This week, in cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, opponents of affirmative action have argued that there is a trade-off between affirmative action and fair admissions for Asian Americans.

But for nearly half a century, Asian Americans have fought for both at the same time.

They have said that affirmative action, a program created to end historic exclusion of people of color, did not discriminate against them. The real problem was and is how institutional racism continues to distort any definition of "merit" and "meritocracy."

This lost history of Asian Americans and affirmative action contradicts much of what you hear opponents of affirmative action saying about Asian Americans and university admissions.

You may have heard a lot this week about the cases being argued before the Supreme Court around Harvard and the University of North Carolina's undergraduate admissions process.

But what you have heard almost nothing about are the things many Asian Americans have actually been saying about university admissions and affirmative action for nearly fifty years. 

For much of the history of American higher education, universities have been -- by design -- the sole preserve of white elites. Until the latter part of the 20th century, very few students of color were allowed into American colleges. 

In the wake of the civil rights movement, equal opportunity and affirmative action programs were established to redress the historic exclusion of people of color. You won't read this in many places but it's absolutely true: affirmative action desegregated American higher education.

At many of the most selective universities, Asians were removed from these programs, including many working-class rural and urban students. After the 1970s, most competed directly with white students for seats in these universities in a supposedly colorblind meritocratic process.

But in the early 1980s, Professor Ling-chi Wang at the University of California at Berkeley noted that despite a big increase in the number of Asian students applying to the school, the number admitted to the university had either flattened or dropped. He began to study the data and raised questions about changes the university had made to this allegedly "race-neutral" process. He showed how many of these decisions disproportionately impacted only Asian students. 

Other Asian Americans across the country noted similar trends at universities like UCLA, Brown, Stanford, Yale, and other highly selective universities. By the mid-80s, across the country, students, parents, and community leaders were fighting for both fair admissions and affirmative action.

The connection they drew? That white alumni were pressuring universities to keep admissions of white students from falling. They were trying to get rid of affirmative action and limit Asian admissions at the same time.

Even today, so-called "legacy admissions" -- seats reserved for the children of alumni -- have gone largely unchallenged, while affirmative action programs -- originally meant to redress just this sort of historic exclusion -- have been under constant attack. These attacks have been led by the same people who want to resegregate American higher education under other names (see below).

By drawing a false equivalency between affirmative action and racially exclusionary admissions, these opponents of affirmative action have succeeded in drawing attention away from the ongoing need to repair the harm done by historic exclusion. They have accomplished it by using Asian Americans.

Let's be clear: discrimination against Asian Americans in the admissions process at elite universities is real. "Merit" is endlessly fungible and always subject to pressure. It is used to reduce opportunity.
 
But doing away with affirmative action will not resolve the problem of unequal opportunity. It will only make it worse by placing quality secondary and higher education further out of reach for those who need and want it the most.

Instead we need to address the ways that racism reduces educational opportunities for all. Perhaps we might even begin to imagine a world without meritocracy.

Watch this video directed by Bao Nguyen (Be Water) -- from our "We Gon' Be Alright" series for Independent Lens -- and hear from Asian Americans and others discuss the past, present and future stakes of these cases before the Supreme Court right now.