On a crisp fall day in 1924, Martha Lum entered Rosedale Consolidated School, a beautiful mission-style building that had been constructed just three years earlier for white students in Rosedale, Mississippi. Martha, however, was not new to the school. She had attended the public school the previous year. But everything had changed due to the Immigration Act of 1924, which banned immigrants from Asia and fueled anti-Asian racism within the United States.
During this time, African Americans were fleeing the intense racism of the Mississippi Delta through the Great Migration, seeking new lives in the north and west. To replace them, white landowners began recruiting Chinese immigrants like Martha’s father, Gong Lum. These Chinese immigrants, barred from white neighborhoods, often opened grocery stores in Black communities, instead of working in the cotton fields like their predecessors.
At noon recess, Martha received an unexpected visitor. The school superintendent informed her that she must leave the public school, despite her family’s tax contributions, because of her Chinese descent. Instead, she was directed to the district’s all-Black public school, where the infrastructure and textbooks were outdated, classrooms overcrowded, and teachers underpaid.
Gong Lum decided to take legal action and sued, invoking the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where all nine justices ruled in favor of school segregation, using the precedent of the “separate but equal” doctrine established in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896.
Looking back a century from now, historians studying racism will inevitably draw parallels between the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision and the precedent set by Gong Lum v. Rice—an example of judicial rulings based on legal fiction. Back then, the fantasy was that separate educational facilities for different races were equal, rendering desegregation unnecessary. Today, the fantasy is that traditional college-admissions metrics are race-neutral and that affirmative action is obsolete, or even detrimental.
The Supreme Court’s recent decision effectively banned affirmative action in two lawsuits brought by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. SFFA, led by legal strategist Edward Blum, claimed that affirmative action violated the equal-protection rights of Asian American, white, and Asian applicants. Despite overrepresentation of white and Asian Americans in selective colleges and universities with ample resources and high graduation rates, they positioned themselves as victims.
This notion mirrors a broader societal fantasy, where white Americans, who generally benefit from racial inequities, falsely perceive themselves as the primary targets of racism. This fantasy has fueled the grievances exploited by politicians like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Those who oppose affirmative action have been misled into believing that traditional admissions metrics are fair for everyone while branding affirmative action as unfair to white and Asian American applicants.
The Court has effectively endorsed SFFA’s demand for “race-neutral” admissions, which effectively eliminates minor admissions factors like affirmative action that help address racial disparities, while allowing major admissions factors that have historically perpetuated these disparities. Ignoring overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Court claimed that “race-neutral policies may achieve the same benefits of racial harmony and equality without affirmative action policies.” The result is a perpetuation of racial inequity as the new norm.
Chief Justice John Roberts, in his majority opinion, acknowledges the inherent flaws of the past approach but fails to recognize the inherent folly of the so-called “race-neutral” approach today.
History may repeat itself without a direct rhyme. “Race neutral” serves as the new “separate but equal.” The Court argues that “Twenty years have passed since Grutter, with no end to race-based college admissions in sight,” but the reality is that twenty years have passed with racial inequity still prevalent.
Black, Latino, and Indigenous students continue to be underrepresented in the top 100 selective public universities. The ban on affirmative action in public universities in California and Michigan during the 1990s caused a roughly 50 percent drop in Black enrollment at the most selective schools, returning numbers to levels reminiscent of the early 1970s. The lack of diversity harms both students of color and white students.
SFFA argued in their brief that the University of California system currently enrolls “more underrepresented minorities today than they did under racial preferences,” highlighting the increase in Latino student enrollment from 1997 to 2019. However, considering the increase in the number of Latino high school graduates during that time, the gains should have been even larger. There is a significant 23-point gap between the percentage of Latino high school graduates in California and the percentage of those enrolled in the UC system.
The decline in representation and associated disadvantages extends to graduate and professional programs. Before affirmative action was banned, the UC system produced more Black and Latino medical doctors than the national average. However, since the ban, those numbers have fallen below the national average.
Underrepresentation of Black, Latino, and Indigenous students in prestigious universities is not a coincidence or a result of any shortcomings on the part of these students, their parents, or their cultures. Admissions metrics historically and presently value qualities that reflect access to inherited wealth and resources, such as computers, counselors, tutors, college preparatory courses, and test preparation. Racial disparities persist in access to each of these elements, just as funding disparities existed in segregated schools in the Mississippi Delta a century ago.
But what about class? Class-based or income-based interventions disproportionately benefit white students because their low income is less likely to extend to their neighborhoods and schools. Low-income white Americans are significantly less likely than low-income Black and Latino Americans to reside in highly impoverished areas or send their children to poorly funded public schools. Research shows that 80 percent of low-income Black individuals and 75 percent of low-income Latino individuals live in low-income communities, which often have under-resourced schools, compared to less than 50 percent of low-income white individuals. The predominantly white school districts receive an average of $23 billion more funding compared to districts serving the same number of students of color.
When admissions metrics heavily prioritize standardized test scores like the SAT and ACT, they primarily predict the wealth or income of the test-takers’ parents, rather than their success in college or graduate school. This inherently affects applicants along racial lines, albeit in complex ways. While Asian Americans, on average, have higher incomes than African Americans, they also exhibit the highest income inequality among racial groups. Therefore, standardized tests advantage more affluent white Americans and Asian ethnic groups like Chinese and Indian Americans, while disadvantaging Black Americans, Latino Americans, Native Americans, and poorer Asian ethnic groups like Burmese and Hmong Americans. Can we truly claim that standardized tests, along with other admissions metrics, are “race-neutral”?
Standardized tests predominantly favor students with access to test preparation that can boost their scores. This understanding has led to the establishment of a multibillion-dollar test-prep and tutoring industry. These companies openly advertise their ability to increase students’ scores, with a concentration in immigrant and affluent communities.
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