EDUCATION
Why Black Americans Still Get the Blame After Affirmative Action
It's easier to cast blame than to understand the process

Imagine being blamed for something you had no control over like the rain falling out of the sky. That's what it feels like when Black Americans catch the blame for other groups' misfortunes despite having the least social capital to make systemic changes. For instance, Jon Wang, an 18-year-old Asian American student with exceptional grades and standardized test scores, had his heart set on attending the college of his choice. When they rejected his application, he blamed Black students, none of whom were actually standing in his way.
According to Wang and the White conservatives who gleefully rode his argument's coattails, too many Black students were accepted into colleges and universities with the help of race-based affirmative action policies. As a plaintiff in a suit filed against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, Wang, who couldn't fathom why his grades weren't enough to gain his acceptance, targeted Black students, who ironically remain underrepresented on the elite college campuses and universities he sought to attend. Whether knowingly or not, Wang's complaint had a snowball effect and became the justification for ending policies designed to foster a diverse student body.
If you thought this whole ugly mess of blaming Black students for high-achieving Asian American students not getting into the college of their choice would be buried after the Supreme Court decided to ban race-based affirmative action policies, you'd be sadly mistaken. When ABC reported that a Bay area student, 18-year-old Stanley Zhong, was rejected by sixteen colleges he applied to, some quickly blamed Black students again. "It's crazy that American universities can have officially racist policies, but the victims are Asian kids, so we all collectively shrug," one man posted.
Of course, he was playing upon the conservative trope that diversity programs are racist, ignoring the fact that race-based affirmative action policies were used to mitigate the racism Black, Latino, Indigenous, and even some Asian Americans continue to experience in academic admissions. Also, his response skipped over the obvious point that schools can no longer use race-based affirmative action policies. So, what policy is he alluding to? Maybe if high school students took the time to understand the admissions process for elite colleges is competitive and grades alone are not always sufficient to get you into the college of your dreams, they wouldn't be dead-set on blaming Black Americans.
As a psych major, I can tell you that Wang is absolutely wrong about how the college admission process works. For starters, only so many students can attend any given college program. The resources of a college, no matter how vast, are indeed limited. Given these limitations, administrators have to decide who to extend an offer to attend college. Grades and standardized test scores are not the only metrics they use to make this decision. We know that many students receive athletic scholarships or get accepted based on their parents' alumni associations (a policy that disproportionately benefits White students because of America's legacy of racial segregation), which have nothing to do with someone's ability to exhibit academic excellence. Yet, Black students became the unjustified target of their scorn.
Factors such as "leadership experience, course load difficulty, letters of recommendation," and "application essays" are regularly considered alongside grades to make a final decision. This means that a student with great grades (As and Bs) with several letters of recommendation and leadership experience may be more likely to be admitted than a student with excellent grades with nothing more. It makes sense that people who score high on standardized tests and make excellent grades (all As) expect to be acknowledged for their efforts, but attempting to force colleges and universities into only using these metrics is limiting. As human beings, we deserve to be judged by more than our standardized test scores and grades. Also, it's short-sighted to ignore the fact that grades are impacted by school funding resources, which have been proven to be discriminatorily distributed in this country, or the fact that standardized tests are racially discriminatory measures that should be taken with a grain of salt.
Michael Wang, one of the students who "set in motion the latest movement to end affirmative action on college campuses," claims now, "A part of me regrets what I've put forward." Of course, since filing a complaint, Wang has learned a lot more about the debate and acknowledged that he never wanted to see affirmative action go away, just reformed, but that nuance got lost in the political sauce. By and large, White conservatives capitalized on Wang's complaint, weaponizing the model minority myth to drive a wedge between Asian American students and Black students. But what's done is done; Wang won even if he regrets doing so. The trope that alleges “diversity” is the bad guy on campus reigns supreme, even after diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts took a major hit after the Supreme Court banned race-based affirmative action policies. Why are Black students still getting the blame when they are the most underrepresented racial group?
There's always this assumption that Black students can't hack it or that our mere presence is evidence of a diversity program at play, and on the other hand, these attacks demonize students who are given an opportunity based on a diversity program even though once they're accepted, they are provided with the same resources and expected to meet the same academic rigor as every other student. Black students in America, a marginalized group that is the least likely to be extended opportunities, are being targeted as a group of undesirables, a group of undeserving people, because of this endless pattern of blaming Black students.
Don't Asian American students like Wang understand that they wouldn't be attending college alongside White students if it weren't for the efforts of Black Americans, which made integration possible? As Fèi Qǐhè 费起鹤, a Chinese student, noted in the early 1900s, "America is not so good a friend to China as I had mistakenly thought, because in no part of the Earth are the Chinese so ill-treated and humiliated as in America." White Americans refused to let Asian American students integrate and attend their primary schools and colleges. So, why do some treat Black Americans like the man behind the mirror, the ones calling the shots, depriving Asian American students of opportunities? For some, it's easier to blame diversity programs designed to help Black students (that don't exist anymore) than to critique the process, confront those in power, or accept that excellent grades may not be the only qualification schools seek.
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