Last week SCOTUS ruled that race cannot be used in the college admissions process. Many in and outside of the Asian American community see the ruling as positive for Asian American students who are supposedly disadvantaged by affirmative action policies. Brad talks with Dr. Janelle Wong of the University of Maryland about what the data tells us concerning Asian American acceptance rates, how this ruling will affect BIPOC Americans on the whole, and the ways the model minority myth is used to divide and conquer people of color and Black Americans in the United States.
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
To donate:
venmo - @straightwhitejc
Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
AXIS Moondi AXIS Moondi You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
Visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, and today I have the pleasure of interviewing a return guest, and that is Dr. Janelle Wong.
So, Dr. Wong, thanks for being here.
Great to be here.
Thanks for having me.
I have to say this, you were like maybe guest number five or six on this show, and Janelle, there have now been like Nearly 500 episodes.
So you like made it happen and I have not yet sent you the millions of dollars I owe you for coming on the show early on when we hadn't, you know, you got an email from me and we're like, who is this man?
And why does he want me to spend an hour talking to him?
So.
It's all you!
We'll always be grateful that you came on and talked to us.
I send out that episode probably at least once a month, somebody emails me the question and I say, Hey, we covered that way back in 2018.
Here's the episode.
Go listen to Dr. Wong on that.
So, all right.
Let me tell folks about you.
Cause it's been a while since you've been here.
You are professor of American studies at the University of Maryland.
You were faculty at the University of Southern California before that.
The author of a number of works.
One is what we discussed last time, and that is a book called Immigrants, Evangelicals, and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change.
Another is Democracy's Promise, Immigrants and American Civic Institutions.
You have several co-edited and authored books as well.
But today we're here to talk about something I think is very important and is on the minds of many of us, especially those of us who are Asian American.
And that is the issue of affirmative action and Asian Americans in the United States and college admissions.
If you're listening to this, friends, you know that last week there was a court decision, a Supreme Court decision related to affirmative action and basically said that race will not be considered in the application process at places like Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
And part of this whole kind of process and the fallout from the decision has been a large-scale discussion of Asian Americans as a group that is supposedly or potentially or mythologically disadvantaged by affirmative action when it comes to college admission.
So let me just start here and ask this.
Myths about Asian American students Go like this.
If you're Asian, you have to work harder to gain acceptance at an elite university.
Can you spell out those myths?
And can you also spell out why they persist in Asian American communities?
Why do some Asian Americans sort of buy into them?
Yeah, I mean, you nailed it.
Asian Americans have to score higher to get in.
Another similar charge is that Asian Americans shouldn't check the box, the Asian box on applications.
And why do they persist?
I think for two reasons.
One, College admissions advisors often perpetuate these myths.
It's really unfortunate.
But second, they persist because of the model minority stereotype.
It is just kind of in this particular context, a lot of Asian Americans question the model minority stereotype, know that it's harmful.
But in the case of college admissions, There is a kind of lack of critique of the model minority stereotype.
And there's almost like a wholesale swallowing of the myth in this particular context.
That is the myth that Asian-Americans work harder, care more about education than especially Black and Latina students.
That is a part of the myth that we don't talk about as much.
But that has really come to the fore in this court decision.
We'll come back to the myth, but I think one of the things that you pointed out in a recent op-ed at the Los Angeles Times with Viet Thanh Nguyen is that the model minority myth is, there's a lot of aspects of it that are hurtful.
One of them is that it is a divide and conquer strategy.
It really is meant to divide Asian Americans from other BIPOC people in the country, and we see that in this case.
We'll come back to that in a second.
One of the ways that the myth persists is when people talk about standardized tests, SATs and ACTs and things like this.
So one of the things people say is, well, if an Asian student gets a really good score on the SAT, that's one thing, but it's not going to help them as much when it comes to a student who is white or black or Latino, when they get a similar score or even a lesser score.
I want to just talk a minute about the SAT as a kind of problematic metric for deciding admissions.
Could you just give us like the very basics as to why the SAT is a problem?
So the SAT is a standardized test that was taken up in greater and greater, became a greater and greater part of college admissions over the last 20 years.
And that's because so many more students are applying to college.
Colleges and universities needed some way to be able to sort through students.
What got lost in kind of the uptake of the SAT is that it has never been a fair tool.
It is rooted in racism in that it's developed by this racist, you know, kind of Very clearly eugenicist researcher Carl Brigham.
Standardized test scores are really, really overused and so much is put into standardized tests as a tool of merit.
When actually, standardized test scores are very, very highly associated with parental education and family income.
In fact, more highly associated with those two factors, parental education and income, than with college success or completion.
You know, why is that problematic?
Because we would not use, there's not anyone on either side of this debate who would use parental education or as admissions criteria, right?
Now, de facto, we tend to do that, but the SAT is just another way that we capture that information.
And lost in the kind of 140 points more than white students meme and talking point is that Asian Americans as a whole, not all, but 80% of Asian Americans have higher education and incomes than any other racial group.
And, you know, yes, there are other groups that have lower levels of income and parental education.
And those groups don't tend to do as well on the tests on average.
And so rather than hard work and natural proclivity for test taking, there are these other structural factors in play.
So I would say that, you know, considering any other factors beyond the test really doesn't amount to what was the charge in this Harvard-UNC case, which is intentional discrimination against It is simply acknowledging that standardized tests reflect economic inequalities and are not the best indicators of merit.
That's why many universities have actually dropped the SAT.
You said a couple things there that really seem worth highlighting and hovering on.
One is that you talked about 80% of Asian Americans having higher income levels and or parental education than other groups.
It highlights the diversity of this category, Asian American.
I mean, it's an overwhelmingly heterogeneous category.
It includes People from East Asia, from Southeast Asia, from South Asia, from the Indian subcontinent, and so on, and so on, and so on.
So I think that's one.
I think it brings up the histories of immigration in the country and the ways that immigration from various parts of the country, including something that's not immigration, but is forced migration in the Middle Passage, all of those things play into this.
The other thing though, and I hope people can sort of understand what you're saying here about the SAT and it being about income level and parental education.
I was once a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Santa Barbara is a very expensive place to live.
I did not have a lot of money.
And so someone offered me money to be a tutor for the SAT.
And when they told me how much they would pay me per hour, I thought to myself, are you really?
And it was basically very wealthy families in Santa Barbara who would come to PhD students and say, help my kid improve there on the verbal part of the SAT.
I'll pay you triple digit dollars per hour.
And as somebody who made very little money and was worried about making rent, it was like, sure.
And after I did that for six months, I realized what was going on.
I was like, if If you grow up and at age 17, someone hires a private tutor to come over here and teach you how to take this test, and they do that with you three days a week for six months, you're going to do better on the test than somebody who didn't have that opportunity, maybe only took the test the first time, like when they showed up on that Saturday morning to sit in the exam room for four hours and do the SAT.
All that to say, I hope that highlights for people how the SAT is based in something more than, as you say, a natural proclivity for test taking or aptitude or anything else.
Here's the question I think pertains to this case.
Do SAT results over the past decades show that Asian American students have to score significantly higher than others to gain admissions to top schools?
So I think Julie Park, Julie J. Park, my colleague at University of Maryland has said it best.
Just because Asian-Americans exhibit the highest test scores doesn't mean they have to have the highest test scores to get in.
And the fact is that even in places where affirmative action is banned, banned to an extent that's even more restrictive than this court case, and that is California.
So in the court case, you know, race can still be Expressed experiences with the race can still be shared as part of the college essay.
Colleges can still ask about it.
For instance, in California, the consideration of race is banned in college admissions.
And in that case, we still see a test score differential.
And that test score differential is in part because of these socioeconomic differences between Asian Americans and other groups.
And so I think there's very little evidence that Asian Americans have to have a higher test score, and that any kind of difference between test scores is due to anti-Asian discrimination in these cases.
Because we also see that, I mean, it kind of, if you think through the case a little bit more deeply than the headlines, then it also becomes obvious that, you know, there are going to be differences between groups in terms of test scores, average test scores, because of resources.
And for those groups that don't Those students that don't score as high on a test, they might have to do a little bit better on other metrics.
Now, the mistake in this case is that people were like, oh, you have the highest test scores?
Well, you should also be getting the highest personal ratings.
Well, that's not necessarily true.
Other groups that don't have those test scores are going to have to show more strength in those other areas.
So we have students who are, yeah, if we take a student X who has a very high test score, and I actually remember somebody from my high school, they got a perfect score on the SAT.
But as a college candidate, they were not necessarily at the top of the ranking when it came to other aspects of their portfolio.
And there were some of us in high school who thought, well, so-and-so got a perfect score in the SAT, shouldn't they just get admitted to Harvard or to MIT?
And we sort of had to realize as 16-year-olds, oh, that's not how it works.
You actually have to write a personal statement and you have to show all these other aspects of your dossier.
Now, let's come back to the model minority myth and how the model minority myth might play into the factors in an application that do go beyond the standardized test score when we talk about those other components.
The model minority myth basically says that Asian Americans are the model minority.
They're hardworking, smart, quiet, peaceful.
There's a lot of ways that it's sort of manufactured.
How does this play into the process of college admissions in ways that are hurtful, perhaps, and in ways that sometimes, unfortunately, are advantageous?
So, you know, Edward Blum, the white legal activist who brought this suit with Asian American plaintiffs, Asian American plaintiffs, by the way, who never testified in the trial.
The only two Asian Americans who testified in the trial were college students who defended affirmative action and Opposed the lawsuit.
But Edward Blum's suit makes much of this the fact that Asian Americans might have been subject to implicit bias in the ways in which their applications were evaluated.
And what he brought forward were a small number of applications that his team reviewed, and he had access to a lot of applications.
He didn't bring back Any that showed discrimination, by the way, but he did bring forward a few applications that said things like Asian Americans were very, an applicant was very quiet or quiet and strong.
And of course, I saw this and I was like, oh my God, because you think this is the model minority stereotype and it's hurting us because These readers are thinking Asian Americans are like these passive nerds that don't have leadership qualities.
But then if you read through the court documents, you see that those exact same comments, very quiet, quiet and strong, were comments that were also Written on black, Latino, and white applicant files as well.
This was not an Asian American thing.
And so, you know, there's a lot of fears invoked here because of the model minority myth.
Of course, I'm ever vigilant for the model minority myth.
But in fact, you know, and I'm not saying Asian-Americans don't face implicit bias.
They do.
Right.
Asian-Americans do experience implicit bias that they are nerdy or quiet as you know, but all non-white groups experience implicit bias and Asian-Americans.
And I think we need to contend with this.
You know, that stereotype that we are quiet and nerdy, that is what fuels this idea that we're also super competent when it comes to academics, that we are hard workers who are really smart.
And this provides actually And the court case did show that Asian Americans had a bit of an unexplained higher rating on the academic rating beyond test scores, beyond grades, and that we can attribute to this implicit bias that really no other non-white group benefits from in that way.
And there's really a kind of danger here.
Within our own community, Internalization of the model minority myth, internalization of the idea that we work harder and value education more than other groups, researches have shown that that is associated with anti-Black attitudes.
And, you know, it's just it's just a sort of snowball effect.
Once again, it shows the ways that the model minority myth is a divide and conquer strategy.
If within the Asian American community, and I have seen this firsthand in my own family, if you can have Asian American people who adopt and accept the model minority myth that, oh yes, somehow we are.
As Asian, Asian American people, something, something, something, smarter, harder working, etc.
Oh, that must mean that other groups, minority groups, other groups who are non-white must be less.
They must be different, right?
And you can see how it really has a pernicious effect across the board.
Let's talk about California.
You mentioned this 25 years ago.
The California University System did away with affirmative action in the college admissions.
You're a Californian.
This is something that you've been part of firsthand.
When you look at the data, Did getting rid of affirmative action in California help Asian American students gain access to California's top schools as those in this case at the Supreme Court would claim, right?
The claim is by the the plaintiffs here is if you get rid of affirmative action then Asian Americans will have a level playing field quote-unquote and they will gain access in more in greater numbers in the numbers they quote-unquote deserve to the nation's top schools.
Well, California is a test case.
What happened there?
So in California, an economist, Zach Bleemer, has studied this.
What he shows is that when affirmative action was banned, Asian American and white students were slightly more likely to get into those very top schools.
And some would say, you know, in an amount that wasn't insignificant to get into Berkeley and UCLA.
But what didn't happen was any kind of change in their economic outcomes, right?
So they might have had the more prestigious college admission, but it really didn't change Asian Americans and white students' economic outcomes.
However, for the 20 years since it was banned, It's been really clear that there were major negative impacts on Black and Latin-A students, not only in terms of their enrollment at the most prestigious campuses.
At the other campuses, there's been a bit of, you know, now it's more like it was prior to the ban.
But at UCLA and Berkeley, enrollment enrollment went down.
They haven't yet recovered completely, although it's creeped up.
And their economic earnings show dramatic negative effects over time.
So that's like a generation of people negatively affected where there wasn't really much benefit for white and Asian students.
And so all of that for what?
To just further undermine economic opportunities with no real benefit for white and Asian Americans.
And that's, I think, really, really what we have to look at as this as a test case.
One of the best explanations of this I've heard came from Joy Reid on MSNBC, and what she said there was, look, I was a black student at what was a pretty underfunded school.
I was smart.
I was nerdy.
But because of affirmative action, Harvard was affirmatively looking for students that might have fallen through the cracks in situations where their school districts were underfunded, where their socioeconomic privilege was not present for them to do things like fly to Harvard and take a tour or to show interest in being part of the campus.
And so because I did not have those resources, I was never going to show up on Harvard's radar, even though I was really qualified to go and had a great case for them to accept me.
And so what Joya Reed says there is like, a Harvard person reached out, I met with them, and they realized that, oh, by looking at my performance and portfolio, I was actually a good candidate for Harvard.
That was affirmative action, meaning there was an affirmative mandate, a mandate to be active in looking for students from groups That are perhaps underfunded in terms of their school district, are part of groups where the economic resources are not as present across the board, and to usher them into the pipeline of the university, whether it's an Ivy League school or a University of California school, it doesn't mean that somebody who wasn't qualified went to Harvard.
It means that somebody who just wouldn't have shown up on the radar went to Harvard.
And I think that's the difference.
That's one of the ways we can dispel some of the myths here about all of this.
You mentioned this, and I guess I'll just touch on it briefly and see if there's anything to add, but it seems as if doing away with affirmative action in California's universities did have a negative effect on Black and Latino enrollment for some time, and especially at those top schools.
And I guess if I can just ask you to maybe spell this out a little further, What you're talking about here is economic outcomes.
So if black and Latino students are at places like Berkeley or UCLA, you're saying that there are economic differences that are made as a result of those experiences and getting those degrees?
There are.
So what Zach Gleamer's research shows is that black and Latino students took a real hit in terms of, you know, earnings over the last 20 years after this policy, whereas he did not find evidence of improvements in long run outcomes, economic or otherwise, from the banning of affirmative action for white and Asian American students.
And so You know, I think one of the things that we really have to contend with here is there's a lot of energy going into the banning of race conscious admissions, and it's not going to necessarily create the benefits that are maybe expected, assumed, but it really does mean a closing off of some opportunities.
And that closing off is not just a result of the sort of technicalities of the policies.
What Zach Bleemer found is many fewer Black and Latino students applied to UCLA and Berkeley.
And I just spoke with an undergraduate who just graduated from Berkeley, and he said he was one of two percent of Black students at Berkeley when he graduated.
Yeah, it feels like, and I've seen this on social media, I've seen students saying, well, it feels like you don't want us.
It feels like, what's the point?
Why should I try?
This is not a place that wants me.
I have spent most of my career teaching at predominantly white institutions, students that serve a majority of white students.
there is a feeling of BIPOC students on those campuses, at least in my own experience of, this is not a place that perhaps was built for us and a place we've always feel very welcome.
And so you can start to see how this sort of seeps into not only just being on campus and feeling like, well, I'm only a small fraction of the student body here, but the application process, like what's the point?
Like, come on, they don't want someone like me to apply to their school.
So, all right.
We've heard a lot about, unfortunately, I don't know about you, but unfortunately my timeline has been filled with a lot of Asian American folks perhaps celebrating this decision as something that is a win for equality and so on.
From the data that you have, how do most Asian Americans feel about affirmative action programs?
You know, I guess there are kind of two strains of data.
On the one hand, API data surveys conducted in multiple Asian languages with multiple Asian groups show pretty consistently that a majority of Asian Americans across different national origin groups support affirmative action.
More recent data coming out right after this decision, now that's done with a very small number of Asian American respondents who are not interviewed in language, shows that Asian Americans are accepting and And approve of this court case in particular.
So I think you can see that in general, Asian-Americans do support affirmative action and race conscious admissions, but they're also showing that they are.
And I wouldn't be surprised if polling about this case in particular, they are going to support the decision.
And there's an inconsistency there, but it's also, you know, it is the model minority stereotype is very seductive.
I think what's important to take from these last few days is that major and many Asian American civil rights organizations, including Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Chinese for Affirmative Action, C-RAC, the Southeast Asian Resource Action Center, many more condemned the Supreme Court decision, do support affirmative action, have been supporting affirmative action for the past Decades.
And that's not going to change for many of us.
This is kind of an existential moment for solidarity.
And so I expect to see Asian-Americans supporting affirmative action, not only because, yes, they benefit from a more diverse learning environment.
Yes, because some Asian-Americans definitely benefit from race conscious policies, but also because It's the right thing to do.
It is not fair to foreclose opportunities for those who have faced systemic racism.
Yeah, cannot agree more with that point.
Well, as we close, I just want to ask you one more question, and I know you study data, so you may not like questions like this, so I'm just going to be very aware of that.
A lot of us are thinking about legacy.
Legacy as part of an admission process to a place like Harvard.
Did you have family members that went here?
What is your family's history with this institution?
So on and so forth.
We're now seeing a court case brought against Harvard on that basis, saying that legacy is an unfair criterion for admission.
Do you have thoughts on legacy as playing into this puzzle?
Are there comments to make here for you from your perspective as a scholar at this point, or is it more of a wait and see?
No, I think, you know, I'm not sure this court would eliminate legacy admissions.
That was on the table to some extent, and they did not do it.
I think the arguments against legacy are very powerful.
And I will also say, as an Asian-American community, we also need to Acknowledge that in the Harvard briefs, there is some evidence that enough affirmative action has been so great for Asian Americans that we now have many generations of Asian American students that have, in fact, graduated from Harvard.
And the research in the brief showed that Asian American legacies actually were more likely to be admitted than white legacies.
It's a complicated puzzle.
It's nuanced and it's, it's not one that I don't know about you.
The headlines in this case are ones that are easy for people to read and I think have a certain reaction to.
It's one of those, to me, cases that you go to the barbecue and you hear somebody who's probably spent all of 45 seconds thinking about this, giving you a very strong opinion about.
Affirmative action and race and this and that.
And when you actually dig into the details, there's no straight lines.
There's nuance.
But as I think you said just a minute ago, what's clear to me is an opportunity as an Asian American community to say that what is right, what is just, is most important.
And that should be our concern, especially as it comes to those who have been systemically oppressed in this country.
And we'll just leave it there.
Are there places people can find you?
You're writing a lot right now.
You're interviewing a lot, talking about this.
If people want to continue to follow you and your work, where's the best place?
So I am on Twitter at Professor Janelle, Prof Janelle Wong, but trolls, please don't come after me.
No trolls listening, I don't think.
There's probably a couple.
I know there's a couple because they email me.
Anyway, good to hear from you all.
But as always, find me at Straight White JC.
Find our show at Straight White JC.
Find me at Bradley Onishi.
You can always use your help on PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo.
We're an indie show, no grand, no big university funding, just us doing our best three times a week.
So if that's something you can consider, please do.
You can find all the info for our stuff in the show notes.
You can check us out at straightwhiteamericanjesus.com.
