blum backed, like “Harvard Not Fair” and “UNCNotFair,” which recruited students who felt they were discriminated against on the basis of race when they were rejected from the institutions. He used SFFA, a group that’s bankrolled by conservative donors, as the body for conveying these concerns.

In the end, the two Supreme Court cases did not feature testimony from any individual Asian American plaintiffs, who remained broadly anonymous. Asian American students did testify, however, in favor of affirmative action.

Blum’s apparent theory, which was seemingly successful, was essentially if SFFA could argue that race-conscious admissions were harming a minority group, that could prove to be a more sympathetic case for the courts. (Blum has pushed backon this interpretation.)

As Blum’s support for prior anti-affirmative action cases makes clear, however, his goal wasn’t so much to help Asian American students in any way but to do away with affirmative action, a move that could be disproportionately harmful to Black, Latino, and Indigenous students. Beyond this case, Blum has also challenged other civil rights legislation and played a central role in gutting the Voting Rights Act. His broader efforts suggest an agenda ultimately aimed at undercutting minority power in the US.

“It’s very much a case of being exploited by Ed Blum. If you look at his anti-voting rights, anti-civil rights work, there’s a lot that shows a really troubling attack on the rights of communities of color with this being one of them,” Chinese for Affirmative Action’s Chen told Vox. “This is a conservative strategist, having failed in his last case, bringing the same case again, and purposely shopping for a different face.”

By using Asian Americans as a wedge in this case, Blum and other conservatives are using a longstanding strategy of pitting minority groups against one another while failing to hold institutions accountable for discrimination. Rather than prioritize the disproportionate advantages that programs like legacy admissions afford white students, for example, the case hinged heavily on the argument that other minority groups are admitted to the detriment of Asian Americans. (The issue of legacy admissions was raised in court but was not the central focus of the case.)”
https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/6/29/23778734/asian-americans-affirmative-action-supreme-court-ruling

 

The U.S. Supreme Court, like every other court in the United States, is deliberately designed to be anti-democratic. It is never the function of any Judge at any level to determine what is popular or unpopular. Legislatures including Congress are elected to represent the will of the people.

Every Judge makes decisions based upon the law as that Judge understands it. Trial Courts apply the law to the facts as found by a jury or by the trial Judge. Popularity is totally irrelevant.

Finally, the Supreme Court only rarely takes witness testimony itself and then through a Special Master. Appellate Courts are not generally set up to consider new evidence.

The point of my post is that the VOX author is making pointless arguments in a meaningless article.