Interest Convergence, Negative Action, and SFFA vs. Harvard

Abstract

I. INTEREST CONVERGENCE: THE FULL REALIZATION In 2009, my collaborator Amy Liu and I started writing a paper on Asian Americans and affirmative action that eventually became our paper “Interest Convergence or Divergence? A Critical Race Theory Analysis of Asian Americans, Meritocracy, and Critical Mass in the Affirmative Action Debates.” In that paper, we argued that any effort to adopt Asian Americans into the anti-affirmative action cause represented interest convergence, a term that originated within Critical Race Theory. Interest convergence describes how it is unlikely for the White majority to adopt the interests of people of color unless there is a clear way that Whites would benefit—in other words, when there is a convergence of interests. When we started writing, there had not been any high-profile cases challenging affirmative action featuring Asian American plaintiffs although, in 2006, Jian Li filed a complaint against Princeton University alleging discrimination. Still, at the time of writing, we were not too far removed from the 2003 University of Michigan Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger cases and had yet to undergo the two Fisher v. University of Texas Supreme Court cases, all of which featured White female plaintiffs.