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RACE AND AFFIRMING OPPORTUNITY IN THE BARACK OBAMA ERA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 June 2012

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: bill_wilson@harvard.edu

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.”

Type
State of the Discipline
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2012

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