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In this provocative and important book, Bryan K. Fair, the eighth of ten children born to a single mother on public assistance in an Ohio ghetto, combines two histories - Americas and his own - to offer a compelling defense of affirmative action. How can it be, Fair asks, that, after hundreds of years of racial apartheid during which whites were granted 100 percent quotas to almost all professions, we have convinced ourselves that, after a few decades of remedial affirmative action, the playing field is now level? Fair ambitiously surveys the most common arguments for and against affirmative action. He argues that we must distinguish between America in the pre-civil rights movement era - when the law of the land was explicitly anti-black - and todays affirmative action policies - which are decidedly not anti-white. He concludes that the only just and effective way both to account for Americas racial past and to negotiate current racial quagmires is to embrace a remedial affirmative action that does not rely on quotas or fiery rhetoric but takes race into account alongside other pertinent factors. Championing the model of diversity on which the United States was purportedly founded, Fair serves up a most personal and persuasive account of why race-conscious policies are the most effective way to end de facto segregation and eliminate racial caste.
List of contents
Table of Contents A Note to the Reader Acknowledgments Preface: Telling Stories Recasting Remedies as Diseases Color-Blind Justice The Design of This Book Pt. 1. A Personal Narrative Not White Enough Dee Black Columbus Racial Poverty Man-Child Colored Matters Coded Schools Busing Going Home Equal Opportunity The Character of Color Diversity as One Factor The Deception of Color Blindness Pt. 2. White Privilege and Black Despair: The Origins of Racial Caste in America The Declaration of Inferiority Marginal Americans Inventing American Slavery The Road to Constitutional Caste Losing Second-Class Citizenship Reconstruction and Sacrifice Separate and Unequal The Color Line Critiquing Color Blindness Pt. 3. The Constitutionality of Remedial Affirmative Action The Origins of Remedial Affirmative Action The Court of Last Resort The Invention of Reverse Discrimination The Politics of Affirmative Action: Myth or Reality? Racial Realism Eliminating Caste Afterword Notes Index
Summary
At the heart of their deals was a clear race-conscious intent to place the interests of whites above those of blacks. In this provocative and important book, the author combines two histories - America's and his own - to offer a compelling defense of affirmative action.
