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

Abstract

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.