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The Affirmative Action Puzzle: A Living History from Reconstruction to Today
Bottom of the pile
24
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
12/100Critics
36/100Scholars
Author:
Melvin I. Urofsky
Publisher:
Pantheon
Date:
January 28, 2020
A multifaceted history of affirmative action from the Civil Rights Act of 1866 through todayâs tumultuous times.
What The Reviewers Say
... scholarly, comprehensive, thoroughly engaging.
Urofsky’s The Affirmative Action Puzzle is a comprehensive account of the nonwhite version of affirmative action. This is a complex and challenging historical task, given that 'no other issue divides Americans more.' But Urofsky, by and large, has executed it well.
There is a whole library on racial inequality and efforts to address it, and The Affirmative Action Puzzle does not offer many novelties. But the book, just by the accumulation of sixty years’ worth of evidence, allows us to reach some useful conclusions, and the most important of these is that affirmative action worked.
Focused on federal law, particularly U.S. Supreme Court cases, this narrative recollects continuous conflicts within an undeniably long history of disparate treatment.
