At Minding the Campus today, I have a rather lengthy review of Peter Schmidt’s recent book Color and Money. The book promises an “honest discussion” of affirmative action, but I find that it’s badly one-sided. Schmidt doesn’t do justice to the many arguments that have been advanced against affirmative action (a.k.a. racial quotas) and is too ready to take at face value the weak justifications given for it.
I think that affirmative action is cut from the same cloth as all the many other interventionist nostrums where good intentions and wishful thinking blind people to reality. Affirmative action, I’m convinced, accomplishes nothing at considerable cost. It thrives because it has become a symbol to the leftist intelligentsia.