Not All Black and White: Affirmative Action and American Values by
Christopher Edley Jr. Farra, Straus and Giroux, 1996 New York 294 pages
Hardback: $25.00
Increasingly, affirmative action has become a commanding issue in
our nation’s political life. In the early months of the recent
presidential campaign, Republican candidates, looking to boost their
campaigns by tapping into supposed voter dissatisfaction with such
policies, loudly opposed affirmative action programs. Yet both
California Governor Pete Wilson and U.S. Senator Phil Gramm of Texas,
leading the loudest attacks on affirmative action, failed to draw any
national momentum from the issue, and their presidential candidacies
quickly died.
While such political opportunism failed to boost anti-affirmative
action presidential candidates, the success in last fall’s elections of
California Proposition 209, which bans racial and gender preferences in
state government, has brought forth a more profound and significant
challenge to affirmative action policies.
Passage of the referendum has drawn the opposition of civil rights
groups, which convinced a federal judge in California to block
implementation of the new law after he declared that it was probably
unconstitutional. However, the judge was overturned by a three-judge
panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco which
ruled the proposition constitutional. Civil rights groups have asked
the court to allow the order to block implementation of the proposal to
remain in place while the case is appealed, and the U.S. Department of
justice has announced that it will join efforts to block Proposition
209’s implementation to prevent it from undermining federal civil
rights policy.
As affirmative action continues to make headlines in 1997, some
analysts and thinkers hope the debate will help the American people to
consider the hard choices about race within our national policies and
private practices. When complicated disputes arise — as demonstrated
by the struggle between California and the federal government —
citizens ought to have a clear understanding of the laws, policies and
values at stake. But helping citizens to gain clear understanding of
issues is not something anyone should expect from politicians in the
midst of a political fight.
In his book, Not All Black and White: Affirmative Action and
American Values, Harvard University law school professor Christopher
Edley Jr. sets his sights on helping readers “better understand why the
affirmative action, and racial justice debates generally, are so
difficult.”
The professor wants readers to grasp the fundamental values that
underlie the affirmative action debate. For example, the age-old
tension between the ideal of limited government and the vision of
activist government represents part of the values struggle inherent to
the affirmative action debate, according to the author.
