For Immediate Release
100+ Asian American Organizations Urge Supreme Court to Ban Racial Discrimination in College Admissions
September 10, 2015—Short Hills, New Jersey: The Asian American Coalition for Education (“AACE”), representing 117 Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Korean, Vietnamese and other Asian American community and education organizations, and the Asian American Legal Foundation (“AALF”) jointly filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court to urge a total ban on racial discrimination in college admissions. This document was filed in support of the plaintiff, Abigail Fisher, in the Fisher v. University of Texas lawsuit.
For much of America’s history, race-based governmental policies and programs have been used to oppress and disadvantage Asian Americans, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII and various segregation and racial quota systems in school admissions. Unfortunately today, Asian Americans are the most disadvantaged group by race-based admission programs such as those of University of Texas. Asian Americans are consistently discriminated against through the illegal use of de facto racial quota, racially-differentiated standards and racial stereotypes in many colleges’ admission practices throughout United States. It is worth pointing out that while the Supreme Court is gradually limiting the use of race in college admissions, Asian Americans have experienced ever worsening discrimination because those proclaimed benign racial balancing are, as Judge O’Connor forthrightly pointed out, “simply too amorphous, too insubstantial, and too unrelated to any legitimate basis for employing racial classifications.” Asian American organizations request that the Court should find the UT’s race-based admission program to be unconstitutional.
Asian Americans care deeply about the educational quality in lower income communities of all racial proportions. We believe the most effective approach to address the issue is to implement meaningful and truly beneficial changes, such as improving K-12 education in disadvantaged communities, supplemented with reasonable Affirmative Action programs that use race-neutral criteria such as socio-economic factors and other constitutionally-permissible means. Yukong Zhao, the Chair of the Organizing Committee of AACE, stated, “We should treat all students the same based on merit, and jointly help the poor, regardless of their racial background. Only in this way, can we build a racially harmonized society and advance American education.”
Asian American Coalition for Education
To read the Amicus Brief:
Click to view our Fisher II Amicus Brief
About the AACE
The Asian American Coalition for Education (“AACE”) is a non-political, non-profit, national organization devoted to promoting equal rights for Asian-Americans in education and education-related activities. The leaders of AACE and its supporting organizations are Asian American grassroots community volunteers, business leaders and most importantly, parents. In May 2015, the founders of AACE united more than 60 Asian American organizations to file a complaint with Department of Justice and Department of Education regarding Harvard University’s discriminatory practices against Asian American applicants. It was one of the largest joint actions ever taken by Asian American organizations in pursuit of equal education rights.
About the AALF
The Asian American Legal Foundation (“AALF”) was founded to protect and promote the civil rights of Asian Americans, in particular where, as here, Asian Americans are being discriminated against in the name of a purportedly benign purpose. Members of AALF were instrumental in the struggle to end discrimination against Chinese American students in the San Francisco, California public school system, discrimination that was also imposed for supposedly benign reasons. See Ho v. San Francisco Unified Sch. Dist., 147 F.3d 854 (1998). More information on AALF and its mission can be found on its website at