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Ending Affirmative Action by Terry Eastland
- Abstract
In this book, Terry Eastland, a former official in the Justice Department and now the editor of Forbes MediaCritic, offers a compelling explanation of how we arrived at our pervasive system of racial preferences, and an equally compelling case for why and how it should be abolished.
Eastland traces the roots of affirmative action to a postwar shift in American law from colorblindness to color-consciousness. In the Japanese relocation cases of World War II, the Supreme Court, even as it approved the internment of Japanese-Americans, issued a ringing endorsement of the principle of racial equality. “Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry,” the Court ruled in Hirabayashi v. United States (1943), “are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.” Such affirmations came to be a source of inspiration and encouragement to the civil-rights movement in the 1950′s.
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