I'm Lee Rowland, and from the ACLU, this is At Liberty, the show where we dive into today's most crucial civil rights and civil liberties topics.

Today, affirmative action and the case against Harvard.

Harvard University is facing a lawsuit alleging that its undergraduate admissions practices unlawfully discriminate against Asian Americans.

The suit is the latest salvo in the legal battle over whether and how schools can consider race as a factor in their admissions process. Here today to help us understand the stakes for this lawsuit is Jin He Lee,

Senior Deputy Director of Litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund,

affectionately known in the civil rights world as LDF. She represents more than

two dozen Harvard student and alumni groups who have filed briefs with the court considering

the case against Harvard to defend Harvard's current use of a holistic and race-conscious admissions

process. Jen, thank you so much for being here today.

Thank you for having me.

It's a pleasure to be a part of this podcast.

So if you're willing, I'd love to start with your biography.

Can you tell us a little bit about your own background

and how you came to be a civil rights advocate?

Yes, and actually my background is very

much relevant to the issues in the Harvard lawsuit. I grew up in a very small town in rural

Tennessee, and it was an all-white community. And it was that experience of being the only

person of color, my family, being the only people of color in this community,

that really forged in my mind the importance of race and how much that determines someone's opportunities,

as well as the burdens of being a person of color and whether it's explicit or implicit discrimination

that a person of color, especially children, can experience. And it's that experience that

really led me to want to become a civil rights lawyer and in particular focusing on racial justice

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