Notes of a Racial Caste Baby
Color Blindness and the End of Affirmative Action
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Publisher Description
The Constitution of the United States, writes Bryan Fair, was a series of compromises between white male propertyholders: Southern planters and Northern merchants. 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, Fair, the eighth of ten children born to a single mother on public assistance in an Ohio ghetto, combines two histories--America's 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% quotas to almost all professions, we have now convinced ourselves that, after a few decades of remedial affirmative action, the playing field is now level? Centuries of racial caste, he argues, cannot be swept aside in a few short years.
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 today's affirmative action policies--which are decidedly not anti- white. He concludes that the only just and effective way in which to account for America's racial past and to negotiate current racial quagmires is to embrace a remedial affirmative action that relies neither on quotas nor fiery rhetoric, but one which 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 personal and persuasive account of why race-conscious policies are the most effective way to end de facto segregation and eliminate racial caste.
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Last month, California voters passed proposition 209, thereby effectively ending affirmative action in that state. What, one wonders, would have happened to Fair, now a black academic at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, had it passed a decade ago? In his first book, a lively but sometimes disconnected report that is by implication at least, to be a response to Stephen Carter's Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, Fair draws on both his training as a law professor and his experiences as the eighth of 10 children born to a single mother on public assistance in Columbus, Ohio. Fair grew up eating bread and sugar sandwiches when the food stamps ran out, but he beat the odds with a combination of supportive mentors and his own determination. He attended Duke University and UCLA law school in the wake of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the 1978 Supreme Court decision which outlawed fixed racial quotas but permitted schools to consider race, among other factors, in admissions. Encapsulating court rulings and historical anecdotes with the details of his own struggle, Fair shows how racially sensitive policies can give disadvantaged minorities a leg up in a society where the best jobs go to the best educated students. "I was a special admit student at Duke, one of the new students --black as well as white--from around the country that would bring greater diversity to the class of 1982," reports Fair, who notes that though he had almost all A's in high school, his SAT scores "were far below Duke's median." Fair adroitly combines legal and personal history but the book is sometimes marred by an excessively polemical tone.