From the Magazine: How low-income Asian Americans became the forgotten minorities of higher education
If you are driving east on Florin Road toward Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, you will pass under a pedestrian bridge that has a message permanently affixed to it: “If you dream it, you can do it.”
When Students for Fair Admissions sued Harvard in 2014 over its race-conscious admissions policies, only one member of the organization was described in detail, a young man who, according to the lawsuit, deserves a seat at the university. He is the son of Chinese immigrants, attended one of the nation’s top high schools, was captain of the tennis team and got a perfect score on the ACT.
As a remedy, Students for Fair Admissions wants the court to declare Harvard’s admissions practices unconstitutional. But it goes further: It wants an injunction that would bar Harvard admissions officers from learning the race of applicants — a prohibition that might force students to scrub any mention of their race in their applications. If the case advances through the courts, it could have wider implications.
My dad shared a cramped home with some assortment of his seven siblings and other Filipino families or distant relatives who were down on their luck. His father worked as a janitor while he flipped burgers, sometimes sneaking food for his mother and younger siblings. When he started at Burbank High in the late 1960s, the country was roiled with racial tension that spilled over into the school’s hallways.
Asian Americans are now the most economically divided racial group in the country, with the wealthiest 10 percent earning more than 10 times the amount of the poorest 10 percent. Mai Xi Lee, the director of social-emotional learning for the Sacramento City Unified School District, remembers the day she left Laos. She was 5, and her mother slaughtered a chicken and gave her the prized drumstick. Then, her mother told her to pack.
He found support for his crusade among well-educated and wealthy Chinese Americans in places like Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay area, people who had grown suspicious when their high-achieving children were rejected from top-flight schools. They spread the word of their fight through WeChat, a Chinese messaging program.
Lowell High was also one of the early sites of Asian American resistance to affirmative action. In the late 1990s, a group of Chinese parents successfully sued to get the school’s racial quota system — which permitted no single racial group to exceed 40 percent — dismantled. The number of Chinese students at the school has soared, and the number of black and Latino students has plummeted.
I met with about a dozen Hmong students in an empty classroom on the edge of campus. Some of them are aware of the stereotype that Asian Americans are well-off, a notion that makes them conscious of their own station in life. Keng Thao, an 18-year-old who was born in a refugee camp in Thailand, highlighted the difference between him and wealthier Asians using a footwear metaphor: “You see some Asians wearing Jordans. I’m wearing flip-flops.
I asked what it would mean for the students if admissions officers could not consider their race and if they weren’t able to share anything about it on their college applications. They said it would be nearly impossible. “I want them to know that I’m Hmong so they can see that I don’t have money to pay for a private tutor,” Vue said. “Even though I don’t have that help, I still study really hard and still worked hard to get to where I am.
Instead of race, Blum argues, Harvard should lend more consideration to a student’s socioeconomic status, to give students with the odds stacked against them a fighting chance. An expert hired by Blum’s group, Richard Kahlenberg, testified that emphasizing socioeconomic diversity would keep classes racially diverse.
But that’s only part of what has happened since Proposition 209 passed. The data also suggests that the current approach does not benefit all Asians equally. One caveat in measuring the impact that Prop. 209 has had on worse-off Asian American groups is that the University of California system began tracking Asian subgroups only after its passage. But it is clear that some subsets have done better than others. According to U.S.
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