Charles’s study drew on data from 28 schools, going back to 1999. Nearly 20 years later, she is confident that the proportion of black immigrants has increased, but she can’t say exactly how much, because schools do not make that information accessible to the public. “It’s a way to have some plausible deniability,” Charles told me. “The schools are purposefully not paying attention to the backgrounds of the black students they admit. In the ’80s and ’90s, low-income black students could talk about overcoming obstacles in their essays, but over time, that narrative has worn thin. But the immigrant narrative, which is also an American narrative, in some ways might have become a more appealing story for admissions officers. A student can write, say, ‘My parents were doctors in Nigeria, but they had to start all over in the United States,’ and that story doesn’t invoke white guilt. It doesn’t even tie to affirmative action in the same way, because there isn’t this assumption of lesser qualifications that still follows black American students, no matter their backgrounds or their parents’ backgrounds.” Charles continued: “I think there are American blacks whose families have suffered generationally who are being squeezed out.”
Charles, it should be said, did not undertake her study in order to pit one group of black people against another. And she emphasizes that she does not think affirmative-action spots should be taken away from black immigrants.
Edward Blum, Delmar Fears and Yukong Zhao may not agree on much of anything, but they all have made versions of an argument that the spirit of affirmative action has been replaced by a largely cosmetic, overly simplified diversity that allows elite institutions to report gains in black and Latino student populations without having to engage in the harder work of undoing systemic inequality. Waters’s question from 2004 has largely gone unaddressed: If you stop random supporters of affirmative action on the street and ask why they believe in it, they will most likely discuss the need to address the harms of historic, institutional racism. They may talk abstractly about a poor, “inner city” or “urban” kid in, say, Detroit and how his test scores, grades and accomplishments should be evaluated in the context of the extraordinary inequality within this country.
The truth at Harvard and other elite private colleges is that the supposed zero-sum game of admissions slots isn’t really between Asian immigrants and the descendants of enslaved people, but rather between Asian immigrants, Latino immigrants and black immigrants. Some inevitable, deeply uncomfortable questions arise: If you compare an Asian-American student raised in poverty by parents who fled Vietnam during the fall of Saigon with the son of Chilean doctors who come from generational wealth and sent their child to 12 years of private school, who is more privileged? If you accept that the child of, say, solidly middle-class Ghanaian immigrants has to deal with racism in the work force, profiling by the police and all the harms of systemic inequality while the same working-class Asian kid gets to slide into whiteness, how much advantage do you give to ameliorate the disadvantage between one immigrant and another? What if you replace the working-class Vietnamese student with the daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, who, among other things, has had to deal with the profiling of Muslim communities and Trump’s travel ban? These are not outlier examples used in bad faith to present a provocative but false choice. At Harvard and other elite schools, the outlier example is the “inner city” kid from Detroit.
These bizarre, discomforting litigations of race and privilege make sense only within the context of the most exclusive places in America. But if Harvard loses in the Supreme Court, Blum will be closer to his goal of eliminating racial preferences, not only in college admissions but also in every other corner of federal law. Even if Blum eventually loses this case, it’s hard to imagine that he will stop. In 2014, S.F.F.A. filed another discrimination lawsuit, against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The U.N.C. case, which has yet to go to trial, is not about Asian-American applicants, but the goal is the same: end affirmative action everywhere.
On March 12 of this year, a group of federal prosecutors in the same Boston building as Judge Burroughs’s courtroom unsealed the indictments in Operation Varsity Blues, the nationwide college-admissions bribery case that set off a monthslong media circus involving everyone from the actress Felicity Huffman to the head coach of Yale’s women’s soccer team. Legally speaking, Varsity Blues has nothing to do with S.F.F.A. v. Harvard, but the scandal recast the affirmative-action debate in a bit of a humiliating yet ultimately necessary context: It felt as if a bunch of minorities were clawing at one another while a line of entitled, less qualified white kids walked through the gates of Ivy League schools as their alumni parents unpacked an S.U.V. filled with weird rackets and skis.
A few weeks later, I met Alex again at a bubble-tea shop in Flushing. Congratulations were in order — after a somewhat rocky admissions process in which he had applied early to Yale and been deferred, was accepted to Binghamton, Rochester and Rice but rejected at Brown, Princeton and Stanford and was wait-listed at Vanderbilt, Carnegie Mellon, M.I.T. and Duke, Alex had received some good news. He had been accepted at Yale, his dream school.
