Rejecting Honorary Whiteness: Asian Americans and the Attack on Race-conscious Admissions

• Jurisdiction: United States,Federal
• Publication year: 2021
• Citation: Vol. 70 No. 7

Rejecting Honorary Whiteness: Asian Americans and the Attack on Race-Conscious Admissions

Philip Lee

REJECTING HONORARY WHITENESS: ASIAN AMERICANS AND THE ATTACK ON RACE-CONSCIOUS ADMISSIONS

Philip Lee^*

Abstract

Since the 1960s, Asian Americans have been labeled by the dominant society as the "model minority." This status is commonly juxtaposed against so-called "problem" minorities such as African Americans and Latinx Americans. In theory, the model minority narrative serves as living proof that racial barriers to social and economic development no longer exist in America. If Asians can succeed against all odds, the reasoning goes, so can everyone else. Further, if a member of a minority group fails, it is because of their own lack of diligence and ambition, and not some supposed systemic unfairness. However, the model minority narrative serves as nothing more than a legitimizing myth that positions minority groups in opposition to one another and preserves both the benefits and disadvantages of the existing racial hierarchy. Even more, it is an implicit invitation for Asian Americans to assume an "honorary white" status—the dominant society's conferral of social benefits to nonwhite people who pose little threat to the racial status quo.

The recent Harvard affirmative action case brought by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) is an apt illustration. SFFA, led by a white conservative crusader against affirmative action, recruited Asian Americans to serve as plaintiffs in a case designed to end race-conscious admissions. However, SFFA's proposed colorblind remedy will not benefit Asian Americans. Instead, I argue that the interests of Asian Americans converge with other racial minorities in America—a substantive and ongoing convergence of interests to preserve affirmative action in higher education to enhance the learning experience of all students. In doing so, I reveal the critical reasons why Asian Americans should reject the invitation to honorary whiteness, which only serves to hinder America's ongoing battle against its historic legacy of white supremacy.

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I. Whiteness as an Access Card to Education During American Slavery and Throughout Jim and Jane Crow.....1477
II. Whiteness as Racialized Educational Advantage after Brown.............................................................................................1483
III. The Harvard Admissions Lawsuit: Using the Model Minority to Attack Race-Conscious Admissions.................1489
IV. Asian Americans, the Myth of the Model Minority, and an Invitation to Honorary Whiteness....................................1494
V. Asian Americans and the Rejection of Honorary Whiteness......................................................................................1498

Conclusion...............................................................................................1506

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I. Whiteness as an Access Card to Education During American Slavery and Throughout Jim and Jane Crow

Legal Scholar Cheryl Harris, in a seminal Critical Race Theory article, explains that whiteness in America has taken on the characteristics of property.¹ Harris writes that during the era of slavery, whiteness was a highly valued type of property that served as "a shield from slavery," while its absence was its devalued counterpart that facilitated the objectification of human beings as property.² Whiteness as property continued to exist after slavery. Harris notes, "Even after the period of conquest and colonization of the New World and the abolition of slavery, whiteness was the predicate for attaining a host of societal privileges, in both public and private spheres."³ In the realm of access to schools and colleges in America, whiteness has served as an access card to favor educational opportunities for those who have possessed it.

This concept of whiteness as an access card to education can be seen through the evolution of American law. During American chattel slavery, which lasted from 1619 to 1865, almost every Southern state passed laws that prohibited the education of slaves.⁴ Indeed, in some of these states, the fine for teaching a slave to read or write was far greater than the reward for killing a runaway slave or the fine for willfully maiming a slave.⁵ Thus, the lawmakers in these states deemed the educated slave a greater threat to society than that of the runaway slave or the violent slave master who cut the limbs off their slaves. This is a stark example of how white people had been granted an access card to education and its social and economic benefits, while African Americans, by law, had not.

Even after slavery ended in 1865, whiteness remained a form of valuable property that granted white citizens the right to access the best educational opportunities. After the Civil War, and during a brief period of Reconstruction, many states passed "Separate but Equal" laws instituting Jim and Jane Crow.⁶

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These laws provided for separate spaces for white and nonwhite people. However, while the spaces were separate, nothing was equal about these arrangements.⁷ Across the board, nonwhite people received inferior opportunities compared to their white counterparts. Even worse, these inequitable laws received the Supreme Court's imprimatur in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson.⁸

Plessy, decided thirty-one years after the end of slavery, involved Homer Plessy, who appeared white, but was legally classified as African American due to Louisiana's "one-drop rule."⁹ Plessy was arrested and jailed for illegally riding in the white section of a railroad car.¹⁰ While seemingly oblivious to the degrading symbolism and inferior conditions of the nonwhite section, the Court did not find an Equal Protection violation because the segregation law reasonably preserved "the public peace and good order" and equally applied to both white and African American passengers alike who sat in seats that were not designated for them.¹¹ In other words, the highest court in the land upheld Jim and Jane Crow.

Plessy justified the legal segregation of white and nonwhite children in elementary and secondary schools (K-12) and adults in higher education. As a result, nonwhite students consistently received inferior educations compared to their white counterparts. The targets of Jim and Jane Crow laws were not limited to people of African descent; instead, these laws had a multiracial dimension that typically applied to all nonwhite peoples. For example, in a 1927 case, a nine-year-old Chinese American third grader named Martha Lum, who lived in Mississippi, wanted to attend the only school in the district where she lived—a

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school designated for white children.¹² However, the Mississippi Constitution forbade white and nonwhite children from attending school together.¹³ The Supreme Court in Lum v. Rice, citing Plessy as precedent, held that Mississippi could prohibit Martha Lum from attending the white school without violating the Equal Protection Clause.¹⁴ The Court observed,

Most of the cases cited arose, it is true, over the establishment of separate schools as between white pupils and black pupils; but we cannot think that the question is any different, or that any different result can be reached, assuming the cases above cited to be rightly decided, where the issue is as between white pupils and the pupils of the yellow races.¹⁵

The Court was dividing the world between white people on one hand, and nonwhite people on the other, and this legally constructed dichotomy became the generalized racial guidepost for the effectuation of Jim and Jane Crow.

In 1946, another case would illustrate the segregation that Mexican American school children were experiencing. In that case, Mexican American school children in California sued their school districts alleging that their segregation in the public schools constituted a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.¹⁶ Like African American and Asian American school children in many parts of the country, these Mexican American school children were not allowed to attend schools in California designated for white children. Instead, they were relegated to inferior schools designed for nonwhite children.

In a flicker of hope, the trial court agreed with these plaintiffs, observing that "[a] paramount requisite in the American system of public education is social equality. It must be open to all children by unified school association regardless of lineage."¹⁷ The Ninth Circuit upheld the trial court in a narrower opinion that relied solely on the fact that although California law provided for the educational separation of white students from students of other minority groups, including "Indians and certain named Asiatics," it did not specifically mention Mexican Americans.¹⁸ This case never reached the Supreme Court, so it was only binding

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in the Ninth Circuit. Nonetheless, it illustrates how California treated its Mexican American schoolchildren in the mid-twentieth century.

Another type of segregation occurred with Native American school children; however, it took a different form. From the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, many Native American children were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in segregated boarding schools in an attempt to erase their cultures.¹⁹ Historian David Wallace Adams writes,

For tribal elders who had witnessed the catastrophic developments of the nineteenth century—the bloody warfare, the near-extinction of the bison, the scourge of disease and starvation, the shrinking of the tribal land base, the indignities of reservation life, the invasion of missionaries and white settlers—there seemed to be no end to the cruelties perpetrated by whites. And after all this, the schools. After all this, the white man had concluded that the only way to save Indians was to destroy them, that the last great Indian war should be waged against children.²⁰

For Native American...