Yi Fang Chen’s son certainly had the grades to get into New York City’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School.
Just one problem: He’s the wrong race.
Chen’s son was the victim of the city’s Discovery Program, which was meant to be a limited, optional back door into the city’s specialized high schools for disadvantaged students who failed to meet the test cut-off.
But in 2018, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio vastly expanded Discovery admissions.
He ordered these competitive schools to offer 20% of all seats to Discovery students, with the explicit intent of admitting more black and Hispanic students at the expense of Asian teens.
Under the state’s Hecht-Calandra law, those schools — world-renowned for their 15 Nobel laureate alums — must admit students based solely on their scores on the objective, anonymous Specialized High Schools Admission Test.
And Chen’s son scored so close to the Stuyvesant cutoff that he would certainly have been admitted — if not for the Discovery expansion.
The city’s discriminatory intent to exclude Asians worked exactly as it was meant to against him.
On Thursday, the Pacific Legal Foundation filed a federal lawsuit in US District Court on behalf of the Chen family, seeking to overturn the Discovery Program’s overt racial discrimination.
My organization, the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York, supports it wholeheartedly.
And Chen’s lawsuit is only the most recent attempt to halt this blatant anti-Asian educational bias.
Another lawsuit filed by Asian families against the city over this discriminatory Discovery expansion is working its way through the courts — and has been for seven long years.
That case, originally filed in 2018 as Christa McAuliffe Parent-Teacher-Organization, CACAGNY, et al. v. De Blasio, has had to be updated with two different name changes, as mayors have come and gone.
How many more mayors’ names will we need to swap in for this case?
It’s an outrage that CACAGNY’s lawsuit still sits in the US Court for the Southern District of New York.
The monumental and far more complex SFFA v. Harvard racial-discrimination case against affirmative action in college admissions made it out of Boston’s district court in under five years.
The revolutionary Brown v. Board of Education case that ended school segregation raced out of a Kansas district court in just five months — and for that matter, the United States won World War II in four years.
Yet CACAGNY’s case has languished, and is still gathering dust.
To double the outrage, the same Yi Fang Chen now suing the city was an original plaintiff in CACAGNY’s 2018 suit.
Back then, the district court removed her from the case on the grounds that her son, then a first-grader, was “too young” to challenge anti-Asian discrimination in high school admissions.
Now her son has grown up — and has been denied admission by the very same racially discriminatory policy that Chen was prescient enough to challenge nearly eight years ago.
In effect, she was punished for being able to see the future.
So Chen has returned to district court — proving, painfully, that justice delayed is justice denied.
Every year for the past seven years, hundreds of Asian-American students just like Chen’s son have been harmed.
New York City and the well-funded NAACP — which volunteered its own members as co-defendants in the case — have erected one delay after another.
They know such tactics can wear out authentic grassroots associations like CACAGNY.
Groups can change membership and become inactive; students can “age out,” or families can move away.
The wear-them-down tactic worked exactly as intended: Of the six original plaintiffs in the 2018 lawsuit, CACAGNY stands as the last remaining active plaintiff.
As well, the city is probably hoping to wait out this current Supreme Court.
That’s because its justices ruled in SFFA v. Harvard that “the only way to stop discrimination by race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” — exactly CACAGNY’s position.
This is not how our legal system is meant to work.
This time around, Chen’s son deserves his chance to be justly served by the court.
As for CACAGNY’s case, the district court’s slow-walking, unfair maneuvers must end.
They harm hundreds of students each year — and make a mockery of justice.
Wai Wah Chin is the founding president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York and an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
