The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap: How a Civil Rights Ideal Got Hijacked
Lots to get mad about in this piece. I knew the legal movement against affirmative action was planned but I had no idea how coordinated it was or how early after the Civil Rights era it had started. My '90s education certainly treated it as a solved problem even as it was well on its way to being dismantled.
For centuries, men like Powell and Bakke had benefited from a near-100 percent quota system, one that reserved nearly all the seats at this nation’s best-funded public and private schools and most-exclusive public and private colleges, all the homes in the best neighborhoods and all the top, well-paying jobs in private companies and public agencies for white Americans. Men like Bakke did not acknowledge the systemic advantages they had accrued because of their racial category, nor all the ways their race had unfairly benefited them. More critical, neither did the Supreme Court. As members of the majority atop the caste system, racial advantage transmitted invisibly to them. They took notice of their race only when confronted with a new system that sought to redistribute some of that advantage to people who had never had it.
conservatives argue that programs specifically helping the women most likely to die violate the 14th Amendment
we have decided as a nation that there is nothing we should do to help Black Americans achieve equality and that we will remain a caste society
Race-based affirmative action has died. The fight for racial justice need not. It cannot
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