"I would not have been able to tell the full story of who I am without the full context of race and ethnicty," says Chinese for Affirmative Action's Sally Chen.

SFFA’s lawsuit advanced the claim that Asian Americans should be against affirmative action and suggested that the group broadly is. But that’s not necessarily the case. In fact, polls have found that views are quite mixed on the subject.

Sally Chen, the education equity program manager at Chinese for Affirmative Action, said she hopes this moment serves as a gateway "to challenge the idea that college is a zero-sum game" or the idea that "if someone gets a spot, someone else loses a spot."

“I did not have perfect SAT scores and I knew that, even then, these small elite campuses could fill their entire class with just valedictorians, with just people with perfect test scores,” said Vincent Pan, co-executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, who attended Harvard in 1996. Affirmative action probably played a role in his admission, Pan, 50, said, “but I understood that there was more to not only my application — there was more to me.”

When the Supreme Court rejected affirmative action in college admissions, it argued that the practice puts Asian Americans at a disadvantage. But, as Vincent Pan from Chinese for Affirmative Action explains, that narrative masks how Asian Americans communities have faced exclusion from educational opportunities and played pivotal roles in calling for greater access.