To me, it’s no mystery. Having grown up surrounded by racism, I had learned to hate myself. I had little hope for the future, which, in turn, made me unlikely to excel. Once I got to college, the diversity of the environment allowed me to discover my talents. Last year, I became the first female Asian-American playwright to have a play produced on Broadway.

I was fortunate to begin my playwriting career in New York’s downtown theater community, which was full of organizations that cared about challenging and diversifying the predominantly white theater world. I was also lucky to follow in the path of trailblazers like David Henry Hwang, the Tony-winning playwright of “M. Butterfly.”

David got his big break at the Public Theater in New York after it faced protests over the casting of a white actor in an Asian role. Joseph Papp, the Public’s founder, hired one of the protesters to seek out plays by Asian-Americans. That led to the production of David’s play “FOB.”

“I really consider my career to be the beneficiary of affirmative action,” David told me recently, “because that’s what affirmative action does: It recognizes a social need and creates a program in order to address that.”

I’ve seen how increasing diversity can cause a field to flourish. The theater world is in the midst of a golden age of playwriting, and this has coincided with a concerted effort by theaters to diversify their programming. The next step is for theaters to produce more work by playwrights who come from low-income backgrounds, as our field is still dominated by the voices of the middle-to-upper classes. To achieve real diversity, I believe that affirmative action should be a holistic process, as it is at Harvard, encompassing class as well as race.

Affirmative action exists because people of color — predominantly black and brown people — have fought for it in the face of centuries of discrimination. The Harvard admissions lawsuit is a cynical manipulation that urges Asian-Americans to sell out other people of color. As an Asian-American, I know too well that we face discrimination. But, in the end, this lawsuit will benefit well-off white people the most.

The plaintiffs’ sole proposed solution, eliminating affirmative action, would be incredibly harmful to all people of color, including Asian-Americans like me. We can’t let this happen. We must protect diversity.