What is Affirmative Action?
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What is Affirmative Action? The Affirmative Action Puzzle: A Living History from Reconstruction to Today, Melvin I. Urofsky, Pantheon, 2020, pp. 592, $22.68 hardcover.
Steve Balch # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Melvin I. Urofsky is a man conflicted. A distinguished, retired constitutional historian with numerous books to his credit, he has attempted to write a non-polemical history of affirmative action. He promises the reader a detailed narrative of affirmative action’s emergence, evolution, debates, and battles with a fair rendering of the arguments of its friends and foes. He is also considerate enough to forewarn readers of his own biases, while acknowledging that affirmative action is fraught with both philosophical and practical difficulties that divide people of good will and serious judgment. He himself believes in it, especially in its “softer forms,” and thinks it will
Steve Balch was the Founding President of the National Association of Scholars; [email protected].
continue to be necessary for the indefinite future. All this reflects a bifurcated mindset, one half oldfashioned liberal, the other a “woke” geriatric. As a historian, Urofsky delivers on his promises . . . for the most part. A good and highly readable account of affirmative action’s history, The Affirmative Action Puzzle, reaches as far back as the Freedman’s Bureau, though it rather quickly vaults over the long period between Reconstruction and the Kennedy-Johnson years. Allowing for the fraught nature of his subject Urofsky maintains a decent dispassion until the concluding sections, though he never leaves any doubt as to where he believes the superior wisdom lies. Unfortunately in his closing discussion of Trump, his “movement” and its policies, Urofsky’s self-discipline collapses into snarky barking and something akin to reductio ad Hitlerum, the president and many of his “extreme right-wing” supporters identified with racism at its deplorable ugliest. Despite this ultimate loss of dispassion readers who don’t share Urofsky’s slant can still learn a great deal from his book. Even affirmative action’s more reasonable adherents will encounter some eye-opening frankness about the flagrant disregard for democratic decision-making and the
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rule of law that greased affirmative action’s slide from a policy designed to forbid discrimination to one legitimizing and mandating it. They will also get some affecting accounts of individuals who fell into its toils. Urofsky doesn’t mince words about the subversions of law. He’s plainspoken about the brazen way in which, first the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance, and then the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, disregarded the clear intent of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by insisting on quotas. Equally, Justice William Brennan’s majority opinion in United Steel Workers v. Weber (1979) is exposed for the juridical chicanery it was, ignoring the statute’s clear text and legislative history to deny a white w
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