Book of the week: For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law by Randall Kennedy

(Pantheon, $26)

“One would think the last thing the American reading public needs is another book on affirmative action,” said Gerald Early in The Washington Post. The subject has been argued over for at least 50 years, and the opposing positions have been fixed for roughly the last 20. The next Supreme Court case, due to be heard this fall, will stir the pot again. Yet Randall Kennedy, a Harvard law professor and “one of our most perceptive writers on race and the law,” has done us all a service by adding much-needed clarity to the debate over whether schools and universities should favor blacks and other minorities when making admissions decisions. Kennedy’s pro-affirmative-action précis “bristles with conviction,” said Erin Aubry Kaplan in the Los Angeles Times. At the same time, he “does not hesitate to scrutinize inconsistencies and shibboleths” of others in his camp.

In fact, his “crisp, devastating” summary of the arguments against affirmative action nearly undermines his own position, said Stuart Taylor Jr. in The Wall Street Journal. He freely acknowledges, for instance, that racial preferences for selective minorities tend to cost poor whites opportunities, and that such policies sometimes put unqualified individuals in situations they have a hard time coping with. He also admits that affirmative action fosters racial resentment. But Kennedy ultimately argues that the benefits outweigh the costs, and contends that blacks should enjoy special favoritism because of the lingering effects of American slavery and segregation. Fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Kennedy and his allies apparently want Americans “judged by the color of their skin—for many more decades.”

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Kennedy, surprisingly, “gives short shrift to an emerging third way: affirmative action for economically disadvantaged students of all races,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg in The New Republic. Universities that have embraced the policy are showing that it achieves affirmative action’s goal of expanding opportunities for blacks and other racial minorities. And it does so without stoking racial tensions. I can’t agree with Kennedy that ending racial preferences would be a “calamity,” but his “profoundly honest” work reminds us that his valuable voice is one that might not have been heard had affirmative action not smoothed his way into Princeton, then to Harvard. “Only a wingnut would say” that those institutions were wrong to take a chance on Kennedy—“or that similar institutions were wrong to help advance the young Barack Obama or Sonia Sotomayor.”