“It’s not your fault that you gave me Covid.”

When I came to college, I never expected that my roommate would believe that I infected her with Covid-19, simply because I was Chinese. My negative test didn’t matter. My ethnicity was all she needed to hurl an accusation my way.

When I sought comfort from a Dean, an administrator who claimed to support her students, I never expected that my hurt would be brushed aside. “You could be just as miserable anywhere,” she said. Her final piece of advice? Focus on how to cope.

But, when I joined Asian Students in Action, I found something different: unyielding comfort and validation. My Asian friends didn’t dismiss my pain or tell me to cope. They named the harm. They understood the pain. They knew that the accusation was rooted in the harmful, misguided belief that Asians were carriers of Covid-19—a narrative that surged during the pandemic.

Asian Students in Action provided what the broader institution failed to: community, safety, and the affirmation that what happened to me was not okay. Without that affinity club, I would have felt unseen and unheard. I would have thought that the racism I faced was both unimportant and invisible to the predominantly white college I attended. Without an Asian club, I would have left college after my first year.

Today, critics of DEI initiatives often lump Asian and white Americans together. They do so for three reasons: to dismiss the structural inequities we face, to undermine our solidarity with Black, Latino, and indigenous communities, and to strengthen the very inequalities DEI efforts aim to solve.

On February 14, the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, issued a “Dear Colleague” letter. While this letter claimed to protect students from alleged racial discrimination by educational institutions, its true intent was clear: to dismantle race-based programs altogether.

But, what caught my attention most was this line: “American educational institutions have discriminated against students on the basis of race, including white and Asian students.”

This phrase is troubling. It collapses white and Asian students into one, unified demographic, while Black, Latino, and indigenous students are conspicuously left out. It suggests that white and Asian students endure comparable racial discrimination.

Here’s what I know for certain: my white peers have never been blamed for spreading Covid-19 simply because a president chose to scapegoat their entire ethnicity for the pandemic. I was. Asians were.

When DEI despisers conflate my racial experiences with those of white students, they weaponize the Model Minority Myth to promote a false sense of Asian-White solidarity. The Model Minority Myth frames Asian Americans as the ideal minority—quiet, polite, and compliant—suggesting that if we conform to this stereotype, we’ll be rewarded with proximity to whiteness. A proximity that promises an illusion of immunity from the racial discrimination and systemic inequalities other communities of color face.

Opponents of DEI hope that Asian Americans will endorse their opinion, simply to attain acceptance into the system of white supremacy that dominates the U.S. But, it is naive to think that we would seek acceptance from a system that has long excluded us and fueled an influx of Anti-Asian hate.

As an Asian American, I know what it feels like to be excluded, stereotyped, and overlooked. But I also know the transformative power of belonging, because I’ve experienced it through the community of care that DEI programs make possible. Without DEI, and without the affinity groups it sustains, we will lose some of the only places on campus where students of color feel seen, heard, and safe.

So, when people assume I despise DEI, my answer is clear.

Absolutely not. I am here because of it.