In the aftermath of the Court’s overturn of affirmative action using the co-optation of Asian American identity politics—and amidst other ongoing horrors of our world—who are the “bad Asians” today?
By Jesica Bak
MAR 01, 2024
On Feb. 20, the Supreme Court denied the appeal to review Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, a post-June 29th attempt by a grassroots group of parents to challenge a revamped admissions policy at a highly competitive public high school in Virginia. Previously upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, a new admissions policy at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology—apparently implemented by the school board to [better] reflect the racial composition of the county’s public school system1—will remain in place despite being contested by the plaintiffs who argue that the new policy unconstitutionally discriminates against Asian American students.
But in Justice Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas’s dissenting opinion, they argue that the circuit court’s decision to uphold the school’s new policy was an “elementary error” made by “elementary arithmetic” in holding that the new admissions process did not have a disparate impact on Asian American applicants because they were still overrepresented in the student body.
In fact, in utter agreement with the Coalition, Alito and Thomas make the tired and violent claim that the previous admissions system, predicated on standardized testing, was one of meritocratic means while the new one is a disruptive attempt at racial balancing that increased the percentage of white, Hispanic, and Black students while decreasing the percentage of Asian Americans. The framing is thus all too reminiscent of Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College in which the affirmative action opposers insist that the harm being perpetrated against Asian American students is purportedly predicated on the benefit of Black and Latinx students. Alito and Thomas’s dissent writes:
Asian-American students, many of whom are immigrants or the children of immigrants, have often seen admission to TJ as a ticket to the American dream… Under the old policy, each Asian-American applicant had a certain chance of admission. Under the new policy, that chance has been significantly reduced, while the chance of admission for members of other racial and ethnic groups has increased. Accordingly, the new admissions policy bore more heavily on Asian-American applicants.2
In our previous piece about the Court’s June 29th ruling overturning decades of affirmative action precedent, we argued that the entire notion of Asian Americans being injured by affirmative action at the alleged “benefit” of Black and Latinx students, needs to be reevaluated as a fallacy and more importantly, as a strategic attempt by the white hegemon to preserve whiteness at institutions that can otherwise provide powerful elevating opportunities for people of color. In that piece, we gratefully invoke scholars like Nancy Leong and Cheryl Harris, the latter of whom timelessly articulates3 that affirmative action is more than a policy of restorative justice, that it is an affirmation of the Black individual stretching beyond all spaces, and a democratic method of representing the underrepresented in institutions that claim power over our lives. Yet, as we gradually approach the marking of an entire year after that ruling, groups like the Coalition for TJ in Virginia are still celebrating and working in the wake of its legacy to “remain committed to ensuring equal opportunities for Asian Americans in our fight against discriminatory practices.”
I provide this lengthy context not to reiterate the same articulations I’ve made in last year’s piece—while I still argue that opponents of affirmative action have ahistorically and apolitically narratively positioned Asian Americans as the racial bourgeoisie4 in order to preserve the existing hierarchy of resources and opportunities for whites—but to instead examine the urgency of thinking about the ongoing discourse surrounding affirmative action in relation to the idea of the “bad Asian.”
I first came across this term with many thanks to a “Bad Asians” course at NYU this spring, taught by professor Michael Salgarolo, a historian of race, migration, and empire in Asian America. Within this course and beyond, students will analyze the historical construction of the “bad Asian” as a project of white supremacy and highlight Asian Americans as an insurgent presence in U.S. history. For professor Salgarolo, bad Asians are resistant and liberatory forces against U.S. empire, and range historically from freedom fighters to sex workers to border crossers. Nora Hui-Jung Kim, tracing South Korea’s sub-imperialism vis-à-vis Vietnam and the Vietnamese, also uses the phrase as she writes that this sub-imperial gaze was partly only possible because of South Korea’s neo-colonial exposure to American Cold War-era racial thinking that distinguished “good Asians” (allies) from “bad Asians” (communists).5
Encountering the duality of the categorical “bad Asian,” then, a rather binary spectrum in which Asian Americans can either be in service of the U.S. nation-state or in direct opposition to it, I find it urgent to take this historical positioning of the bad Asian and interrogate what that category may look like today—particularly as we attempt to contend with the aftermath of the Court’s overturn of decades of affirmative action precedent using the co-optation of Asian American identity politics; with the ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, with the descent towards authoritarianism in the U.S.; with other ongoing horrors of our material reality. In other words: who are the bad Asians today?
It’s a question not even Salgarolo himself has an answer for. In an interview with Illume, he told me that “[Bad Asian] is a relative term, and it depends on who’s doing the naming.” If you ask one side, they might tell you that, more or less, the bad Asian is the Asian alt-right male; if you ask the other, they might tell you that the category is comprised of boba liberals (or, as Salgarolo told me while chuckling, “I’m Filipino American, so we have ube liberals”).
But there is not a good Asian–bad Asian dichotomy wherein Asian Americans can neatly fall into either category—and part of this variability has everything to do with the trap of falling into a kind of political neutrality, a kind of moral complicity amidst the ongoing horrors of our world. It’s easy—and certainly not a coincidence that we fall into this trap—to believe that we are detached from transnational politics, that we have nothing to do with it. And yet, what can Korean Americans, for instance, make of the dual reality in which the very country we materially inhabit is actively backing the ongoing Israeli genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza strip whilst across the Pacific, conglomerates in the country our parents are from, a land with which we also hold some spectral connection to, also have “innovative” profit stakes in ensuring the colonizer wins? When I asked Salgarolo whether the bad Asian might actually be the Asian American who just remains silent, he reminded me that such political neutrality from Asian American individuals and communities is an inextricable part of the U.S. colonial project such that the nation-state cannot survive without this silence:
“It’s very easy for Asian American politics to be very nonpolitical… A lot of folks have been paying attention to what’s happening in Florida, this gutting of the Black history curriculum and all these book bans,” he said. “Amid all that—where Black history is being erased from public schools—Florida also passed a bill that is going to mandate Asian American Pacific-Islander history in public schools. And so, what is it about Asian American history that Ron De Santis thinks is not threatening enough?… I think when we do focus our Asian American history education and cultural politics on visibility and representation, we can lose some political teeth.”
It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that the language Alito and Thomas use to refer to Asian Americans in their dissent—“minorities and the children of immigrants [whose] subsequent careers have in turn richly contributed to our country’s success”6—are perpetually in service of the nation-state and its desire to reject the philosophy underlying affirmative action. Such language, whether from whites or from Asian Americans themselves, is predicated on the myth of meritocracy as well as the process of depoliticizing Asian American politics into a framework that only celebrates visibility and representation. Reassuringly, part of the goal of Salgarolo’s Bad Asians course to combat such depoliticization is, in his own words, “to make Asian American history dangerous again.”
Jesica Bak is the editor-in-chief of Illume Magazine.
- ttps://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/022024zor_7647.pdf, p. 3 ↩︎
- https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/022024zor_7647.pdf, pp. 3; 7–8 ↩︎
- Harris, Cheryl I. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–91. https://doi.org/10.2307/1341787. ↩︎
- Matsuda, Mari. “28. WE WILL NOT BE USED: ARE ASIAN AMERICANS THE RACIAL BOURGEOISIE?” In Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader edited by Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu, Thomas Chen and Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu, 558-564. Ithaca, NY: Rutgers University Press, 2010. https://doi.org/10.36019/9780813549330-031 ↩︎
- Kim, Nora Hui-Jung. “Forgotten Refugees and Erased “Multicultural” Subjects: The Vietnam War and South Korea’s Subimperial Nation-Building.” positions (2023) 31 (3): p. 599. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10441273. ↩︎
- https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/022024zor_7647.pdf, p. 3 ↩︎
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