Defend Affirmative Action! Take Back Our Education!
Anakbayan-USA calls on Filipino youth and students to defend affirmative action in education, which allows universities to consider a student’s race as a factor in the admissions process, recognizing the structural barriers denying Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth access to higher education.
The people’s victory in winning affirmative action is being undermined by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) and the racist Supreme Court majority that sides with them. SFFA launched a case against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, which it claims discriminates particularly against Asian Americans through its race-conscious admissions policies. SFFA argues instead for “race-neutral” admissions.
Race-neutral admissions assume an even playing field in access to higher education. This is a gross denial of the history of education in the United States, which for a majority of its existence explicitly served to perpetuate the white, bourgeois, and patriarchal culture and power structure in this country. Race conscious admissions policies were a hard-fought victory of the student movement in the 1960s and 1970s, which organized to carve out space in higher education institutions for Black, Brown, and Indigenous students. In addition to affirmative action, these communities fought together to create student organizations on campus and demand ethnic studies. We remember the militant organizing of the Black Student Union and Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State University, of which the Pilipino American Collegiate Endeavor was an integral part.
We have already seen what happens when affirmative action is overturned. After California banned affirmative action in 1996, admissions for Black, Latino, and Indigenous students at University of California campuses plummeted by 50 percent or more in certain schools. Just as the student movement of the 1960s worked across oppressed minorities, we must also not allow groups like SFFA to turn the Asian American community against others. The mass mobilization of Asian American students protesting SFFA and supporting affirmative action in front of the Supreme Court during the hearings is a testament to the ongoing solidarity in the fight for the right to education for all.
As we mobilize for this current fight in defense of affirmative action, Anakbayan-USA also recognizes the larger fight ahead. We must not be satisfied with equal representation in higher education systems that train youth to perpetuate the exploitative capitalist system that is the foundation for unequal access to education in the first place. We will not sit idly by as youth are educated to develop more sophisticated ways to exploit working people, or to develop weapons and technology to militarize peoples abroad. We will continue to organize and fight for an education system rooted in building power among the most exploited and oppressed.
