Cornell University

Article

Asian Americans and the Harm of Exceptionalized Inclusion

Kaiponanea T. Matsumura & Erin Suzuki

Professor of Law and William M. Rains Fellow, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. Associate Professor of Literature and Asian American Studies, University of California, San Diego. The authors contributed equally to this Article and are listed alphabetically by last name. We thank Shirin Bakhshay, Robert Chang, Gabriel “Jack” Chin, Tristin Green, Vinay Harpalani, Ariel Jurow Kleiman, Solangel Maldonado, Julia Mendoza, Kimberly West-Faulcon, and Tiffany Yang for their thoughtful feedback. We also thank the editors of Cornell Law Review for their careful and constructive work on this Article.

22 Aug 2025

The use of race in college admissions is contentious not only because elite colleges are a gateway to good careers, but because the colleges themselves symbolize belonging at the highest levels of American society. In this sense, the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (“SFFA”) was more than a dispute over college admissions policies: its majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions offer competing visions of racial belonging in the twenty-frst century. Those visions do not include Asian Americans. The absence of Asian Americans in the opinions is all the more ironic because the lawsuit was cast as an Asian American civil rights case, centering on claims that Harvard College penalized Asian American applicants. This Article explores the causes and effects of the Supreme Court’s absenting of Asian Americans in SFFA. It documents how the Justices restored a black and white view of race relations in this country by treating Asian Americans as a proxy for whites. It shows how the Justices deployed the stereotype of Asians as model minorities to attack and defend affrmative action. And it reveals the irony of the Court’s proposed remedy, requiring Asian American applicants to demonstrate leadership and individualism after completely fattening them and denying their individuality. Extending recent theoretical advances in Asian American studies, the Article shows that the model minority is a paradigm for understanding one’s place in society. It works internally to shape the realm of what is possible or desirable. It infuences whether one is seen and, therefore, the terms on which one exists as an individual. This paradigm places Asian Americans in an impossible position: Asian Americans are rendered visible only when they represent themselves in a narrowly circumscribed way, a way that fattens individuality and renders them undesirable. The struggle to establish oneself as a meaningful subject on these terms inevitably ends in failure, inficting a psychological harm that has yet to be accounted for in the law. 

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