Demonstrators protest outside of the Supreme Court in 2023, after the justices struck down affirmative action in college admissions.Jose Luis Magana/AP
Admissions Granted, a documentary set to premiere on MSNBC on Sunday at 9 pm ET, gets at a central question about equality in the United States. “Everyone is treated the same, or equality demands that people be treated differently in order to produce the equality,” Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard law professor, says in the film. “This has been there since the beginning of the country and was there at the inception of the Fourteenth Amendment. And it’s one that is unresolved.”
The documentary probes this idea by tracking the progress of a 2014 lawsuit alleging that Harvard’s race-conscious admissions program—which was intended to help underrepresented minorities—was illegal. Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), an anti-affirmative action legal nonprofit, simultaneously sued the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (my alma mater!), arguing that, as a public school, its admissions process breached the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
SFFA focused on the negative effect these affirmative action programs had on Asian American applicants, with the group positing that the two universities were racially discriminatory. As Harvard Magazine explained, SFFA found that Asian Americans consistently received the lowest score of any racial group on their “personal” rating, one of the five admissions categories, alongside academic, athletic, and extracurricular achievement, and an “overall” rating. Harvard dismissed the data analysis as “flawed” and stated that the personal rating helps provide a holistic understanding of who an applicant is and “considers race in accordance with Supreme Court precedent.” Both lawsuits went through the court system, eventually landing at the Supreme Court.
The film follows several subjects from both sides of the Harvard case, with SFFA founder and conservative activist Edward Blum and organizations like the Asian American Coalition for Education facing off against proponents of affirmative action—and Asian American students and their families divided in between.
This wasn’t the first battle over affirmative action. Admissions Granted chronicles the long history of conservative efforts to roll back these programs, including prior court decisions like Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978, which struck down racial quotas, and Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, which permitted schools to use affirmative action for campus diversity as long as race was only one factor considered among many.
The crux of these cases was an argument over what discrimination really means in the United States. What should be allowed under federal law and the US Constitution? In its 2023 ruling on the Harvard and UNC cases, the Supreme Court declared the schools’ admissions systems to be unlawful. “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it…For ‘the guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color,’” the court stated, quoting from Bakke.
In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson rejected that argument. “Our country has never been colorblind,” she wrote. “Given the lengthy history of state-sponsored race-based preferences in America, to say that anyone is now victimized if a college considers whether that legacy of discrimination has unequally advantaged its applicants fails to acknowledge the well-documented ‘intergenerational transmission of inequality’ that still plagues our citizenry.”
Amidst all of this, where do Asian Americans lie? The film documents claims that they have been used as the face of the decades-long conservative backlash against affirmative action. Beginning in 1961, with President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925, the US government began taking halting steps toward a vision of equality in an imagined racially binary society. Over the decades, that vision would lead to countless debates, political battles, and legal challenges over what fairness and equality really mean.
One year after the Supreme Court’s Harvard ruling, I spoke with Hao Wu and Miao Wang, the directors of Admissions Granted, to better understand the case, the affirmative action debate that it brought once again to the national stage, and what can still be done to address systemic racism in higher education. Our interview has been edited for clarity.
One subject in the documentary, Sally Chen, recalled her counselor telling her to not write an Asian immigrant story for her college essay, saying it was overdone and not compelling. So to reject that advice, I was wondering about both of your stories coming and working in the US.
Wang: I came to the US when I was around 12, and I didn’t speak English when I arrived in the Boston area. When Jeannie [Suk Gersen], who is in the film, talked about her experience, I really related to her because we moved around the same time and same age, sitting in the classroom not knowing what was going on. I started at the end of seventh grade and then went on to eighth grade and high school. Those were my years in Boston, feeling very alienated from everything. In my high school it was pretty much mostly white, and I think I was the only Asian person in the school.
Then I went to college, but I didn’t study film. I went to Chicago and studied economics. A lot of that also has to do with feeling the family pressure of studying something creative. But I moved to New York as soon as I graduated and started to slowly work on more creative projects. I attended Parsons [School of Design] for an interactive media program. That’s where I started doing more film. My first film [“Yellow Ox Mountain”] looked at Chinese artists in New York—that was my thesis project that I turned into a real film and submitted to film festivals.
It’s interesting as an Asian American filmmaker. I think my own relationship to being Asian American has changed since I’ve now been here for a long time. It took me a while to feel at all comfortable identifying as an Asian American because I felt more like Chinese and an American. And I still feel like I’m that—more than Asian American—but I’ve gotten more comfortable with that terminology over the years.
Wu: I came to the US at the age of 20. I went to college in China and went through the college entrance exam system—as mentioned in the film—where a single score determines where you end up. I came over here studying molecular biology, and then later I switched to business. I got my MBA at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I actually went to work in the tech industry for many years and made films on the side as a hobby, but 12 years ago, I quit my tech corporate job and started doing filmmaking full-time.
As Miao mentioned, I definitely felt more Chinese and American, by culture, instead of Asian American. But having lived here for a long time, especially after I had my own kids and watched them grow up in America as Chinese Americans—or Asian Americans—and also having made this film about the American experience, has helped me start to identify as Asian American. But I absolutely understand many Asian Americans have a very different upbringing than my own experience growing up in China.
What drew both of you to the Harvard case? What inspired you to make a film about it?
Wang: It was at a big film party that was overflowing with food and drinks during a long conversation while both of us were reading about the lawsuit and when the case had just gone through its district court ruling in late 2019. Both of us felt like it was a fraught conversation in the news. There’s so much nuance around it like the two sides of Asian Americans that were involved in the case and how affirmative action was part of the discrimination litigation. There were a lot of different things to unpack, and I think we got interested.
Wu: Because I came here initially for graduate school, a lot of my friends from China had a similar experience to Yukong [Zhao] and Jeff [Wang], the parents in the film. Around the Harvard lawsuit, starting in 2018, I started hearing a lot more and became more conscious about my friends talking about their perception of how difficult it was for Chinese American or Asian American kids to get into college. That definitely piqued my interest, and then once I started reading about this lawsuit, as Miao mentioned, there was confusion about what this has to do with affirmative action. After having talked at the party, we both felt like we were really interested. First of all, we wanted to find out more, but we were not sure whether there was a film. A lot of times when filmmakers get together, we encourage each other to go along with the project, so that’s what we did. We just decided to work on this together, to be able to discuss, and also motivate each other to go on.
Based on what you were saying, Hao, how did your perspective on Asian Americans’ place in that whole affirmative action discourse in media and in politics change throughout the filmmaking process?
Wu: Throughout the filmmaking process, both Miao and I read a lot of books about Asian American history. For example, early Chinese Americans building the railroad, the San Francisco riot against Chinese Americans, and Japanese internment camps. We read about the different groups coming to America, and that expanded my understanding of what the Asian American identity truly encompasses. Previously, based on what I read in the media, there seemed to be a very monolithic view about what Asian American identity represents, but through the making of this film, I started realizing that there was not only ethnic and cultural diversity within the Asian American community, but also their political views are quite diverse. That’s refreshing for me.
Wang: One of the things that I found interesting is when many Asian immigrants come to the US, they don’t really understand why they are suddenly now under this Asian American umbrella. Where did that come from? And I feel like not knowing that history—which I didn’t really know until more recently—of why early immigrants decided to come together and become “Asian American” would make it seem like somebody else put that umbrella together to make you more monolithic. But I read that it was actually political alliances that came together to create more power for the group. So instead of just one group, each fighting for their own rights, they were actually coming together for empowerment.
Wu: What was really helpful for me to understand why there’s so much diversity in Asian Americans’ views on affirmative action is the concept of cultural repertoire from Natasha Warikoo, who is in the film. Newly arrived immigrants, on one hand, don’t fully understand the history of Asian Americans and their involvement in the civil rights movement, and they also came here with their own cultural repertoire—how what made them successful in their own life experience shaped their views and expectation for their kids, as well as their political views.
Yeah, watching this documentary led me to research the history of the term “Asian American.” I read how during the ’60s it originated from student activists at UC Berkeley as something political and tied to the civil rights movement but has evolved more into a demographic descriptor today.
Wang: Exactly, that’s what I was talking about. It’s so interesting to learn that history.
In the documentary, Natasha Warikoo discussed the evolving language we were using after the Bakke ruling in addressing systemic racism and discrimination. Instead of using ideas like “equality,” “justice,” and “access,” we were now talking about multiculturalism and diversity. What do you think about that change in language?
Wu: That’s tied to the legal argument. The original rationale to why American society started and popularized affirmative action was to try to remediate. But during the Bakke case, the first affirmative action lawsuit to the Supreme Court, the Court ruled that to remedy past discrimination is not a legally valid rationale for the existence of affirmative action. Justice [Lewis] Powell said universities have a compelling state interest to increase diversity, so that students can learn from each other. It was a legal compromise for the Supreme Court to be able to justify the continuation of affirmative action policies. At that time, it was viewed as a win for liberals.
Wang: It wasn’t a win for everybody. Some of the schools felt like they could continue their work, but there were civil rights activists in the beginning that were against it.
Wu: It wasn’t necessarily fully beneficial to the longevity of affirmative action because in last year’s ruling, conservative justices really battered the diversity rationale. During the oral argument, they kept asking, “How do you measure the benefits of diversity?”
The documentary touches on the idea of conservatives like Edward Blum using middle-class Asian Americans under the model minority myth to position communities of color against each other. What do you think is the way forward to ameliorate this?
Wang: Because universities now don’t have access to using race as a checkbox, they are trying to find alternative ways. Jeannie was talking at one of our panel interviews about how some of them are considering recruitment processes that look at different zip codes because a lot of times you can tell household makeup or even race and income. They’re using different factors that are not directly race for recruitment to achieve the same results.
Wu: The state of California banned affirmative action with Proposition 209. The University of California system has experimented with ways to give preferences to underrepresented minority groups using socioeconomic measures as well as geographic measures, as Miao mentioned. Also, the Supreme Court allowed college applicants to write about race as one of the factors that shaped their character or achievement to give admissions officers a more complete understanding of their background. That’s still allowed—the only thing that they cannot use is race as a checkbox. The ruling will definitely have some impact, but I think other universities are trying to do something similar to what the California system has been doing to get around the ban.
Wang: I’m sure it’s more work for the schools, and they’re going to have to experiment and do more research to find other ways that work.
Wu: But the concern now with conservatives like Edward Blum is that they are very critical of race considerations. So they’ll challenge whatever the elite colleges want to do.
