Reckoning with Asian America and the New Culture War on Affirmative Action*

Abstract

The latest battle over affirmative action in university admissions may soon reach the U.S. Supreme Court, and a ruling in the plaintiff’s favor will end affirmative action in higher education across the nation. Asian Americans have taken center stage in this new culture war, fueled by the reigning narrative that they are victims of the policy who are unjustly penalized because of their race in spite of their competence. Opponents of affirmative action have effectively wielded competence—and more specifically hyper‐competence—to mark moral deservingness as they push to retreat from race in the name of merit. The onset of Covid‐19, however, has laid bare this impossibility for Asian Americans as the surge of hate incidents has affected one in eight Asian American adults in 2020, underscoring that presumed competence is no shield from xenophobia, and moral deservingness is no protection from anti‐Asian hate. This project highlights how U.S. immigration law, science, and medicine do more than reflect social constructions of race, merit, and moral deservingness; they also produce and reproduce them. I close by arguing that reckoning with Asian America enables us to dismantle the tropes that propel the latest culture war on affirmative action, equips us to rewrite narratives about merit and moral deservingness, and invites us to re‐imagine the linked fate and linked futures of Asian Americans and other minoritized groups.