On the Streets of D.C., Praise and Protest of a Landmark Ruling on Race in Admissions

Smoke from Canadian wildfires hung over the Supreme Court, in Washington, D.C., on Thursday morning as a crowd of journalists, tourists, and protesters began whispering to one another.

“Affirmative action is down!” someone yelled.

Around the nation’s capital, scenes of defeat and victory, disappointment and division, were visible in the hours after the justices struck down race-conscious admissions.

The legal cases, against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Harvard College, cited claims of discrimination against Asian American students. Asian Americans were present both to protest and to praise the ruling.

Representatives of the Asian American Coalition for Education, which supported the court’s decision, held a large banner that read, “Equal Rights for All.”

“It’s a historic win for Asian Americans because our children will no longer be treated as second-class citizens in college admissions,” said Yukong Mike Zhao, the coalition’s founding president. “It’s also a win for all Americans because universities preserve meritocracy, which is the bedrock of the American dream.”

It wasn’t long before counterprotesters showed up. A handful of students from various colleges across the country, carrying light-blue handkerchiefs, told reporters about their opposition to the ruling as Asian American students, saying that the cases had wrongly pitted Asian Americans against members of other racial-minority groups.

“It’s unfair that our community is being used as a wedge to take down multiracial democracy, not only at the university level but at levels above,” said Jack Trowbridge, a third-year student at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut. “Because it all starts in higher education.”

Nearby, a sign propped against a police partition read, “We Are Not a Wedge.”

But others, like Christopher Banks, a guest lecturer at Washington Adventist University, condemned the ruling, calling it “highly regrettable.”

A few blocks northeast of the court’s building, on Second Street, a group of Black, Latino, and Asian civil-rights lawyers — including a former New York City mayoral candidate, Maya Wiley — held a news conference in a small studio to voice their opposition to the ruling and express support for continued efforts to diversify America’s selective colleges.

“We call upon higher education to revisit its own standards and look inwardly because race-conscious admissions does some of the work but not all of the work,” said Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. He said such colleges should further reduce their reliance on standardized testing and legacy status in admissions.

A few minutes earlier, the lawyers had watched President Biden appeal to those institutions to re-examine their admissions practices, an assertion that “heartened” them, they said.

An hour later, in a navy-carpeted room at the National Press Club, less than two miles away, the plaintiffs’ lead lawyers in both the Harvard and UNC cases, along with their clients, declared victory.

Edward J. Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions, the organizational plaintiff in both cases, heralded the ruling as a re-establishment of principles outlined in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which, he said, “clearly forbids the treating of Americans differently by race.” He founded Students for Fair Admissions in 2014 to represent students who had felt discriminated against in college admissions because of their race.

“Today’s victory belongs to thousands of sleepless high schoolers applying to colleges,” said Calvin Yang, a student at the University of California at Berkeley whose rejection by Harvard in 2021 spurred his activism to take down race-conscious admissions. “It belongs to those with the last names of Smith or Lee, Chen or Gonzalez. Most importantly, it belongs to all of us who believe that if we work hard enough, we all can have a chance and get our own slice of this grand American dream.”