-We’re here at the center of Bentonville Square.
There used to be a Confederate statue housed here.
I was involved in the activism and the protesting, uh, surrounding
removal of the monument.
It was a really fraught experience, but now
it’s been gone for a couple of years and there’s a beautiful sunflower
bed that’s replaced it.
Muskaan Arshad became a social activist due to her own challenges
growing up Asian American in Arkansas.
So in 2021, when she applied to college, she decided to
write about how race had often defined her experiences.
-When I was growing up, there was always this inherent feeling that
being brown, being Indian, wasn’t good enough.
I think the youngest time I experienced that was when I
was in class, and we were doing, like, an activity that involved
everyone holding hands. And,
just, no one would touch me.
Just being, like, 7 years old, and
hearing and seeing your peers, like, not be able to touch you just
because of your skin color, and thinking you’re just inherently dirty
in some way, that was just an extremely hurtful moment, and I
think, just, was the first instance of many that really cemented the fact
that being brown, being Indian, being Asian American wasn’t an
accepted thing.
My race was just essential in every part of my
application and who I am.
Without mentioning my race and how it was
part of my life, I don’t think I could have painted a full picture of who I was,
and maybe not even gotten into Harvard.
It’s the kind of history that universities like Harvard have long
given special attention to, in order to promote a diverse student body.
Supreme Court decisions dating back to the 1970s solidified the
idea that race can be explicitly considered as a factor
in college admissions.
But that changed in June of 2023.
-Today’s Supreme Court decision delivering a blow to affirmative
action policies.
A sharply divided court scrapping decades of
precedent, striking down race-based admissions programs
at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, ruling their efforts
to create racially diverse campuses are unconstitutional.
The man behind these Supreme Court cases is Edward Blum,
who spent decades seeding lawsuits to challenge affirmative action practices.
-Kids check which race they belong to, and then they’re judged
either affirmatively or negatively by competitive admissions offices
based upon the box they check.
That is inherently unfair.
That is inherently polarizing and inherently
illegal and unconstitutional.
Blum lost an earlier case in which he represented a white student
who challenged affirmative action at the University of Texas.
But his 2014 lawsuits against Harvard and
the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, drew attention for a
more unusual argument: that elite universities were using
affirmative action policies to discriminate against one
minority group, Asian Americans.
-Harvard systematically raises the bar for Asian Americans and
systematically lowers it for whites, African Americans and Hispanics.
We allege that Harvard has a quota.
That possibility long worried some in the Asian American community,
but it was one student’s fight that made it front-page news, attracting
Blum to the cause.
-Michael Wang did everything he could to get into Harvard.
-Which, I actually sang Obama’s inauguration, multiple speech and
debate awards, uh, piano competitions.
-But in 2013, the California high school student was rejected by his
dream school, even, as he says, students with lower grades got in.
-I spent middle school, high school, really grinding away, taking as
many AP classes as I could, participating in as many
extracurriculars as humanly possible, really just trying to put
together the best resume
for these Ivy leagues and all these top-tier institutions.
Ultimately when I got my decisions, you know, they
weren’t what I expected.
So I wrote to their admissions offices by email
and asked them, can you tell me how you utilize race
as a factor of admission?
All I wanted to see was, you know, is me being Asian American
something that disadvantaged me on my application,
and the answers I received back from those
admissions offices were unsatisfactory, and so that’s where,
you know, in 2013 I decided to file my three complaints, and
that’s how I got started on this whole road.
While the U.S. Department of Education ultimately decided not to
act on Michael Wang’s complaints, in 2014, Blum began to seek out
Asian American students to bring a lawsuit.
-The lawsuit against Harvard University for discriminating
against Asian American applicants just took a new twist with claims
that the bias against them is a, quote, personal thing, including
such traits as positive personality, likability and attractive to be with.
-You cannot remedy past discrimination with new discrimination.
The cases deeply divided the Asian American community.
-We are united today to protect opportunity.
Blum’s lawsuit is racist in its effort to whitewash history.
-We’re still a minority at the end of the day.
Asians have been discriminated against.
I would hope that, as a minority and as
an Asian American, we’re not the ones losing out.
But Blum’s lawsuits also reopened the larger debate, one that the
Supreme Court famously grappled with in 2003, in a case called
Grutter v. Bollinger.
-For the first time since the ’70s, the Supreme Court today took
affirmative action in education dead on.
Can race be a factor in college admissions, period.
Two white females say the University of Michigan denied
them admission using tough standards for whites.
-They say things like, we’re selective, but they’re making
selections on racial lines.
-I think that the University of Michigan is using a preference that
is based solely on skin color.
And that is wrong.
-A position shared by more than two-thirds of Americans, according
to a Newsweek poll.
Sixty-eight percent said they opposed racial
preferences in college admissions for Blacks.
Seventy percent said they opposed preferences for Hispanics.
-Those who were challenging the affirmative action program were
arguing that there was something deeply offensive about counting
and sorting people by race.
On the other side, of course, was, look, it’s
been working; without it, we’d be back to where we were.
So, these are two profoundly different ways of
looking at the problem, and, it came at a very important moment
in the court’s own evolution.
At the center of that court was a conservative former politician who
had overcome discrimination to become its first female justice, but
struggled with the question of affirmative action.
Her name was Sandra Day O’Connor.
-People paid a lot of attention because these issues of race really
touched, uh, deep cords in the American fabric.
One issue with affirmative action is that, um,
somebody gets a benefit on the basis of race.
That means that, if it’s a zero-sum game, somebody,
because of their race, didn’t get that benefit.
And, that really bothered her.
I think she very deeply grappled with the issue that
was presented in Grutter, and the deeper issue about the role of race
in American life and American law.
-We knew from the very beginning that whatever she thought the
conclusion should be, we weren’t going to sway her from that, but
she was someone who, in the difficult cases, was open to
debate and compromise.
That desire for compromise was helped along by two unusual briefs.
-One from the military emphasizing why affirmative action in the
academies is important to producing diverse leadership, and
then one from Fortune 500 companies that emphasized why
having diverse institutions is important in populating the
workforce with people who’ve had the experience of interacting with
those who are not necessarily like themselves.
-The arguments made sense to her as a reflection of the America that
she knew, and that she had watched from this perch as a
Supreme Court justice, and so she
came up with her very modulated response.
-Student body diversity is a compelling state interest that can
justify the narrowly tailored use of race in admissions.
-Yes, there’s room for a limited kind of affirmative action in higher
education that doesn’t have a fixed quota, that takes a look at each
applicant as an individual.
So the decision in Grutter kept affirmative
action alive.
O’Connor’s ruling was important because it upheld the use of
affirmative action to racially diversify universities and because
it affirmed a broad rationale: doing so was good for the country.
- I think that she felt like the cost to the country would be too great in
striking it down, but that it was also a divisive remedy, that it was
incumbent on those in a position to do something about the disparities
in educational achievement and access that make affirmative action
necessary to address those underlying problems.
Her ruling also contained a ticking time bomb.
-She did something very unusual in the opinion.
She said, basically, we expect that, uh, 25 years from now
American society would've worked this problem out, and
it won’t need us anymore.
It won’t need affirmative action anymore.
-Diversity begins with me!
-A landmark decision from a bitterly divided Supreme Court.
The lawsuits brought by Blum’s group, Students for Fair Admissions,
highlighted disparities in the treatment of Asian American
college applicants.
But they also sought what Blum had long been advocating.
-The whole Asian issue was just a stalking horse.
What it’s really about is a university may not
consider race, full stop.
And it, the whole thing was an effort to get
that question before this Supreme Court, and it has succeeded.
-It's humbling to know that in some small way, um, I was able to help
get these very important issues, um, before the U.S. Supreme Court.
While satisfied that the Supreme Court validated his concern, Wang
says he’s now worried by what may come next.
-I think I may have set in motion things that
might have been out of control.
Affirmative action is still very necessary in helping
minorities who actually do need it.
Maybe there’s this one problem with implementation.
That doesn’t mean that we toss affirmative action out the door.
There is a middle ground.
Many of the nation’s universities say the ruling will not stop their
efforts to diversify their student bodies, but they may face an
increase in litigation over their implementation.
California’s experience in the 1990s and early
2000s shows how difficult achieving this goal may become.
-When there was a proposition that barred the use of race in admissions,
African American representation in the class
plummeted, and so that was kind of a controlled experiment.
It's possible that these justices could
basically hamstring, um, you know, all of American education.
For student activists like Muskaan, the importance of finding a way to
keep diversity alive in higher education is clear.
-I think a quote that really sticks with me is that no racial group has
a monopoly on talent or intelligence, but certain students
do have a monopoly on opportunity.
And I think race-conscious admissions really
takes that into account.
We’re trying to pretend we’re in a society
where race doesn’t matter, where everything is race blind, and
everything is equitable, when these systemic issues are still right
underneath, but we just aren’t addressing that.