Pro-meritocracy activists with Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), the group that brought the pair of affirmative action cases to the highest court in the land, rallied on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court following Thursday’s landmark ruling that found Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s discriminatory race-based college admissions practices to be unconstitutional.
While self-proclaimed “racial justice activists,” who chanted “#StopAsianHate!” not too long ago and denounce “systemic racism” on the daily are now losing their collective minds, dozens of SFFA’s supporters took to the nation’s capital to hail the historic SCOTUS opinion as a legal triumph for meritocrats and high-achieving applicants alike in pursuit of the American Dream. At the “Equal Education Rights For All” rally, where double-masked self-identifying “half-Asian” liberals attempted to drown out speakers with music, Asian American Coalition for Education (AACE) founder Yukong Mike Zhao celebrated the decision as “a historic victory for Asian Americans, because our children will no longer be treated as second-class citizens in college admissions” and a win “for all Americans, because the ruling will help preserve meritocracy, the bedrock of the American Dream.”
AACE, which represents 360-plus Asian American organizations that backed SFFA in its legal challenge against anti-Asian discrimination in higher education, will be monitoring the ruling’s enforcement by asking all colleges and the Common App “to remove race/ethnicity from college application processes,” Zhao announced, as AACE advocates held signs that said “Diversity Does Not Equal Skin Color;” “My Race Should Not Hurt Me In Admissions'” and “I Am Asian American, I Have A Dream Too.”
“As America moves toward a color-blind society, AACE calls upon America’s ruling class to take concrete measures to address the root causes of the failing K-12 education in many African American and Hispanic American communities, as it is the only constitutional and effective way to enhance diversity in higher education,” reads AACE’s press release, which Zhao recited aloud.
Ahead of decision day, Townhall interviewed a handful of Asian American community members, including high school students and a guidance counselor, who revealed that “in order to promote inclusiveness in the classroom,” K-12 schools are “watering down the rigor” of challenging courses for black and Hispanic students “not academically strong enough to thrive in these classes.” In addition to grade inflation, the reform is using racial quotas as selection criteria in Gifted and Talented programming.
Formerly on SFFA’s board of directors, community organizer Eva Guo, whom Townhall interviewed, also spoke at the rally about her hard-fought journey navigating the public education system as a mother of two school-aged Asian children, while counter-protestors carrying a rainbow Antifa-Black Lives Matter flag and a “SCOTUS Is Illegitimate” banner surrounded her mid-speech.
Applauding the end of racial preferences in the college admissions process, alongside counsel, SFFA founding president Edward Blum delivered remarks during a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. “The opinion issued today by the United States Supreme Court marks the beginning of the restoration of the colorblind legal covenant that binds together our multi-racial, multi-ethnic nation. The polarizing, stigmatizing, and unfair jurisprudence that allowed colleges and universities to use a student’s race and ethnicity as a factor to admit or reject them has been overruled,” Blum declared from the podium.
“A university doesn’t have real diversity when it simply assembles students who look different but come from similar backgrounds and act, talk, and think alike,” Blum continued at the afternoon briefing. Moving forward, America’s colleges and universities have “a legal and moral obligation to strictly abide by the Supreme Court’s opinion,” Blum stated, also adding that “these obligations compel the removal of all racial and ethnic classification boxes from undergraduate and postgraduate application forms.”
SFFA board member Kenny Xu, the president of Color Us United, a pro-meritocracy nonprofit advocating for “a race-blind America united in our individuality and freedom,” issued a press statement Thursday cheering for the Supreme Court decision:
These Supreme Court rulings are a victory in the fight to restore merit and equal opportunity to the college admissions process. Top schools have been rigging the game in the name of diversity for too long. The landmark decisions confirm that using racial preferences to choose applicants is not only unfair, but unconstitutional. We need to keep holding schools accountable to help ensure that all of the best and brightest students get the fair shot they deserve, regardless of race.
The head of Color Us United, which promotes merit-based policies to ensure equal opportunity in all sectors of American life from corporate America to higher education, is a second-generation Chinese American and a top insider in SFFA’s Harvard case.
