The Harvard Bias Suit by Asian Americans

The plaintiff, which were representing Asians-American, accused Harvard of discriminating against Asians-American applicants for their college. They accused Harvard of systematically rejecting Asians-American applicants due to their higher expectation/standard for these students. Harvard argued against this stating that try to construct a class full of diverse students and considers each applicant individually ignoring what their race/ethnicity is. The plaintiff used statistical proof that the Asian-American applicants had better academic and extracurricular records than many of the white applicants. Unfortunately the court cannot base any judgement off statistical evidence due to the fact that it still can't be proven that is due to race. The plaintiff also argued that nowadays racism is often subtle so there is no proof left behind. It can't be proven whether the bias against Asian-Americans is subconscious or conscious.

This article is important to the educational/academic world because this is another case amongst many about the subtle racism shown to minorities in the modern world. This is relevant to Americans because moving forward we want to try to have a society that accepts all races, not just into the country, but also as a citizen and part of the community. Cases like this one will help so many adolescents who are of different ethnicities besides european/white. When I go to college, I may want to apply to  Harvard this case will help the educational world be more aware of subconsciously or consciously discriminating against Asian-Americans. In the article it is said that racism in modern times is more “subtle and insidious”, I never really thought of that until I read this in the article. I have noticed that that is very true and that many people will be judged for being outright racist so prefer to do it subtly without judgement. Whether or not Harvard is purposely showing a bias against Asian-Americans this case will make the world aware of the problem. Therefore it will put social pressure on Harvard to accept more Asian-Americans that are great for the school but wouldn't have let in before due to the fact that they did not have that attention on them, judging them. Unfortunately there's always questions unanswered for example in this case, and many other cases, they have sided with the University due to the fact that no matter how much statistical evidence the plaintiff has against the University you can't prove that they are consciously making an effort to discriminate against a certain race or ethnicity. So the question remains unanswered of if they are doing this purposely or not. A question that popped into my head while reading this article was: Why do colleges discriminate against ethnicities in minorities when that doesn't affect the type of person in the student that they can be? Your ethnicity doesn't matter it's the type of person you are and also your academics and extracurriculars. It doesn't make sense on why someone would discriminate against a specific kind of ethnicity or minority when they will be paying the same amount of money as well as have the same graded academics and extracurriculars.  Another issue that bothered me while reading this article is that it was written that Harvard holds Asian-Americans to a higher standard than others. This creates the question, why do they hold asian-americans to a higher standard than other people when they take the same classes and extracurriculars as any other American?