The long legal battle over race-conscious admissions policies ended last summer. But the many cultural currents that shaped the successful lawsuits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill still matter.
And those currents are complex, as OiYan Poon explains in her new book, Asian American Is Not a Color: Conversations on Race, Affirmative Action, and Family (Beacon Press). The researcher and activist set out several years ago to answer a big question: How did members of her diverse community come to hold such conflicting views of colleges’ race-conscious admissions programs — and of racism itself?
Poon, an education equity and senior research fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute, has long studied educational access, the role of race in admissions, and the racial politics of Asian Americans. Her deep dives into admissions data, including the statistics at issue in the lawsuit against Harvard, convinced her that colleges had not been using race-conscious policies unlawfully. “There’s no evidence,” she told National Public Radio last year, “that there’s a practice of anti-Asian discrimination.”
After the U.S. Supreme Court declared such policies unconstitutional in a 6-to-3 decision last summer, some Asian Americans celebrated the landmark ruling while other lamented it. Poon found herself in mourning. “There was this deep uncertainty,” she said in a recent interview with The Chronicle, “and also just, like, anger and rage and sadness all mixed up.”
Poon, who is also co-director of the College Admissions Futures Co-Laborative at the University of Maryland at College Park, still feels the sting of the court’s decision. But she didn’t write Asian American Is Not a Color to argue for a now-defunct practice. Nor did she want to spend too many words rehashing the story of how Ed Blum, a conservative activist and founder of Students for Fair Admissions, made Asian American students the centerpiece of the group’s lawsuit against Harvard, alleging that the university’s admissions practices harmed them.
What Poon sought to understand was why Blum’s arguments resonated with some Asian Americans, and why some so vehemently opposed the same practices that she espoused. “I just couldn’t understand it, based on my own life experiences,” she said.
So Poon interviewed dozens of people throughout the nation. She asked them scores of questions and reflected on their answers. Bit by bit, a picture emerged, full of nuance and contradiction. A picture of striving and struggle, success and defeat, of fundamentally different understandings of racial equity and fairness. A picture of what it means to be Asian American.
Asian American Is Not a Color is deeply personal. Its title sprung from a conversation Poon shared with her daughter, Té Té, one night in 2018. Just 3 at the time and blooming with curiosity, the girl asked, “Mama, are we Black?” And then, “Are we white?” Poon, surprised by the questions, explained, “We’re Asian American.” But Asian American, Té Té replied, “isn’t a color.”
The observation inspired Poon’s approach to the book, full of short reflections addressed to her only child that weave into a broader narrative encompassing the author’s own experiences. She takes us to Forest Hills, a lush, sprawling cemetery in Boston where her paternal grandparents and her mother — “a fighter and survivor” born in Zhongshan, China — are buried near many other Asian Americans, whose graves relatives visit in spring to celebrate Ching Ming, also known as “tomb-sweeping day.”
And Poon takes us to Ludlow, a predominantly white town in western Massachusetts where she grew up. In her book she recalls experiencing racial bullying and harassment, and the times when white classmates would shout at her: “Chink! Go back to China.” When she was 4, she punched a classmate who called her a monkey. Then, in sixth grade, just as she was about to take a standardized state exam, she encountered a demographic question with three possible answers: Black, white, or other; her teacher instructed her to mark “other.” Poon later grappled with the meaning of that word and the confusion it stoked within her.
That confusion, as the book explains, echoed the experiences of many Asian Americans dating back generations. The Naturalization Act of 1870 excluded Asian Americans from the right to become naturalized citizens, leaving them in an ambiguous state of otherness. “The uncertainty of belonging in the U.S.,” Poon writes, “continues to follow contemporary Asian Americans who are often viewed as perpetual foreigners.” And while striving for their experiences to be recognized, their rights to be affirmed, and their voices to count throughout American history, they have “engaged in heated identity wrestling matches.”
Growing up, Poon saw college as the only way out of a town where she would always be marginalized. In an especially revealing passage, she describes why she desperately wanted to attend an Ivy League college. After being told she didn’t belong in America because she wasn’t white, she believed an acceptance from Harvard or Penn “could represent a stamp of approval, more official than my U.S.-born citizenship and passport, that I belonged. … a well-deserved reward and validation of my parents’ constant struggle, exhaustion, and stress.”
When those acceptances didn’t come, Poon was devastated. But, with offers from several other institutions in hand, she got over her disappointment and enrolled at Boston College, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in management. She liked it there.
Still, Poon would remember the feeling of receiving rejections from two of the nation’s most sought-after institutions. Sure, she knew that Harvard and Penn turned down the vast majority of their applicants. But, in her gut, those rejections felt like a powerful message: “How invisible and unimportant I was.”
Her memories of that feeling would help her understand the sky-high stakes that some Asian Americans see in admissions outcomes at the nation’s most-selective colleges — and why some of them sided with white opponents of race-conscious policies.
The ethnic and socioeconomic diversity within the nation’s Asian American community of more than 19 million often goes overlooked. Over all, they have the highest levels of educational attainment and household income among all racial subgroups in the United States. But the wealth gap among Asian Americans is greater than that within any other subgroup: Those in the top 10 percent of income distribution earn more than 10 times as much as those at the bottom, according to an analysis of federal data by the Pew Research Center. Cambodian, Hmong, and Laotian Americans, Poon notes in her book, have some of lowest levels of postsecondary attainment and income in the nation.
Asian Americans’ varied ethnicities, cultures, and experiences can help explain why there never was one monolithic view of race-conscious admissions policies among them. “In the affirmative action debate,” Poon writes, “Asian Americans are wrestling with many different and conflicting views, perhaps reflecting the varied social, cultural, and economic conditions experienced across the Asian diasporic communities. At the heart of the differences lies a disagreement over where anti-Asian racism comes from and the best solutions for dismantling it.”
Poon wanted to unpack that disagreement. So she conducted in-depth interviews of 36 Asian Americans who were leaders or core members of organizations involved in legal and policy debates over race-conscious admissions policies. They represented a range of ethnic identities and socioeconomic backgrounds. Just over half supported race-conscious admissions; the rest were opposed to it. All saw themselves as representing the interests of Asian Americans. And each believed that racism and racial inequality were problems, something that, as Poon notes, many white critics of affirmative action didn’t believe.
But the conversations revealed a prevalent misunderstanding of race-conscious admissions. Just six of those she interviewed could explain accurately how it worked. The rest believed that race-conscious admissions meant quotas for applicants from each racial subgroup, or that it produced an automatic “Asian American penalty.” Those beliefs, Poon writes, drew on an assumption that intelligence can be measured only by standardized tests and high-school grades. And that assumption, Poon writes, rested on “deeply entrenched, conscious and unconscious, racial stereotypes of intelligence among Asian Americans and lack of intelligence among non-Asian people of color.” It troubled her.
Poon wanted to understand each person’s origin story, the experiences that had molded their understanding of race and racism. This inquiry revealed a crucial insight. “They didn’t share a common understanding of the nature of racism,” she writes. “Without a common notion of the problem, it felt like there were different understandings of what it meant to be Asian American.”
The disagreement she examined boils down to this: Critics of race-conscious admissions understood racism as a problem existing within individuals, a matter of “interpersonal disrespect,” while supporters understood it as a systemic problem. The former tended to dismiss race-conscious policies as anachronistic tools for achieving greater racial equity; the latter saw those policies as a necessary response to unjust “structural conditions” that often limit opportunities for nonwhite Americans.
Poon interviewed several Chinese Americans affiliated with groups opposed to race-conscious admissions. They believed that one could overcome racial inequalities, she writes, “through sheer individual grit,” which one subject identified with Chinese cultural and family values. And, she found, they believed that racial disparities resulted from “individual behaviors among people of color.” That is, they apparently understood that a lack of will, determination, and hard work explained racial inequities in higher education. Some who held such views were perhaps predestined to find themselves especially receptive to Blum’s anti-affirmative-action narrative, which essentially pitted Asian American applicants against Black and Latino applicants.
“They viewed race-conscious admissions,” Poon writes, “as an unfair punishment of Asian Americans’ (especially Chinese Americans’) hard work and achievement in favor of other people of color and, in some cases, white people.”
But those who fixate on an individual’s supposed grit, Poon argues, often fail to acknowledge how systemic inequalities can “render even the most herculean individual effort sufficient” for racially marginalized students striving for a particular goal. Such a way of thinking about college access, she concludes, undermines racial equity: “It’s an assimilationist perspective that avoids questioning social, political, and economic systems and norms.”
Though Poon clearly comes down on one side of that divide, her conclusions in Asian American Is Not a Color add up to something more than a partisan argument in an age-old admissions debate.
For one thing, her narrative links the long history of Asian Americans’ struggles to secure rights and recognition to modern debates about educational equity. She traces the stories of “litigious Asian Americans” who sought to change the status quo. In the late 1800s, Takao Ozawa, who was born in Japan, immigrated to the United States, where he later sought to become a U.S. citizen. Though his lawyers argued that he was “white in color,” and therefore eligible for citizenship under naturalization law, the Supreme Court in 1922 ruled against him, concluding that he was not “a member of the Caucasian race.”
Poon contrasts a handful of such lawsuits, in which Asian Americans sought to “gain rights reserved for whites,” with others that confronted systemic racial oppression affecting all people of color. Wong Kim Ark, the U.S.-born son of Chinese immigrants, filed a lawsuit in the late 1800s claiming that he was entitled to American citizenship under the 14th Amendment (and despite the fact that he had left the United States to visit China and later returned, an alleged violation of the Chinese Exclusion Act). But the Supreme Court in 1898 grudgingly sided with the plaintiff, after which, Poon writes, “the principle of birthright citizenship regardless of race became legal precedent.”
In the years ahead, Asian Americans will continue to influence debates over educational opportunity. And, Poon argues, they will confront an important choice between advocating for changes that would either affirm or reject existing racial inequalities and hierarchies, changes that might benefit just some or all Asian American students and those that might benefit all students of color. She argues on behalf of Asian American activism in education that pursues “expansive notions of racial equity and justice.”
One of of the most moving scenes in Poon’s book describes a wintry night in Boston a few years back. Hours after visiting her mother’s grave at the Forest Hills cemetery, she holds her daughter close and explains that one’s ancestors never leave them, even when they die.
That moment echoes another a major theme of Asian American Is Not a Color. “The past is always present,” she writes. “What our ancestors and elders did in the past has created the condition of the present. And what we do in the present — what will become history — will shape the future.”
Many of the Asian Americans Poon interviewed, including those she disagreed with, reminded her of her parents and older relatives — “deeply human and imperfect elders whom I love.” She realized during her research that those who held opposing views of race-conscious admissions policies were not, as she writes, “unthinking racial props” for white critics of the practice: “They were thoughtful and deeply invested in their efforts to advocate for what they understood to be Asian American rights.”
Poon told The Chronicle about an especially intense discussion with one Chinese American father over Zoom. The two disagreed intensely about race-conscious admissions. “In the interview, he was yelling at me most of the time,” she recalls.
But when his daughter, who appeared to be 7 or 8, walked into the room, Poon saw his demeanor change, heard his voice soften. Watching him speak to her lovingly, she felt a sudden connection with him. “He said ‘Here’s one of the reasons I do what I do.’ And I was like ‘I can say the same thing about my own daughter.’”
Asian American Is Not a Color is, in part, an act of acceptance, a quest for common ground, a recognition of the fact that Asian Americans share many common experiences even as they hold disparate views. Poon doesn’t want to sugarcoat anything: “Some of the things a few of these people said were absolutely just awful,” she said. But she tried, in the end, to find a lesson, one that she might, perhaps, pass along to her daughter.
“We’re just so hard-lined, so quick to say, ‘No, I’m not going to listen to someone who disagrees with me,’” Poon said. “That was the biggest learning experience for me. Even when I was disgusted by some of the anti-Black and other ideas I heard from some of the people I interviewed, I wanted to try and hear out how they came to be where they’re at — to engage them, with questions and curiosity, instead of just saying ‘Let me tell you how wrong you are.’ The latter approach is not really getting us a whole lot right now in our society.”
