For Discrimination

For Discrimination PDF Author: Randall Kennedy
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307949362
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
The definitive reckoning with Affirmative Action, one of America’s most explosively contentious and divisive issues—from “one of our most important and perceptive writers on race and the law.”—The Washington Post “A clear-eyed take on America’s battle over affirmative action and diversity.... [Kennedy] goes straight at the issue with fearlessness and a certain cheekiness.” —Los Angeles Times “Compelling.... Powerful.” —Wall Street Journal What precisely is affirmative action, and why is it fiercely championed by some and just as fiercely denounced by others? Does it signify a boon or a stigma? Or is it simply reverse discrimination? What are its benefits and costs to American society? What are the exact indicia determining who should or should not be accorded affirmative action? When should affirmative action end, if it must? Randall Kennedy gives us a concise and deeply personal overview of the policy, refusing to shy away from the myriad complexities of an issue that continues to bedevil American race relations.

For Discrimination

For Discrimination PDF Author: Randall Kennedy
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307949362
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
The definitive reckoning with Affirmative Action, one of America’s most explosively contentious and divisive issues—from “one of our most important and perceptive writers on race and the law.”—The Washington Post “A clear-eyed take on America’s battle over affirmative action and diversity.... [Kennedy] goes straight at the issue with fearlessness and a certain cheekiness.” —Los Angeles Times “Compelling.... Powerful.” —Wall Street Journal What precisely is affirmative action, and why is it fiercely championed by some and just as fiercely denounced by others? Does it signify a boon or a stigma? Or is it simply reverse discrimination? What are its benefits and costs to American society? What are the exact indicia determining who should or should not be accorded affirmative action? When should affirmative action end, if it must? Randall Kennedy gives us a concise and deeply personal overview of the policy, refusing to shy away from the myriad complexities of an issue that continues to bedevil American race relations.

Affirmative Talk, Affirmative Action

Affirmative Talk, Affirmative Action PDF Author: Augustus J. Jones
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Affirmative action programs have been implemented in over 50 jurisdictions in the United States, yet studies of a number of these communities have shown that most efforts to meet proposed race-conscious hiring goals have been unsuccessful. This unique comparative case study investigates the reasons for the success or failure of affirmative action programs in two Southern communities. Augustus J. Jones, Jr. challenges the findings in the literature that affirmative action efforts are doomed to failure. This analysis does what similar studies have failed to do: it identifies and defines those elements--communications, resources, commitment, political-social conditions, and bureaucratic arrangements--required for the successful execution of any public policy program, and then offers appropriate strategies in a detailed, step-by-step approach for successfully executing affirmative action goals. Research for the volume includes over 50 interviews of city, state, and federal officials responsible for implementing affirmative action goals, on-the-spot observations of the communities' affirmative action shops, and written records of city and country commission meetings. Following an introductory chapter that outlines the purpose, justifications, and methodology of the work, the second chapter compares variables within the two communities, such as their civil rights records, political orientation, and progress in meeting affirmative action goals. Five subsequent chapters focus on the key elements in race-conscious hiring programs, including communications, resources, commitment, political conditions, and organizational arrangements. The final chapter offers conclusions, a recipe for successful affirmative action programs, and speculations about the future of these programs. This useful assessment will become a standard affirmative action how-to book for scholars, students, policy analysts, bureaucrats both inside and outside government, and equal opportunity officers at the federal, state, and local levels who are responsible for implementing and enforcing equal opportunity laws and affirmative action goals.

Race, Class, and Affirmative Action

Race, Class, and Affirmative Action PDF Author: Sigal Alon
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610448545
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
No issue in American higher education is more contentious than that of race-based affirmative action. In light of the ongoing debate around the topic and recent Supreme Court rulings, affirmative action policy may be facing further changes. As an alternative to race-based affirmative action, some analysts suggest affirmative action policies based on class. In Race, Class, and Affirmative Action, sociologist Sigal Alon studies the race-based affirmative action policies in the United States. and the class-based affirmative action policies in Israel. Alon evaluates how these different policies foster campus diversity and socioeconomic mobility by comparing the Israeli policy with a simulated model of race-based affirmative action and the U.S. policy with a simulated model of class-based affirmative action. Alon finds that affirmative action at elite institutions in both countries is a key vehicle of mobility for disenfranchised students, whether they are racial and ethnic minorities or socioeconomically disadvantaged. Affirmative action improves their academic success and graduation rates and leads to better labor market outcomes. The beneficiaries of affirmative action in both countries thrive at elite colleges and in selective fields of study. As Alon demonstrates, they would not be better off attending less selective colleges instead. Alon finds that Israel’s class-based affirmative action programs have provided much-needed entry slots at the elite universities to students from the geographic periphery, from high-poverty high schools, and from poor families. However, this approach has not generated as much ethnic diversity as a race-based policy would. By contrast, affirmative action policies in the United States have fostered racial and ethnic diversity at a level that cannot be matched with class-based policies. Yet, class-based policies would do a better job at boosting the socioeconomic diversity at these bastions of privilege. The findings from both countries suggest that neither race-based nor class-based models by themselves can generate broad diversity. According to Alon, the best route for promoting both racial and socioeconomic diversity is to embed the consideration of race within class-based affirmative action. Such a hybrid model would maximize the mobility benefits for both socioeconomically disadvantaged and minority students. Race, Class, and Affirmative Action moves past political talking points to offer an innovative, evidence-based perspective on the merits and feasibility of different designs of affirmative action.

Affirmative Action Around the World

Affirmative Action Around the World PDF Author: Thomas Sowell
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300107753
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
An eminent authority presents a new perspective on affirmative action in a provocative book that will stir fresh debate about this vitally important issue

The Diversity Bargain

The Diversity Bargain PDF Author: Natasha K. Warikoo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022640028X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
We’ve heard plenty from politicians and experts on affirmative action and higher education, about how universities should intervene—if at all—to ensure a diverse but deserving student population. But what about those for whom these issues matter the most? In this book, Natasha K. Warikoo deeply explores how students themselves think about merit and race at a uniquely pivotal moment: after they have just won the most competitive game of their lives and gained admittance to one of the world’s top universities. What Warikoo uncovers—talking with both white students and students of color at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford—is absolutely illuminating; and some of it is positively shocking. As she shows, many elite white students understand the value of diversity abstractly, but they ignore the real problems that racial inequality causes and that diversity programs are meant to solve. They stand in fear of being labeled a racist, but they are quick to call foul should a diversity program appear at all to hamper their own chances for advancement. The most troubling result of this ambivalence is what she calls the “diversity bargain,” in which white students reluctantly agree with affirmative action as long as it benefits them by providing a diverse learning environment—racial diversity, in this way, is a commodity, a selling point on a brochure. And as Warikoo shows, universities play a big part in creating these situations. The way they talk about race on campus and the kinds of diversity programs they offer have a huge impact on student attitudes, shaping them either toward ambivalence or, in better cases, toward more productive and considerate understandings of racial difference. Ultimately, this book demonstrates just how slippery the notions of race, merit, and privilege can be. In doing so, it asks important questions not just about college admissions but what the elite students who have succeeded at it—who will be the world’s future leaders—will do with the social inequalities of the wider world.

Mismatch

Mismatch PDF Author: Richard Sander
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465030017
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
The debate over affirmative action has raged for over four decades, with little give on either side. Most agree that it began as noble effort to jump-start racial integration; many believe it devolved into a patently unfair system of quotas and concealment. Now, with the Supreme Court set to rule on a case that could sharply curtail the use of racial preferences in American universities, law professor Richard Sander and legal journalist Stuart Taylor offer a definitive account of what affirmative action has become, showing that while the objective is laudable, the effects have been anything but. Sander and Taylor have long admired affirmative action's original goals, but after many years of studying racial preferences, they have reached a controversial but undeniable conclusion: that preferences hurt underrepresented minorities far more than they help them. At the heart of affirmative action's failure is a simple phenomenon called mismatch. Using dramatic new data and numerous interviews with affected former students and university officials of color, the authors show how racial preferences often put students in competition with far better-prepared classmates, dooming many to fall so far behind that they can never catch up. Mismatch largely explains why, even though black applicants are more likely to enter college than whites with similar backgrounds, they are far less likely to finish; why there are so few black and Hispanic professionals with science and engineering degrees and doctorates; why black law graduates fail bar exams at four times the rate of whites; and why universities accept relatively affluent minorities over working class and poor people of all races. Sander and Taylor believe it is possible to achieve the goal of racial equality in higher education, but they argue that alternative policies -- such as full public disclosure of all preferential admission policies, a focused commitment to improving socioeconomic diversity on campuses, outreach to minority communities, and a renewed focus on K-12 schooling -- will go farther in achieving that goal than preferences, while also allowing applicants to make informed decisions. Bold, controversial, and deeply researched, Mismatch calls for a renewed examination of this most divisive of social programs -- and for reforms that will help realize the ultimate goal of racial equality.

The Loneliest Americans

The Loneliest Americans PDF Author: Jay Caspian Kang
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0525576231
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
A “provocative and sweeping” (Time) blend of family history and original reportage that explores—and reimagines—Asian American identity in a Black and white world “[Kang’s] exploration of class and identity among Asian Americans will be talked about for years to come.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, NPR, Mother Jones In 1965, a new immigration law lifted a century of restrictions against Asian immigrants to the United States. Nobody, including the lawmakers who passed the bill, expected it to transform the country’s demographics. But over the next four decades, millions arrived, including Jay Caspian Kang’s parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. They came with almost no understanding of their new home, much less the history of “Asian America” that was supposed to define them. The Loneliest Americans is the unforgettable story of Kang and his family as they move from a housing project in Cambridge to an idyllic college town in the South and eventually to the West Coast. Their story unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding Asian America, as millions more immigrants, many of them working-class or undocumented, stream into the country. At the same time, upwardly mobile urban professionals have struggled to reconcile their parents’ assimilationist goals with membership in a multicultural elite—all while trying to carve out a new kind of belonging for their own children, who are neither white nor truly “people of color.” Kang recognizes this existential loneliness in himself and in other Asian Americans who try to locate themselves in the country’s racial binary. There are the businessmen turning Flushing into a center of immigrant wealth; the casualties of the Los Angeles riots; the impoverished parents in New York City who believe that admission to the city’s exam schools is the only way out; the men’s right’s activists on Reddit ranting about intermarriage; and the handful of protesters who show up at Black Lives Matter rallies holding “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” signs. Kang’s exquisitely crafted book brings these lonely parallel climbers together and calls for a new immigrant solidarity—one rooted not in bubble tea and elite college admissions but in the struggles of refugees and the working class.

The Affirmative Action Hoax

The Affirmative Action Hoax PDF Author: Steven Farron
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Debates surrounding Affirmative Action, the public policies and initiatives designed to help eliminate past and present discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, have raged for years. In his book, Professor Farron examines the history of affirmative action and exposes the fraudulent nature of its justification. The Affirmative Action Hoax centers on universities where academic achievement can be clearly compared and where affirmative action generates intense controversy. The Affirmative Action Hoax offers an uninhibited examination of the practice and exposes the damage it causes to society.

Place, Not Race

Place, Not Race PDF Author: Sheryll Cashin
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807086150
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
From a nationally recognized expert, a fresh and original argument for bettering affirmative action Race-based affirmative action had been declining as a factor in university admissions even before the recent spate of related cases arrived at the Supreme Court. Since Ward Connerly kickstarted a state-by-state political mobilization against affirmative action in the mid-1990s, the percentage of four-year public colleges that consider racial or ethnic status in admissions has fallen from 60 percent to 35 percent. Only 45 percent of private colleges still explicitly consider race, with elite schools more likely to do so, although they too have retreated. For law professor and civil rights activist Sheryll Cashin, this isn’t entirely bad news, because as she argues, affirmative action as currently practiced does little to help disadvantaged people. The truly disadvantaged—black and brown children trapped in high-poverty environs—are not getting the quality schooling they need in part because backlash and wedge politics undermine any possibility for common-sense public policies. Using place instead of race in diversity programming, she writes, will better amend the structural disadvantages endured by many children of color, while enhancing the possibility that we might one day move past the racial resentment that affirmative action engenders. In Place, Not Race, Cashin reimagines affirmative action and champions place-based policies, arguing that college applicants who have thrived despite exposure to neighborhood or school poverty are deserving of special consideration. Those blessed to have come of age in poverty-free havens are not. Sixty years since the historic decision, we’re undoubtedly far from meeting the promise of Brown v. Board of Education, but Cashin offers a new framework for true inclusion for the millions of children who live separate and unequal lives. Her proposals include making standardized tests optional, replacing merit-based financial aid with need-based financial aid, and recruiting high-achieving students from overlooked places, among other steps that encourage cross-racial alliances and social mobility. A call for action toward the long overdue promise of equality, Place, Not Race persuasively shows how the social costs of racial preferences actually outweigh any of the marginal benefits when effective race-neutral alternatives are available.

Affirmative Action and Racial Equity

Affirmative Action and Racial Equity PDF Author: Uma M. Jayakumar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317664663
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
The highly anticipated U.S. Supreme Court decision in Fisher v. University of Texas placed a greater onus on higher education institutions to provide evidence supporting the need for affirmative action policies on their respective campuses. It is now more critical than ever that institutional leaders and scholars understand the evidence in support of race consideration in admissions as well as the challenges of the post-Fisher landscape. This important volume shares information documented for the Fisher case and provides empirical evidence to help inform scholarly conversation and institutions’ decisions regarding race-conscious practices in higher education. With contributions from scholars and experts involved in the Fisher case, this edited volume documents and shares lessons learned from the collaborative efforts of the social science, educational, and legal communities. Affirmative Action and Racial Equity is a critical resource for higher education scholars and administrators to understand the nuances of the affirmative action legal debate and to identify the challenges and potential strategies toward racial equity and inclusion moving forward.