Taiyee Chien and Matthew Reade present a diverse, challenging, and respectful conversation about affirmative action and its future.
Month: October 2020
What can a debate between two political adversaries in October 1996 teach us about the affirmative-action debate today? Matthew Reade explains.
Coleman Hughes frames the affirmative-action debate as a contest between three positions: the pro-equality position, the pro-equity position, and the middle ground between them.
Richard Sander asks and answers fifteen questions about California's antidiscrimination provisions and their proposed repeal.
Girardeau Spann hopes that ongoing protests against racial injustice across the United States reflect an emerging consensus around the pro-equity conception of affirmative action—a consensus that may prompt the Supreme Court to embrace the view that the Constitution requires efforts to "eradicat[e] racially disparate impact."
Jonathan Feingold criticizes the Supreme Court's "preference" for "class-not-race" affirmative action as "intersectional blindness"—a failure to recognize that hardship may attach simultaneously to many different facets of a person's identity.
Defending affirmative action "continues to be important and necessary." But, Susan Sturm argues, affirmative action is not enough. Institutional transformation is necessary to correct structural bias in education.
Anthony Chen and Lisa Stulberg argue that the diversity rationale for affirmative action originated earlier—and for different reasons—than scholars previously thought.
The diversity rationale for race-based affirmative action drastically departs from its traditional justification as a remedy for past discrimination. Amy Wax argues that the diversity rationale paves the way for "affirmative action forever." In this new paradigm, to remain true to the civil-rights laws, courts must prohibit racial preferences in education and employment unless their proponents offer specific evidence that the benefits of racial preferences outweigh their cost.
The fight over affirmative action is nothing new, Richard T. Ford writes. We'd be better off without it—but it reflects enduring malignancies in American life.