Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T20:54:59.241Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

RACE AND AFFIRMING OPPORTUNITY IN THE BARACK OBAMA ERA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 June 2012

William Julius Wilson
William Julius Wilson*
Affiliation:
Kennedy School and Departments of African and African American Studies and Sociology, Harvard University
*
Professor William Julius Wilson, Harvard Kennedy School, 79 John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

I first discuss the Obama administration's efforts to promote racial diversity on college campuses in the face of recent court challenges to affirmative action. I then analyze opposition in this country to “racial preferences” as a way to overcome inequality. I follow that with a discussion of why class-based affirmative action, as a response to cries from conservatives to abolish “racial preferences,” would not be an adequate substitute for race-based affirmative action. Instead of class-based affirmative action, I present an argument for opportunity enhancing affirmative action programs that rely on flexible, merit-based criteria of evaluation as opposed to numerical guidelines or quotas. Using the term “affirmative opportunity” to describe such programs, I illustrate their application with three cases: the University of California, Irvine's revised affirmative action admissions procedure; the University of Michigan Law School's affirmative action program, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2003; and the hiring and promotion of faculty of color at colleges and universities as seen in how I myself benefited from a type of affirmative action based on flexible merit-based criteria at the University of Chicago in the early 1970s. I conclude by relating affirmative opportunity programs for people of color to the important principle of “equality of life chances.”

Keywords

Affirmative ActionAffirmative OpportunityRacial PreferenceEquality of Life Chances
Type
State of the Discipline
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , Spring 2012 , pp. 5 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Bluestone, Barry and Stevenson, Mary Huff (2000). Greater Boston in Transition: Race and Ethnicity in a Renaissance Region. New York: Russell Sage.Google Scholar
Bobo, Lawrence (1998). Race, Interests, and Beliefs About Affirmative Action. American Behavioral Scientist, 41(7): 986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bobo, Lawrence and Kluegel, James R. (1997). Status, Ideology, and Dimensions of Whites' Racial Beliefs and Attitudes: Progress and Stagnation. In Tuch, Steven A. and Martin, Jack K. (Eds.) Racial Attitudes in the 1990s, pp. 93–120. Westport, CT: Praeger.Google Scholar
Bowen, William G. and Bok, Derek (1998). The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences in Considering Race in College and University Admissions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fishkin, James (1983). Justice, Equal Opportunity and the Family. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Flacks, Richard and Thomas, Scott (1998). Among Affluent Students, a Culture of Disengagement. Chronicle of Higher Education, XLV(14).Google Scholar
Gladwell, Malcolm (2008). Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Little Brown.Google Scholar
Glazer, Nathan (1998). In Defense of Preference. The New Republic, April 6.Google Scholar
Hochschild, Jennifer L. (1999). The Strange Career of Affirmative Action. Ohio State Law Journal, 59(Winter): 997–1037.Google Scholar
Jencks, Christopher, and Phillips, Meredith, Eds. (1998). The Black-White Test Score Gap. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.Google Scholar
Kahlenberg, Richard (1996). The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Kane, Thomas J. (1998). Misconceptions in the Debate over Affirmative Action in College Admissions. In Orfield, Gary and Miller, Edward (Eds.) Chilling Admissions: The Affirmative Action Crisis and the Search for Alternatives, pp. 17–32. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Publishing Group, The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Karabel, Jerome (1997). No Alternative: The Effects of Color-Blind Admissions in California. In Orfield, Gary and Miller, Edward (Eds.), Chilling Admissions: The Affirmative Action Crisis and the Search for Alternatives, pp. 33–50. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Publishing Group, The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Kluegel, James R. and Smith, Eliot R. (1986). Beliefs about Inequality: American Views of What Is and What Ought to Be. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Lehman, Jeffrey S. (1997). Statement of Dean Jeffrey S. Lehman of the University of Michigan Law School. University of Michigan Law School, Ann Arbor, Michigan.Google Scholar
NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll (2010). February.Google Scholar
Newsweek (2003). Do We Still Need Affirmative Action? January 22.Google Scholar
New York Times (2012). The Affirmative Action War Goes On. January 21, 2012.Google Scholar
Pew Research Center (2007). Optimism about Black Progress Declines: Blacks See Growing Values Gap Between Poor and Middle Class. Washington, DC, November 13.Google Scholar
Sampson, Robert J., Sharkey, Patrick, and Raudenbush, Stephen W. (2008). Durable Effects of Concentrated Disadvantage on Verbal Ability among African-American Children. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105(January 22): 845–852.Google Scholar
Selmi, Michael (1995). Testing for Equality, Merit, Efficiency, and the Affirmative Action Debate. UCLA Law Review, 42: 1252–77.Google Scholar
Sharkey, Patrick (2008). The Intergenerational Transmission of Context. American Journal of Sociology, 113(4): 931–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sturm, Susan and Guinier, Lani (1996). The Future of Affirmative Action: Reclaiming the Innovative Idea. California Law Review, 84(July): 953–1036.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sugrue, Thomas J. (2010). Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swain, Carol M. (1998). Affirmative Action: A Search for Consensus. Paper presented at the National Academy of Sciences, Research Conference on Racial Trends in the United States. Washington, DC, October 15.Google Scholar
Time/CNN Harris Interactive Poll (2003). Presidential Election/Affirmative Action, February.Google Scholar
United States Department of Education and Department of Justice (2011). Guidance on the Voluntary Use of Race to Achieve Diversity in Postsecondary Education. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
University of Michigan Law School (1992). Report and Recommendations of the Admissions Committee. Ann Arbor, Michigan, April 22.Google Scholar
Wilbur, Susan and Bonous-Hammarth, Marguerite (1998). Testing a New Approach to Admissions: The Irvine Experience. In Orfield, Gary and Miller, Edward (Eds.), Chilling Admissions: The Affirmative Action Crisis and the Search for Alternatives, pp. 111–122. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Publishing Group, The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Wilson, William Julius ([1978] 1980). The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, William Julius (1987). The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar