BiblioVault - Books about Affirmative action programs

Affirmative Action and the Stalled Quest for Black Progress

W. Avon Drake and Robert D. Holsworth

University of Illinois Press, 1996

W. Avon Drake and Robert D. Holsworth focus on the landmark case of Richmond v. Croson. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled against the city of Richmond's set-aside program requiring that thirty percent of the money in municipal construction contracts go to minority-owned firms. The authors describe the politics that gave rise to the set-aside program, investigate its actual operation, explore its effects, and detail responses to it in both black and white communities. As they show, the program served important political purposes but produced limited economic benefits for the Black community. Drake and Holsworth conclude by examining the politics of development as an alternative to the set-aside framework.

Insightful and path-breaking, Affirmative Action and the Stalled Quest for Black Progress examines the accomplishments and limitations of the set-aside programs once at the center of political debates about affirmative action in the United States.

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Affirmative Action in Medicine

Improving Health Care for Everyone

James L. Curtis, M.D.

University of Michigan Press, 2003

Affirmative action programs have significantly changed American medicine for the better, not only in medical school admissions and access to postgraduate training but also in bringing a higher quality of health care to all people. James L. Curtis approaches this important transition from historical, statistical, and personal perspectives. He tells how over the course of his medical education and career as a psychiatrist and professor--often as the first or only African American in his cohort--the status of minorities in the medical professions grew from a tiny percentage to a far more equitable representation of the American population.

Advancing arguments from his earlier book, Blacks, Medical Schools, and Society, Curtis evaluates the outcomes of affirmative action efforts over the past thirty years. He describes formidable barriers to minority access to medical-education opportunities and the resulting problems faced by minority patients in receiving medical treatment. His progress report includes a review of two thousand minority students admitted to U.S. medical schools in 1969, following them through graduation and their careers, comparing them with the careers of two thousand of their nonminority peers. These samples provide an important look at medical schools that, while heralding dramatic progress in physician education and training opportunity, indicates much room for further improvement.

A basic hurdle continues to face African Americans and other minorities who are still confined to segregated neighborhoods and inferior school systems that stifle full scholastic development. Curtis urges us as a nation to develop all our human resources through an expansion of affirmative action programs, thus improving health care for everyone.

James L. Curtis is Clinical Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

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Affirmative Discrimination

Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy

Nathan Glazer

Harvard University Press, 1987

Should government try to remedy persistent racial and ethnic inequalities by establishing and enforcing quotas and other statistical goals? Here is one of the most incisive books ever written on this difficult issue. Nathan Glazer surveys the civil rights tradition in the United States; evaluates public policies in the areas of employment, education, and housing; and questions the judgment and wisdom of their underlying premises—their focus on group rights, rather than individual rights. Such policies, he argues, are ineffective, unnecessary, and politically destructive of harmonious relations among the races.

Updated with a long, new introduction by the author, Affirmative Discrimination will enable citizens as well as scholars to better understand and evaluate public policies for achieving social justice in a multiethnic society.

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Color Lines

Affirmative Action, Immigration, and Civil Rights Options for America

John David Skrentny

University of Chicago Press, 2001

A new ethnic order has emerged in the United States. The growing number of Latinos and Asians has rendered the old black-and-white binary obsolete. And yet, political pundits and commentators on both the left and the right continue to overlook the changing face of discrimination and opportunity in today's new multiethnic, multiracial America. With Color Lines, John David Skrentny brings us a collection of essays that reexamines the role of affirmative action and civil rights in light of this important shift in American demographics. The book explores issues of public policy, equal opportunity, diversity, multiculturalism, pathways to better work and higher learning, and attempts in countries outside the United States to protect minority civil rights. Combining perspectives from specialists in fields as diverse as sociology, history, political science, and law, Color Lines is a balanced and broad-ranging guide for anyone interested in civil rights policy and the future of ethnic relations in America.

Contributors:
Erik Bleich
Lawrence D. Bobo
Frank Dobbin
John Aubrey Douglass
Hugh Davis Graham
Kyra R. Greene
Erin Kelly
George R. La Noue
Jennifer Lee
Michael Lichter
Deborah C. Malamud
Sunita Parikh
John C. Sullivan
Thomas J. Sugrue
Carol M. Swain
Steven M. Teles
Roger Waldinger
Christine Min Wotipka

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The Color-Blind Constitution

Andrew Kull

Harvard University Press, 1998

From 1840 to 1960 the profoundest claim of Americans who fought the institution of segregation was that the government had no business sorting citizens by the color of their skin. During these years the moral and political attractiveness of the antidiscrimination principle made it the ultimate legal objective of the American civil rights movement. Yet, in the contemporary debate over the politics and constitutional law of race, the vital theme of antidiscrimination has been largely suppressed. Thus a strong line of argument laying down one theoretical basis for the constitutional protection of civil rights has been lost.

Andrew Kull provides us with the previously unwritten history of the color-blind idea. From the arguments of Wendell Phillips and the Garrisonian abolitionists, through the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment and Justice Harlan's famous dissent in Plessy, civil rights advocates have consistently attempted to locate the antidiscrimination principle in the Constitution. The real alternative, embraced by the Supreme Court in 1896, was a constitutional guarantee of reasonable classification. The government, it said, had the power to classify persons by race so long as it acted reasonably; the judiciary would decide what was reasonable.

In our own time, in Brown v. Board of Education and the decisions that followed, the Court nearly avowed the rule of color blindness that civil rights lawyers continued to assert; instead, it veered off for political and tactical reasons, deciding racial cases without stating constitutional principle. The impoverishment of the antidiscrimination theme in the Court's decision prefigured the affirmative action shift in the civil rights agenda. The social upheaval of the 1960s put the color-blind Constitution out of reach for a quartercentury or more; but for the hard choices still to be made in racial policy, the colorblind tradition of civil rights retains both historical and practical significance.

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The Constitutional Logic of Affirmative Action

Ronald J. Fiscus

Duke University Press, 1992

Few issues are as mired in rhetoric and controversy as affirmative action. This is certainly no less true now as when Ronald J. Fiscus’s The Constitutional Logic of Affirmative Action was first published in 1992. The controversy has, perhaps, become more charged over the past few years. With this compelling and rigorously reasoned argument for a constitutional rationale of affirmative action, Fiscus clarifies the moral and legal ramifications of this complex subject and presents an important view in the context of the ongoing debate.
Beginning with a distinction drawn between principles of compensatory and distributive justice, Fiscus argues that the former, although often the basis for judgments made in individual discrimination cases, cannot sufficiently justify broad programs of affirmative action. Only a theory of distributive justice, one that assumes minorities have a right to what they would have gained proportionally in a nonracist society, can persuasively provide that justification. On this basis, the author argues in favor of proportional racial quotas—and challenges the charge of “reverse discrimination” raised in protest in the name of the “innocent victims” of affirmative action—as an action necessary to approach the goals of fairness and equality.
The Constitutional Logic of Affirmative Action focuses on Supreme Court affirmative action rulings from Bakke (1976) to Croson (1989) and includes an epilogue by editor Stephen L. Wasby that considers developments through 1995. General readers concerned with racial justice, affirmative action, and public policy, as well as legal specialists and constitutional scholars will find Fiscus’s argument passionate, balanced, and persuasive.

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Defending Diversity

Affirmative Action at the University of Michigan

Patricia Gurin, Jeffrey S. Lehman, and Earl Lewis, with Eric L. Dey, Gerald Gurin, and Sylvia Hurtado

University of Michigan Press, 2004

Even as lawsuits challenging its admissions policies made their way through the courts, the University of Michigan carried the torch for affirmative action in higher education.

In June 2003, the Supreme Court vindicated UM's position on affirmative action when it ruled that race may be used as a factor for universities in their admissions programs, thus confirming what the UM had argued all along: diversity in the classroom translates to a beneficial and wide-ranging social value. With the green light given to the law school's admissions policies, Defending Diversity validates the positive benefits gained by students in a diverse educational setting.

Written by prominent University of Michigan faculty, Defending Diversity is a timely response to the court's ruling. Providing factual background, historical setting, and the psychosocial implications of affirmative action, the book illuminates the many benefits of a diverse higher educational setting -- including preparing students to be full participants in a pluralistic democracy -- and demonstrates why affirmative action is necessary to achieve that diversity.

Defending Diversity is a significant contribution to the ongoing discussion on affirmative action in higher education. Perhaps more important, it is a valuable record of the history, events, arguments, and issues surrounding the original lawsuits and the Supreme Court's subsequent ruling, and helps reclaim the debate from those forces opposed to affirmative action.

Patricia Gurin is Professor Emerita, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan. Jeffrey S. Lehman, former Dean of the University of Michigan Law School, is President of Cornell University. Earl Lewis is Dean of Rackham Graduate School, University of Michigan.

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The Enigma of Diversity

The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice

Ellen Berrey

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Diversity these days is a hallowed American value, widely shared and honored. That’s a remarkable change from the Civil Rights era—but does this public commitment to diversity constitute a civil rights victory? What does diversity mean in contemporary America, and what are the effects of efforts to support it?

Ellen Berrey digs deep into those questions in The Enigma of Diversity. Drawing on six years of fieldwork and historical sources dating back to the 1950s and making extensive use of three case studies from widely varying arenas—housing redevelopment in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood, affirmative action in the University of Michigan’s admissions program, and the workings of the human resources department at a Fortune 500 company—Berrey explores the complicated, contradictory, and even troubling meanings and uses of diversity as it is invoked by different groups for different, often symbolic ends. In each case, diversity affirms inclusiveness, especially in the most coveted jobs and colleges, yet it resists fundamental change in the practices and cultures that are the foundation of social inequality. Berrey shows how this has led racial progress itself to be reimagined, transformed from a legal fight for fundamental rights to a celebration of the competitive advantages afforded by cultural differences.

Powerfully argued and surprising in its conclusions, The Enigma of Diversity reveals the true cost of the public embrace of diversity: the taming of demands for racial justice.

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The Ironies of Affirmative Action

Politics, Culture, and Justice in America

John David Skrentny

University of Chicago Press, 1996

Affirmative action has been fiercely debated for more than a quarter of a century, producing much partisan literature, but little serious scholarship and almost nothing on its cultural and political origins. The Ironies of Affirmative Action is the first book-length, comprehensive, historical account of the development of affirmative action.

Analyzing both the resistance from the Right and the support from the Left, Skrentny brings to light the unique moral culture that has shaped the affirmative action debate, allowing for starkly different policies for different citizens. He also shows, through an analysis of historical documents and court rulings, the complex and intriguing political circumstances which gave rise to these controversial policies.

By exploring the mystery of how it took less than five years for a color-blind policy to give way to one that explicitly took race into account, Skrentny uncovers and explains surprising ironies: that affirmative action was largely created by white males and initially championed during the Nixon administration; that many civil rights leaders at first avoided advocacy of racial preferences; and that though originally a political taboo, almost no one resisted affirmative action.

With its focus on the historical and cultural context of policy elites, The Ironies of Affirmative Action challenges dominant views of policymaking and politics.

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The Next Twenty-five Years

Affirmative Action in Higher Education in the United States and South Africa

David L. Featherman, Martin Hall, and Marvin Krislov, editors

University of Michigan Press, 2009

"Ambitious, provocative, and wide-ranging, this rich collection of essays from U.S. and South African perspectives reflects the thinking of thoughtful advocates of affirmative action."
---William G. Bowen, President Emeritus, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and President Emeritus, Princeton University

"Thoughtful commentary from outstanding experts on affirmative action’s future in two countries struggling to overcome a legacy of racial injustice."
---Derek Bok, 300th Anniversary University Research Professor, and President Emeritus, Harvard University

"An enormously important comparative study and reflection on affirmative (U.S.) and corrective (South Africa) action with exhaustive and sensitive treatment of a vital topic."
---Kader Asmal, Professor of Law, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, and former Minister of Education, South Africa

A penetrating exploration of affirmative action's continued place in 21st-century higher education, The Next Twenty-five Years assembles the viewpoints of some of the most influential scholars, educators, university leaders, and public officials. Its comparative essays span the political spectrum and dissect debates in two nations to elucidate the legal, political, social, economic, and moral dimensions of affirmative action in higher education and its role in contributing to a just, equitable, and vital society.

David L. Featherman is Professor of Sociology and Psychology and Founding Director of the Center for Advancing Research and Solutions for Society at the University of Michigan.

Martin Hall is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Salford, Greater Manchester, and previously was Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Cape Town.

Marvin Krislov is President of Oberlin College and previously was Vice President and General Counsel at the University of Michigan.

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Nixon’s Civil Rights

Politics, Principle, and Policy

Dean J. Kotlowski

Harvard University Press, 2001

Richard Nixon believed that history would show his administration in the forefront of civil rights progress. What does the record really say about civil rights under Nixon? In a groundbreaking new book, Dean Kotlowski offers a surprising study of an administration that redirected the course of civil rights in America.

Nixon's policymaking recast the civil rights debate from an argument over racial integration to an effort to improve the economic station of disadvantaged groups. Kotlowski examines such issues as school desegregation, fair housing, voting rights, affirmative action, and minority businesses as well as Native American and women's rights. He details Nixon's role, revealing a president who favored deeds over rhetoric and who constantly weighed political expediency and principles in crafting civil rights policy.

In moving the debate from the street to the system, Nixon set civil rights on a path whose merits and results are still debated. Nixon's Civil Rights is a revealing portrait of one of the most enigmatic figures of modern American politics and a major contribution to the study of civil rights in America.

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The Politics of Preference

Democratic Institutions and Affirmative Action in the United States and India

Sunita Parikh

University of Michigan Press, 1997

Sunita Parikh examines the history and fate of affirmative action programs in two ethnically heterogeneous democracies, the United States and India. Affirmative action programs in the United States represent a controversial policy about which the American public feel at best ambivalence and at worst hostility, while in India the expansion of reservation policies in recent years has led to riots and contributed to the fall of governments. And yet these policies were not particularly controversial when they were introduced. How the policy traveled from these auspicious beginnings to its current predicament can best be understood, according to Parikh, by exploring the changing political conditions under which it was introduced, expanded, and then challenged.

Although they are in many respects very different countries, India and the United States are important countries in which to study the implementation of ascriptive policies like affirmative action, according to Parikh. They are both large, heterogeneous societies with democratic political systems in which previously excluded groups were granted benefits by the majorities that had historically oppressed them. Parikh argues that these policies were the product of democratic politics--which required political parties to mobilize existing groups as voters--and the ethnically heterogeneous nature of Indian and U.S. society--where ethnic markers are particularly salient sources of identification as groups. Affirmative action in both countries was introduced because it could be used to solidify and expand electoral coalitions by giving benefits to defined minority groups, according to Parikh. As the policy became better known, it became more disliked by non-targeted groups, and it was no longer an appeal which was cost free for politicians.

This book will be of interest to social scientists concerned with race and ethnic relations and with the comparative study of political and social systems.

Sunita Parikh is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Columbia University.

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The Prism of Race

The Politics and Ideology of Affirmative Action in Brazil

David Lehmann

University of Michigan Press, 2018

Brazil has developed a distinctive response to the injustices inflicted by the country’s race relations regime. Despite the mixed racial background of most Brazilians, the state recognizes people’s racial classification according to a simple official scheme in which those self-assigned as black, together with “brown” and “indigenous” (preto-pardo-indigena), can qualify for specially allocated resources, most controversially quota places at public universities. Although this quota system has been somewhat successful, many other issues that disproportionately affect the country’s black population remain unresolved, and systemic policies to reduce structural inequality remain off the agenda.

In The Prism of Race, David Lehmann explores, theoretically and practically, issues of race, the state, social movements, and civil society, and then goes beyond these themes to ask whether Brazilian politics will forever circumvent the severe problems facing the society by co-optation and by tinkering with unjust structures. Lehmann disrupts the paradigm of current scholarly thought on Brazil, placing affirmative action disputes in their political and class context, bringing back the concept of state corporatism, and questioning the strength and independence of Brazilian civil society.

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The Racial Order Of Things

Cultural Imaginaries Of The Post-Soul Era

Roopali Mukherjee

University of Minnesota Press, 2006

Why did affirmative action programs implemented during the sixties and seventies suffer vicious assaults in the nineties? How were culturally resonant appeals to individualism and colorblindness turned around during the nineties to epitomize a “toxic system of quotas, preference, and set-asides”?In The Racial Order of Things, Roopali Mukherjee analyzes reversals and reinterpretations that mark the turn from the civil rights era of the sixties to the post-soul decade of the nineties. She begins by surveying a series of intractable disagreements over race- and gender-based social justice that have played out over the past decade, framed by the 1996 passage of California’s Proposition 209 and the 2003 Supreme Court decision on admissions criteria at the University of Michigan. Examining political campaigns for and against affirmative action as well as films about dilemmas of gender and race in the mythic meritocracy, the book exposes a remarkable discursive tug-of-war over antidiscrimination policies during the nineties.Highlighting the ways in which categories such as “blackness” and “women” have operated in these debates, Mukherjee sees the public policy process as a key site where cultural identities are formed, recognized, and discarded. Considering mainstream media, including Hollywood films like Disclosure, G.I. Jane, Courage under Fire, and The Contender, Mukherjee focuses on conflicts following the introduction of women and blacks into the workplace. She explores the politics of public memory about the civil rights era through the lens of feature film, documentary, and network news. Using newspaper articles and legislative records, Mukherjee provides a comparative reading of narratives and counternarratives of the debate surrounding the 1964 Civil Rights Act and anti–affirmative action campaigns of the neoliberal nineties.Balancing policy narrative, cinematic reading, and conceptual analysis, Mukherjee demonstrates a shifting and paradoxical racial order that explains how the cultural authority and political career of affirmative action remains in flux, thoroughly contested, and contradictory.Roopali Mukherjee is assistant professor of media studies at Queens College of the City University of New York.

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Understanding Affirmative Action

Politics, Discrimination, and the Search for Justice

J. Edward Kellough

Georgetown University Press, 2006

For some time, the United States has been engaged in a national debate over affirmative action policy. A policy that began with the idea of creating a level playing field for minorities has sparked controversy in the workplace, in higher education, and elsewhere. After forty years, the debate still continues and the issues are as complex as ever. While most Americans are familiar with the term, they may not fully understand what affirmative action is and why it has become such a divisive issue.

With this concise and up-to-date introduction, J. Edward Kellough brings together historical, philosophical, and legal analyses to fully inform participants and observers of this debate. Aiming to promote a more thorough knowledge of the issues involved, this book covers the history, legal status, controversies, and impact of affirmative action in both the private and public sectors—and in education as well as employment.

In addition, Kellough shows how the development and implementation of affirmative action policies have been significantly influenced by the nature and operation of our political institutions. Highlighting key landmarks in legislation and court decisions, he explains such concepts as "disparate impact," "diversity management," "strict scrutiny," and "representative bureaucracy." Understanding Affirmative Action probes the rationale for affirmative action, the different arguments against it, and the known impact it has had. Kellough concludes with a consideration of whether or not affirmative action will remain a useful tool for combating discrimination in the years to come.

Not just for students in public administration and public policy, this handy volume will be a valuable resource for public administrators, human resource managers, and ordinary citizens looking for a balanced treatment of a controversial policy.

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Working Law

Courts, Corporations, and Symbolic Civil Rights

Lauren B. Edelman

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, virtually all companies have antidiscrimination policies in place. Although these policies represent some progress, women and minorities remain underrepresented within the workplace as a whole and even more so when you look at high-level positions. They also tend to be less well paid. How is it that discrimination remains so prevalent in the American workplace despite the widespread adoption of policies designed to prevent it?

One reason for the limited success of antidiscrimination policies, argues Lauren B. Edelman, is that the law regulating companies is broad and ambiguous, and managers therefore play a critical role in shaping what it means in daily practice. Often, what results are policies and procedures that are largely symbolic and fail to dispel long-standing patterns of discrimination. Even more troubling, these meanings of the law that evolve within companies tend to eventually make their way back into the legal domain, inconspicuously influencing lawyers for both plaintiffs and defendants and even judges. When courts look to the presence of antidiscrimination policies and personnel manuals to infer fair practices and to the presence of diversity training programs without examining whether these policies are effective in combating discrimination and achieving racial and gender diversity, they wind up condoning practices that deviate considerably from the legal ideals.

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