Universities have long been a political battleground representing some of the United States’ most deeply held beliefs about meritocracy, who belongs, and who is “deserving” of higher education. I’m an Asian American who attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The political currents swirling around my alma mater land in a particular way for me as a young wealthy Asian American alumnus who cares about racial justice and whose family has benefited from affirmative action.

UNC is a public university built by enslaved people in 1789 and was only open to white wealthy Christian men until 1887 (when white women were admitted) and didn’t admit its first Black students until 1951. UNC has been deeply shaped by white supremacy and segregation and the measures it has taken to repair some of the harm through affirmative action are currently being challenged. A lawsuit filed in 2014 alleges, “Sadly, Asians in particular are being discriminated against at UNC because lesser-qualified African-Americans, Hispanics — and even whites — are gaining admission at the expense of better-qualified Asians.”  (This is not true – in fall 2016 the first-year class of UNC was 14% Asian American when Asians represent about 3% of the total population of North Carolina).

This is all happening in the context of the Justice Department recently indicating that it will devote resources to investigating and suing universities with affirmative action policies deemed to be “discriminatory against white applicants.” As part of its investigations, the Justice Department could take a position on the UNC case as well as a high profile lawsuit against Harvard filed in 2014 by an Asian American for discriminating against Asian Americans in the admissions process.

I am horrified by the way in which Asian Americans are explicitly being used by white conservatives as a wedge in affirmative action cases, as demonstrated by the quote above.

By playing off of the model minority myth (that all Asians are wealthy and successful because of their individual hard work), affirmative action opponents are using divide and conquer tactics, creating a zero sum game in which advances for some people of color means others must be losing out. The narrative of Asians being negatively impacted by affirmative action distorts the reality — the majority of Asian Americans support affirmative action and have systematically benefited from it, especially poor and working class Asian Americans. My mom benefited from corporate affirmative action and was able to break into an old boy network because of her company’s efforts to recruit more women and people of color.

The Twitter town hall appropriately called #NotYourWedge breaks this down much better than I can. Suffice to say I am deeply opposed to Asian Americans aligning with white supremacy against Black and Latinx folks, and I urge other wealthy and/or class privileged Asian Americans (those most likely to internalize the narrative that other POCs are “taking our spots”) to strongly speak out and advocate for affirmative action.

Read the source article at Resource Generation