The Color Bind: California's Battle to End Affirmative Action.(Review)

The Color Bind: California's Battle to End Affirmative Action, by Lydia Chavez. Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, 305 pp., $40.00 hardbound and $18.00 paperback.

The proper role of race, ethnicity, and gender in the allocation of societal rewards is one of the great controversies of our time. No university, employer, or government is immune from this issue. How the legal and ethical consensus finally evolves will have enormous influence on the stability and character of the American experiment.

At the center of the debate is the chameleon-like term "affirmative action." It originally required behaviors without regard to race, ethnicity, and gender and then, under manipulation by bureaucracies, courts, and politicians, began to require exactly the opposite.

Eventually affirmative action meant that, unless proportional representation by race existed in any organization, discrimination could be assumed to be the cause. Race conscious remedies were therefore necessary to assure the proper proportions. Advocates were blind to the reality that in many fields, for example, as different as sports, science, surgery, and symphony orchestras, proportional representation could only be created by discrimination against persons who otherwise would be chosen by merit principles.

The two books reviewed here tell from different perspectives the pivotal story of the passage of California's Proposition 209 which confronted the affirmative action status quo. The Ups and Downs of Affirmative Action Preferences was written in part by Harry Glynn Custred, Jr., professor of anthropology at California State University, Hayward, who was, with Tom Wood, the coauthor and principal organizer for Prop 209. M. Ali Raza and A. Janell Anderson, professors in the business school at Cal State, Sacramento, cowrote Custred's book and had opposed race conscious policies on their campus. The Color Bind was written by Lydia Chavez, a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and self-acknowledged beneficiary of the affirmative action system.

The Ups and Downs of Affirmative Action Preferences can be almost evenly divided into two parts. The first is a comprehensive review of the development of judicial and administrative law that created and then challenged the affirmative action regime. This review is accurate and fair minded, but, except for the most recent events, much of the story has been told elsewhere, for example by Hugh Davis Graham in his The Civil Rights Era (Oxford) or Herman Belz in his Equality Transformed (Transaction). Most readers will be drawn to the second part of the book which focuses on California policies and the motivations to launch Prop. 209.

By the 1990s, the affirmative action movement was triumphant everywhere in higher education. It no longer argued that it was curing discrimination in the academy. Instead it had morphed into the ideologies of multiculturalism and diversity where no need to assert, let alone prove, discrimination existed. Nevertheless the same programs, administered by the same bureaucracies benefitting the same groups, prevailed on campuses, even as their semantic labels kept changing. Search committees organized around identity politics existed to screen out prospective administrators with unorthodox views about affirmative action, had a candidate been so foolish as to voice them. On the other hand, presidents--responsible for campus preference programs in Maryland and Texas that, federal appellate courts found, had violated students' fourteenth-amendment rights (Podberesky and Hopwood)--continued to champion these polices and moved on to new presidencies at Ohio State and Berkeley. An interlocking directorate of the higher education associations, big foundations, accrediting agencies, and government bureaucracies rewarded race conscious adherents.