Asian man speaking. I used to support AA because I recognized racism and SES are very interconnected, and that structural inequalities had to be corrected for, if only imperfectly. History is real, and we are still living it. But even then, my support always sat poorly with me. And over time, my opinion has evolved and I can no longer ignore that affirmative action is a directly anti-Asian policy that leaves white demographics virtually unaffected, while using Asians as sacrificial lambs to further a white liberal agenda which is happy to ignore our existence.
My reasoning for this is that it is almost entirely Asians, not whites, who are giving up seats to increase the representation of other poc demographics. A Princeton 2005 study showed that:
Data for the 1997 entering class indicate that eliminating affirmative action would reduce acceptance rates for African-American and Hispanic applicants by as much as one-half to two-thirds* and have an equivalent impact on the proportion of underrepresented minority students in the admitted class. White applicants would benefit very little by removing racial and ethnic preferences; the white acceptance rate would increase by roughly 0.5 percentage points. *Asian applicants would gain the most. They would occupy four out of every five seats created by accepting fewer African-American and Hispanic students.* The acceptance rate for Asian applicants would rise by one-third from nearly 18 percent to more than 23 percent."
I am a SJW. I was introduced as a debater for whom social justice meant those words in themselves, not a label popularized via tumblr and twitter. But as an Asian man who understands the theory and is well read in cultural studies, I am insulted by a number of trends that ultimately marginalize and dismiss the concerns of Asian Americans, and of Asian American men in particular. I believe this dogmatic support of Affirmative Action amongst white liberals and other poc's is a symptom of that larger trend. America has a "black and white" thinking about race, and Asians are diluted into the melting pot.
The painful result of this invisibility, as I have said before, is that Asians can used by both liberal and conservative whites as sacrificial lambs to further a vision in which we are not fully there. Conservatives use the model minority bs to use us as pawns against the lazy thugs of "black culture." Liberals ignore us because they only learn about racism against blacks and hispanics, and besides, aren't Asians doing pretty well for themselves? Thank goodness white liberals themselves aren't affected, because Asian-Americans get to soak up the costs of this country's white supremacist history while they get to pat themselves on the back.
For now, I think when Asian-Americans try to join into broader social justice conversations, it's essential to remember that we are largely not understood. The dogmatic support of Affirmative Action is a perfect example. Furthermore, I am a feminist, but many environments of feminism/antiracism will not prepare you at all to understand the unique issues facing AAPA men, or how they connect to AAPA women. Unless you take a course specifically on the topic, you'll have brilliant and charismatic cultural studies professors who improperly pronounce an assigned author's common Vietnamese last name, and whose entire department didn't know it either. In terms of gender, I find that my homies are swarmed by a deluge of ignorance and meme-like scientific racism (wildly debunked World Penis Map, anyone?), we are alternately inconsequential in media or desexualized and represented without drive. We are shown to be penalized for dominant behavior in the workforce, while much of our best AAPA creative talent is brain-drained into moneymakers like finance, comp sci, engineering. There's a thousand cuts going on and affirmative action is a symptom of the way we are covertly assigned a lower social status, which is shifting and fluid, but which at times can be lower than anyone else.
This is a much longer discussion, and I've clearly left out a lot of important disclaimers and content so I apologize in advance, but yeah, tldr you've found the Asian man.