Asian Americans are finding ourselves at a political impasse — it seems like our choices are to either fight for the success of our own, or the success of others. And with the way our broken education system is currently set up, it often feels impossible to fight for both. Some Asian American activists are treating education like a zero sum game, as if ceding even 20% of the spots at these elite schools is somehow equivalent to anti-Asianness. And yet they refuse to own up to their own anti-Blackness, while they are knowingly harming Black and Latinx students’ fight for equity and integration. Their argument boils down to the ideology of meritocracy, that as marginalized people we were able to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, study hard and gain entry, which of course ignores the centuries of redlining and institutional racism experienced by Black and brown communities and that many middle schools in Black and Latinx neighborhoods do not have advanced programs or educators who are equipped to prepare their students for the test. In fact, before the influx of Asian immigrants over the past few decades, the boom of the test prep industry, and the reduction of honors programs in Black and Latinx neighborhoods, Black and Latinx students actually made up nearly a third of the student body at specialized schools.