"Asian Americans, the group whom the suit was supposedly about, have been oddly absent from the conversations that have followed the ruling...."

"During the five years I spent covering this case, the commentators defending affirmative action almost never disproved the central claim that discrimination was taking place against Asian Americans, even as they dismissed the plaintiffs as pawns who had been duped by a conservative legal activist. They almost always redirected the conversation to something else—often legacy admissions...."

Writes Jay Caspian Kang in "Why the Champions of Affirmative Action Had to Leave Asian Americans Behind/The original concept in pursuit of diversity was vital and righteous. The way it was practiced was hard to defend" (The New Yorker).

If you acknowledged that Harvard was, in fact, engaging in behavior that by any reasonable standard would be considered discriminatory and rooted in harmful stereotypes, it was nearly impossible to then turn around and say that the university should have the right to conduct its admissions in whatever manner it pleased....

So is the solution not to acknowledge the discrimination against Asian Americans?

The word “Asian” appears only three times in Justice Jackson’s twenty-nine-page dissent—once as a footnote, once as part of a list of median household incomes compared across racial groups, and then again as part of the following statement: “a higher percentage of the most academically excellent in-state Black candidates . . . were denied admission than similarly qualified White and Asian American applicants.” 

The dissent, which details the lengthy history of discrimination against Black people, never mentions the history of racism against Asians in America, whether the lynching of Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Exclusion Act, or Japanese internment....

The  Sotomayor dissent has more to say about Asian Americans, but it's a complicated move:

[H]er defense of affirmative action goes further in showing how Asians are shortchanged in the undignified competition to join America’s multicultural élite. 

“There is no question that the Asian American community continues to struggle against potent and dehumanizing stereotypes in our society,” Sotomayor writes. “It is precisely because racial discrimination persists in our society, however, that the use of race in college admissions to achieve racially diverse classes is critical to improving cross-racial understanding and breaking down racial stereotypes.” 

Race must be used against them in order to help them??! 

Kang elaborates:

In Sotomayor’s telling, Asian Americans who are concerned about being racially stereotyped should attend “diverse” universities, where they can help dispel people’s misconceptions by simply existing and getting along with their peers.

I guess that means they shouldn't want to be treated equally, because they shouldn't want to be in a place where there are too many of their own kind. That is, don't think about the Asian American applicants who don't get in. Think about those who do get in.

[Sotomayor] goes on to argue that race-conscious admissions allow Asian American applicants “who would be less likely to be admitted without a comprehensive understanding of their background” to “explain the value of their unique background heritage, and perspective” and allow colleges to “consider the vast differences within [that] community.” 

It’s hard not to read this as a premise for Asian American teen-agers to essentially dance for acceptance, or to try to distinguish themselves from other Asian Americans by explaining to the good people at the Harvard admissions office why, say, a Vietnamese applicant is more valuable to the Ivy League cultural texture than just another Chinese one....

Interesting example, Vietnamese. WaPo just came out with: "Why are Vietnamese the most Republican-leaning Asian Americans? More Vietnamese Americans favor the GOP compared to other Asian Americans...." 

Back to Kang:

After five years of covering this story, I have found very little to admire about how élite colleges played their decadent racial-preference game. While I do believe that most colleges will be able to maintain some kind of racial diversity on their campuses, I have no faith that the processes they use to do so will be any better than the broken system they’re trying to replace. The conversation will not change. 

It's interesting to see "decadent racial-preference game" in The New Yorker. Part of the decadence is receiving new Supreme Court decisions and working around them and ignoring them. No one is inspired to change their position. 

Oh, no! We've been violating rights and we must stop! — thinks no one.