商品簡介
From a nationally recognized expert, a fresh and original argument for bettering affirmative action
Race-based affirmative action had been declining as a factor in university admissions even before the recent spate of related cases arrived at the Supreme Court. Since Ward Connerly kickstarted a state-by-state political mobilization against affirmative action in the mid-1990s, the percentage of public four-year colleges that consider racial or ethnic status in admissions has fallen from 60 percent to 35 percent. Only 45 percent of private colleges still explicitly consider race, with elite schools more likely to do so, although they, too, have retreated.
Law professor and civil rights activist Sheryll Cashin argues that affirmative action as currently practiced does little to help disadvantaged people. Sixty years since the historic decision, we’re undoubtedly far from meeting the promise of Brown v. Board of Education, but Cashin offers a new framework for true inclusion for the millions of children who live separate and unequal lives. Setting aside race in use of place in diversity programming, she writes, will better amend the structural disadvantages endured by many children of color, while enhancing the possibility that we might one day move past the racial resentment that affirmative action engenders.
A call for action toward the promise of equality, Place, Not Race persuasively shows how the social costs of racial preferences actually outweigh any marginal benefits of continuing to use them when race-neutral alternatives are available.
作者簡介
Sheryll Cashin, professor of law at Georgetown University, is the author of The Agitator’s Daughter and The Failures of Integration, the latter an Editors’ Choice book in the New York Times Book Review. Cashin has published widely in academic journals and print media, including in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Education Week. A frequent commentator on law and race relations, she has appeared on National Public Radio, CNN, ABC News, BET, and numerous other outlets.
Born and raised in Huntsville, Alabama, where her parents were political activists, she was a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and served in the Clinton White House as an advisor on urban and economic policy, particularly concerning community development in inner-city neighborhoods. She lives with her husband and two sons in Washington, DC.
