Chinese Americans Win Anti-Diversity Settlement-- and Lose in the End
by Jeff Chang

“San Francisco’s Lowell High School is over 50% Chinese American and 70% Asian American, yet Chinese parents recently sued to end court-ordered desegregation.”

By all accounts, San Francisco’s Lowell High School is one of the nation’s top public high schools. To many, especially Asian Americans, attending the highly competitive magnet school is a symbol of achievement and a source of pride. “I thought my daughter could get a quality education and be challenged,” says Jean Ishibashi, the parent of a Japanese-Chicana Lowell student.

More important, Lowell—the state’s top feeder school into the University of California system—is seen as a door to that increasingly scarce resource—access to elite universities. The school has long been the site of bitterly contested battles over educational access.

In February, a small group of Chinese Americans, supported by anti-affirmative action right-wingers, won a settlement in a lawsuit over Lowell’s admissions policies—overturning three decades of integration efforts in San Francisco’s schools. As a result, 50 percent fewer blacks and Latinos will enter Lowell next year—including only a handful of black males in an entering freshman class of over 600.

Asian American and other critics call the group’s efforts narrow, selfish, and hypocritical—and bound to inflame racial tensions. “Chinese Americans are being used as a proxy of anti-affirmative action and anti-integration viewpoints, which ultimately increase discrimination against our community,” says Diane Chin of Chinese for Affirmative Action. “This case is a tremendous setback for coalition politics,” says Henry Der, the California State Deputy Superintendent of Education Equity, Access, and Support.

Chinese Americans Swing Right
Lowell admits most of its students based on grades and test scores, but since a 1983 federal consent decree, Lowell has also had to ensure integration of its student body. The consent decree—the result of a lawsuit filed by the NAACP—allowed no single ethnic group to constitute more than 45 percent of the student body at neighborhood schools, and 40 percent at magnet schools, and required each San Francisco school to enroll students from at least four of nine defined ethnic/racial groups.

“The plan represented our best thinking at the time,” says Albert Cheng, who oversaw integration efforts for the San Francisco Unified School District through the early ‘80s. “We knew that if we did not desegregate Lowell High School, the school would have been dominantly Asian and white.”

But in 1992, some Chinese American parents began to argue that the consent decree discriminated against them because it capped Chinese enrollments, thereby forcing them to have higher grades and test scores than whites in order to be admitted to Lowell. Some began to discuss suing the school district. But Asian American civil rights organizations—who could see that Lowell was already over 50 percent ethnic Chinese and 70 percent Asian American—worried that it could be fodder for affirmative action opponents.
Instead, the parents found a sympathetic hearing from Asian conservatives, especially the Chinese American Democratic Club—a group which, interestingly, also works to increase minority affirmative action in government contracts. The Asian American Legal Foundation was formed in part to support the parents’ lawsuit, which was filed in 1994. Ward Connerly trumpeted the plight of the Lowell plaintiffs as he stumped for anti-affirmative action Proposition 209 in 1996.

“Chinese American parents argued that they were forced to have higher grades and test scores than whites. But Asian civil rights organizations worried that the case could be fodder for affirmative action opponents.”

In February, lawyers for the parents and the NAACP unveiled an eleventh-hour settlement which overturned the sixteen-year-old consent decree and ended San Francisco’s use of racial considerations in student assignment. When the settlement was announced, Amy Chang of the Legal Foundation crowed, “The era of racial bean-counting is over.” Roland Quan of the Chinese American Democratic Club was even more triumphal. “This is a solution,” he said, with little apparent irony, “for the 21st Century.”

From Anti-Asian Quotas to Anti-Affirmative Action Sentiments
The settlement was also characterized as “an end to racial quotas” and a victory for Asian Americans. But the origin of the fight against anti-Asian quotas goes back to battles during the 1980s between liberal elite university leaders and Asian American progressives.

By 1984, Asian American progressives noticed anti-Asian quotas at many elite universities, including those with strong pro-affirmative action leadership—such as Ira Michael Heyman’s Berkeley, Derek Bok’s Harvard, and Bill Bowen’s Princeton. After white alumni began to complain about increasingly diverse campuses, university leaders seemed to cap Asian admissions at no more than 20 percent of the student body.