In 2012, Michael Wang, a senior at James Logan High School, in the Bay Area, was confident that he had done enough to get into one of his dream schools: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton. He had the kind of G.P.A.—4.67—that looks like a typo to anyone older than thirty-five. He had aced the ACT and placed in the ninety-ninth percentile on the SAT. But Wang didn’t want to be seen merely as a bookworm—he was an accomplished member of the speech-and-debate team, and he had co-founded his school’s math club. He played the piano and performed in a choir that sang with the San Francisco Opera, and at Barack Obama’s first Inauguration.

The following spring, Wang was rejected from all the Ivy League universities he had applied to, except the University of Pennsylvania. (He made the wait lists at Harvard and Columbia, but was eventually turned down at those schools, too.) He was devastated, and wondered what more he could have done. Then he started thinking about all the impediments that no amount of hard work could overcome. Some of his classmates who had got into these schools, he thought, had less impressive credentials than his. But they were Hispanic and African-American. Had he been rejected because he was Asian?

Wang had always been told that Asian students in America were held to higher standards than everyone else. When he was young, his parents suggested that, if he wanted to go to a school like Harvard, he would have to outwork other Asian students. Swearing off television became a competitive advantage. In high school, his friends, who were predominantly Asian, believed that their race would work against them in the admissions process. Wang knew students whose families were mixed Asian and white who identified themselves as white on their applications, lest they be lumped in with all the other overachievers. The Princeton Review has, in the past, encouraged students of Asian descent to try to conceal their cultural identity. There are admissions-counselling companies, like Asian Advantage, in the Bay Area, that help students strategize their extracurricular activities (less piano and tennis), and others, like Ivy Coach, based in New York City, that promise to make students “appear less Asian” in their application materials.

Wang found this notion troubling. “How are you not supposed to be proud of who we are?” he asked me, in August, when I met him for lunch in San Francisco, where he works as a paralegal. His office is in the financial district, on the border of Chinatown. As we walked a few blocks to get noodles, passing from one San Francisco into another, he recounted his story.

In 2013, Wang began talking to family friends familiar with the law about his options. That June, he filed a discrimination complaint against Yale, Stanford, and Princeton with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. (He did not include Harvard and Columbia, since he was still on the wait lists there.) At first, he said, he hoped to “reap the benefits” himself—never mind that these schools were unlikely to reconsider an applicant who was trying to sue his way into the freshman class. But Wang came to see the issue as one of fairness, and he thought that perhaps he could help someone in the future. He studied the history of Asian-Americans and college admissions, and eventually came across the work of a conservative activist named Edward Blum, a financial adviser who has devoted his life to overturning race-conscious laws. Blum has shown a talent for pinpointing vulnerabilities in civil-rights law and attacking them in the courts. Wang and Blum spoke on the phone and they agreed to keep in touch. At the time, Blum was heading a nonprofit called the Project on Fair Representation, and was working with Abigail Fisher, a white student who, in 2008, had been rejected by the University of Texas at Austin. The school guaranteed admission to Texas students in the top ten per cent of their high-school class; from those under the threshold, like Fisher, admissions officers chose applicants through a process that considered, among other criteria, race and family background. Fisher sued the university, alleging that this policy was unconstitutional. Blum helped assemble, and cover the bills for, Fisher’s legal team. (The Supreme Court eventually ruled against Fisher, in 2016.)

Blum, and other activists, gave a narrative shape to Wang’s grievance. Asians were being discriminated against in the college-admissions process, and among those taking their spots were the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action, like African-Americans and Hispanics.

Wang’s curiosity about the process has helped launch a chain of events that might ultimately alter the course of civil-rights history. In 2013, as Wang was preparing to go to college—he attended Williams—he was interviewed by officials at the Department of Education. Colleges generally say little about their decision-making processes, describing them as a “secret sauce” that makes each school distinct. (Being vague also protects them from legal liability.) But one of the investigators looking into Wang’s claim confirmed that many Ivy League admissions officers had, in the past, talked stereotypically when evaluating Asian-American applicants. “Oh, typical Asian student. Wants to become a doctor. Nothing special here,” Wang said, paraphrasing what the investigator had relayed to him. (The Office for Civil Rights did not make a judgment in Wang’s case.)

Few people knew about Wang’s complaint until July, 2014, when he wrote an op-ed for the San Jose Mercury News describing the “anger” that Asian-Americans felt about being held to unfair standards. Wang’s article and his case were picked up by Chinese-immigrant newspapers and social media. Though Wang professes to be in favor of affirmative action, the most egregious aspects of his story captivated a small but vocal network of Chinese-Americans, who had heretofore shown little interest in American politics. Spurred by WeChat, a Chinese social-media platform, and encouraged by what they saw as the next great civil-rights struggle, they threw their support behind Wang and other Asian-American students penalized by the college-admissions process.

These activists found an ally in Blum. That November, Blum filed a federal lawsuit against Harvard University. The suit advances a surprising line of argument. Instead of claiming that the process is unfair to whites—an increasingly tough sell, at least in the media—the suit suggests that affirmative action, a mechanism intended to help minorities such as Asian-Americans, is actually being used to harm them. Blum hopes for a college-admissions process in which there would be no race or ethnicity boxes to check, and students would be evaluated more or less anonymously. To bring the suit, Blum created Students for Fair Admissions, a membership organization roughly modelled on the A.C.L.U. and the N.A.A.C.P., which sued the university on behalf of its members, some of whom were students with stories similar to Wang’s.

S.F.F.A. alleges that Harvard attempts to curate the racial breakdown of each incoming class. In order to achieve classes that, in recent years, have been roughly half white, twenty per cent Asian-American, fifteen per cent black, and twelve per cent Hispanic, Harvard routinely gives Asian-American applicants—who often excel when it comes to standardized testing, grades, and extracurricular activities—lower marks in the more subjective “personal” category, which includes everything from the student’s admissions essay to letters of recommendation and alumni interviews. If S.F.F.A. can prove that Harvard engages in “balancing,” which is illegal, the school could be forced to remove any considerations of race and ethnicity from its admissions process. Harvard maintains that its process is a “whole person review,” in which applicants aren’t reduced to a single factor, whether it’s academic excellence or their racial and ethnic identity. “We do not discriminate against applicants from any group,” Rachael Dane, a Harvard spokesperson, told me. “I don’t use the term ‘balance,’ because we don’t balance.”