Blum, a former stockbroker, is still pretty bitter about losing the campaign for a House seat in Houston to a Black Democrat in 1992. The loss set him on a course of neoconservative legal activism, beginning with filing (and winning) a
lawsuit against the state of Texas claiming racial gerrymandering.
He sponsored the Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder which
overturned a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that prevented states from enacting voting procedures that might disproportionately burden racial minorities.
He is a man on a mission: to dismantle years of Civil Rights era progress by undoing laws meant to combat racial inequality. And he really,
really hates Affirmative Action.
Blum is entitled (as most conservative straight White cisgender men
feel they are) to fight against race-conscious decision-making in college admissions. What we shouldn’t – can’t – abide is Blum using Asian Americans to do his dirty work.
In 2013, he tried to sue the University of Texas on behalf of a white woman, Abigail Fisher, but the Supreme Court found in the University’s favor. Blum is not one to give up easily. He went back to the drawing board and tried a new strategy…
“I needed Asian plaintiffs,” Blum said, according to
Harvard’s court filing, in regards to starting the website HarvardNotFair.org. In looking at the site, I can only imagine that the search terms he used to find a stock photo for the homepage were something like, “sad Asian student.”
He is essentially a ventriloquist using Chinese Americans as his dummies in an elaborate performance with the intent to upend years of progress in educational equity. The real threat to Asian Americans is not Affirmative Action- it is Blum’s cheap brand of White Privilege wrapped in the fallacy of colorblindness.
Alas, he must have been so busy Googling stock photos of “sad Asians” that he didn’t talk to many of us in real life. If he had, perhaps he would have learned that the majority actually
support Affirmative Action to increase educational representation of Black, Latinx, and other minorities in colleges.
But, let’s be real. Blum is not fighting for racial equity. His end goal is to uphold the status quo and protect conservative power. And he will not be easily deterred.
Elimination of Affirmative Action would primarily benefit White men who already have lifetimes of privilege and advantages over every other intersectional category of people.