I’ve often heard Asian-Americans express resentment toward blacks and Latinos for benefiting from affirmative action. As a Yale senior, I remember feeling disillusioned myself when an upper-middle-class black classmate with significantly less academic achievement than I was admitted to a top medical school that had rejected me.

But if Asians are being held back, it’s not so much because of affirmative action but because of preference for whites. The 450-point advantage that the Princeton study demonstrated blacks have over Asians draws the most attention. But the number that is most revealing is the 140-point advantage for whites over Asians.

To explain that disparity some might assume that while Asian students have high test scores, they fall short in other categories colleges consider important. But the study isolated race as a factor by controlling for variables like academic performance, legacy status, social class, type of high school (public or private) and participation in athletics. So that 140-point gap is between a white student and an Asian student who differ by little more than race.

Still, I’ve always supported affirmative action, though I’d much prefer that it was based on socio-economic disadvantage rather than race alone. All students benefit from having a racially diverse class. I would not have preferred to go to a Yale that was predominantly Asian. Colleges should grant an advantage to blacks and Hispanics because they continue to face barriers to equal access and opportunity.

The same is not true for whites, so there is no reason they should have preference over Asians in college admissions. It would be ludicrous to state that whites have been disadvantaged in comparison to Asian-Americans. The opposite could be argued, with xenophobic persecution during “yellow peril” scares, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II as prime examples.