Asian Americans and the battle against Affirmative Action: opposition to race-based admissions as neoliberal racial subjectivity performance

ABSTRACT

Through a critical discourse analysis of three Asian American organizations’ rhetoric around race and education, we explore the activism of Asian Americans working against affirmative action and other race-based educational policies. We examine the way these groups engage ideological discourses regarding race, civil rights, and the freedom to compete in their fight to protect Asian Americans’ access to elite educational institutions. Drawing on the scholarship on neoliberal educational policy and neoliberal racialization, we argue that the organizational activism of Asian American opponents of affirmative action embodies the intersection of neoliberal approaches to education and neoliberal conceptions of race and racialization. Thus, we consider that Asian American anti-affirmative activists are neoliberal racialized subjects who view education, particularly higher education, as a private good that should go to the most successful student/consumer. They embrace and repurpose the language of civil rights to fight for their individual rights as educational consumers.

Keywords:

• racialization
• Asian Americans
• affirmative action
• neoliberalism in education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Espenshade and Walton Radford’s (2009) book No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal is often cited as evidence on both sides of affirmative action debates (the text was cited, for example, in amicus briefs both in favor and opposition of SFFA v. Harvard), yet there is significant debate about how to interpret the book’s central findings. Most controversial perhaps is a (small) component of Espenshade and Radford’s research that examines Asian Americans’ SAT scores at elite universities in relation to those of White, Black, and Latinx students. Notably, Espenshade has written in op-eds that this work is not intended to discredit or support the overturn of race-conscious affirmative action policy, but rather to show its inadequacy to the task of challenging broader racial inequality (Espenshade 2012).