Law and Race Commons^™

Sffa V. Harvard: How Affirmative Action Myths Mask White Bonus, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

In the ongoing litigation of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, Harvard faces allegations that its once-heralded admissions process discriminates against Asian Americans. Public discourse has revealed a dominant narrative: affirmative action is viewed as the presumptive cause of Harvard’s alleged “Asian penalty.” Yet this narrative misrepresents the plaintiff’s own theory of discrimination. Rather than implicating affirmative action, the underlying allegations portray the phenomenon of “negative action” — that is, an admissions regime in which White applicants take the seats of their more qualified Asian-American counterparts. Nonetheless, we are witnessing a broad failure to see this case for what …

Branch Rickey, Affirmative Action And 'Merit' In Baseball And Education, Evan H. Caminker

Book Chapters

When General Manager Wesley Branch Rickey broke Organized Baseball’s longstanding color barrier on October 23, 1945, by signing Jackie Robinson to a contract to play for the Montreal Royals, a minor league affiliate of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Rickey catalyzed the movement for racial justice. Millions of people saw, heard, and read about black and white men playing side-by-side. Integrating the national pastime helped challenge segregationist norms across the land, facilitating the integration of military troops and public schools soon thereafter.

Rickey’s stirring call in his 1956 Atlanta address to judge people on their merits rather than their pigmentation still resonates …

Second Redemption, Third Reconstruction, Richard A. Primus

Articles

In The Accumulation of Advantages, the picture that Professor Owen Fiss paints about equality during and since the Second Reconstruction is largely a picture in black and white. That makes some sense. The black/white experience is probably the most important throughline in the story of equal protection. It was the central theme of both the First and Second Reconstructions. In keeping with that orientation, the picture of disadvantage described by Fiss’s theory of cumulative responsibility is largely drawn from the black/white experience. Important as it is, however, the black/white experience does not exhaust the subject of constitutional equality. So in …

Revitalizing The Meaning Of Diversity For Racial Justice In Education, Tanya K. Hernandez

Faculty Scholarship

The concept of diversity undermines the true spirit of any affirmative action policy, which is to remedy society's racism and promote racial justice and equality. This is because “diversity” detached from racial justice can signify any human difference unrelated to social inequality. Infusing the notion of “diversity” with the insights from implicit bias research would mean instead considering the goal of “diversity” as a device for making admissions procedures more equitable and justified amidst the continuing implicit bias that can be actually measured. Furthermore, connecting the diversity goal as a device for procedurally addressing

implicit bias in admissions decisions and …

Hidden In Plain Sight: A More Compelling Case For Diversity, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

For four decades, the diversity rationale has offered a lifeline to affirmative action in higher education. Yet even after forty years, this critical feature of equal protection doctrine remains constitutionally insecure and politically fraught. Legal challenges persist, the Justice Department has launched a new assault on race-conscious admissions, and an impending shift on the Supreme Court could usher in an era of increased hostility toward the concept of diversity itself. The future of race-conscious admissions arguably hangs in the balance.

In this Article, I argue that the diversity rationale’s present fragility rests, in part, on its defenders’ failure to center …