In the aftermath of oral argument in the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative actions cases before the Supreme Court, it seems fairly clear from the nature and tenor of questions from the bench that six justices are not in favor of sustaining affirmative action as currently used.

The Supreme Court on Monday appeared ready to rule that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful, based on questioning over five hours of vigorous and sometimes testy arguments, a move that would overrule decades of precedents.

Such a decision would jeopardize affirmative action at colleges and universities around the nation, particularly elite institutions, decreasing the representation of Black and Latino students and bolstering the number of white and Asian ones.

And indeed, the questions poked at the vagueries of rosy rhetoric of goodness that have gone unexplained, most notably what the point of it is and when, if ever, the diversity sought will ever be achieved.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. asked a similar question about the term “underrepresented minority.”

“What does that mean?” he asked, adding that college admissions are “a zero-sum game” in which granting advantages to one group necessarily disadvantages another.

Notably, the rationale for race-conscious admissions has never been to compensate for past discrimination, but to achieve racial diversity as an educational benefit for all students. In other words, it’s not to benefit black and Hispanic students, per se, but to benefit the education of all students by having a student body that includes black and Hispanic students. The former would be racial discrimination. The latter would be improving the educational experience.

In general, two themes ran through questions from the court’s conservatives: that educational diversity can be achieved without directly taking account of race and that there must come a time when colleges and universities stop making such distinctions.

Arguing in favor of taking race into account, not as an absolute where a student, by checking the race “black” on the application, would be given automatic preference over students who checked other boxes, the universities stressed the positive use of race as simply a “plus,” an added consideration in their favor even though not a free ride. But upon being challenged, they argued that there was no such thing as “race minus,” where an applicants race was used against them, a demerit on an otherwise stellar application. The problem is that the math doesn’t work that way.

If the Court rules that racial preferences are categorically forbidden, then that ruling will dispose of Harvard’s anti-Asian policies, as well. But if some diversity-based preferences are held to be legal, then the Court might have to adopt some sort of rule for dealing with situations where an institution deliberately tries to reduce the presence of some minority group in the student body, for fear that otherwise there would be too many of them. In my view, the justices would do well to make clear that, even if some diversity-promoting preferences are permissible, they cannot justify targeted anti-Asian discrimination, any more than it would justify targeting blacks, Jews, or any other specific minority group.

The historic discrimination against black people is more than adequate cause to take affirmative action to enhance their opportunity to get an elite college education as the foremost mechanism to elevate their status. But to deny it comes at a price is foolish. If there are 100 seats in a classroom and, as a result of affirmative action, an additional ten seats are given to black students due to their “race plus” preference, there are ten other students who will not get a seat in the classroom. As a general notion, the math is undeniable.

The problem is that certain Asian students, an ill-defined category that ranges from Afghans to Taiwanese, had become dominant applicants for these seats by dint of enormous effort and sacrifice. Like it did with Jews before them, the Harvard overlords decided to ascribe negative personality traits, things that were impossible to measure or be seen, to Asian students in order to take them out of the competition for those ten seats.

Neither these Asian students nor their ancestors, assuming people are guilty for the sins of their fathers or at least somebody’s fathers of the same skin color, committed any wrong against black students. They fought to elevate their own status by embracing the value of education, having the family support structure to back them, and putting in the effort to achieve. And for that, they were characterized as too unpleasant for Harvard College.

For many, these Asian students were unfortunate collateral damage in the moral quest to put more black students in seats. For others, this is racial discrimination, just against Asian students rather than black students. For many, historic discrimination against black people justified doing whatever had to be done in order to put them where they should have been but for slavery, Jim Crow, and legacy discrimination. For others, racial discrimination was an evil that was never justified, even when it was for the benefit of black people for whom there existed a legitimate argument that they should be given a preference after the burden they carried for so long.

But there was, and had to be, a price, and the price was paid by Asian students who had nothing to do with the enslavement of black people. Being Asian was a “race minus” factor and it was dishonest and foolish to deny the racial prejudice against Asian students.

Update: In a curious yet unsurprising op-ed, Columbia University sociology prof Jennifer Lee argues that Asians had been the beneficiary of favorable bias, teachers assuming that Asian students are smart and hard-working, and thus grading them higher than they deserve.

Asian Americans face bias in education, but not in the direction the plaintiffs claim. Research that I and others have done shows that K-12 teachers and schools may actually give Asian Americans a boost based on assumptions about race. Affirmative action policies currently in place in university admissions do not account for the positive bias that Asian Americans may experience before they apply to college. Abandoning race as a consideration in admissions would further obscure this bias.

For many progressive Asians in academia, the idea that their racial group is being used as a “wedge” against Affirmative Action because of Harvard’s conduct is unacceptable, so they thread the needle, simultaneously decrying racism against Asians in every aspect of life except education, where they seek to get Asians out of the middle so that they won’t be blamed in the battle between black and white.