This book about DeFunis v. Odegaard and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the first two cases challenging race-conscious admissions to professional schools to reach the US Supreme Court, works on legal-judicial discourse, showing how the mechanisms of law, the shape-shifting capacity of language, and the pressures of social surrounds created white-against-white conflicts that marginalized the persons, voices, and interests of minority applicants and their communities, thereby reproducing the regime of white privilege and minority disadvantage that structure higher education to this day.

In The Making of Reverse Discrimination Ellen Messer-Davidow offers a fresh and incisive analysis of the legal-judicial discourse of DeFunis v. Odegaard (1974) and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the first two cases challenging race-conscious admissions to professional schools to reach the US Supreme Court. While the voluminous literature on DeFunis and Bakke has focused on the Supreme Court’s far from definitive answers to important constitutional questions, Messer-Davidow closely examines each case from beginning to end. She investigates the social surrounds where the cases incubated, their tours through the courts, and their aftereffects. Her analysis shows how lawyers and judges used the mechanisms of language and law to narrow the conflict to a single white male applicant and a single white-dominated university program to dismiss the historical, sociological, statistical, and experiential facts of “systemic racism” and thereby to assemble “reverse discrimination” as a new object of legal analysis. In exposing the discursive mechanisms that marginalized the interests of applicants and communities of color, Messer-Davidow demonstrates that the construction of facts, the reasoning by precedent, and the invocation of constitutional principles deserve more scrutiny than they have received in the scholarly literature. Although facts, precedents, and principles are said to bring stability and equity to the law, Messer-Davidow argues that the white-centered narratives of DeFunis and Bakke not only bleached the color from equal protection but also served as the template for the dozens of anti–affirmative action projects—lawsuits, voter referenda, executive orders—that conservative movement organizations mounted in the following years.

Focuses on commonly held cultural myths as the basis for examining subtle forms of racial, sexual, gender and religious bias.

Pincus assesses the nature and scope of "reverse discrimination" in the United States today, exploring what effect affirmative action actually has on white men.

The definitive reckoning with one of America’s most explosively contentious and divisive issues—from “one of our most important and perceptive writers on race and the law.... The mere fact that he wrote this book is all the justification necessary for reading it.”—The Washington Post What precisely is affirmative action, and why is it fiercely championed by some and just as fiercely denounced by others? Does it signify a boon or a stigma? Or is it simply reverse discrimination? What are its benefits and costs to American society? What are the exact indicia determining who should or should not be accorded affirmative action? When should affirmative action end, if it must? Randall Kennedy gives us a concise and deeply personal overview of the policy, refusing to shy away from the myriad complexities of an issue that continues to bedevil American race relations.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER New York Times bestselling author and acclaimed linguist John McWhorter argues that an illiberal neoracism, disguised as antiracism, is hurting Black communities and weakening the American social fabric. Americans of good will on both the left and the right are secretly asking themselves the same question: how has the conversation on race in America gone so crazy? We’re told to read books and listen to music by people of color but that wearing certain clothes is “appropriation.” We hear that being white automatically gives you privilege and that being Black makes you a victim. We want to speak up but fear we’ll be seen as unwoke, or worse, labeled a racist. According to John McWhorter, the problem is that a well-meaning but pernicious form of antiracism has become, not a progressive ideology, but a religion—and one that’s illogical, unreachable, and unintentionally neoracist. In Woke Racism, McWhorter reveals the workings of this new religion, from the original sin of “white privilege” and the weaponization of cancel culture to ban heretics, to the evangelical fervor of the “woke mob.” He shows how this religion that claims to “dismantle racist structures” is actually harming his fellow Black Americans by infantilizing Black people, setting Black students up for failure, and passing policies that disproportionately damage Black communities. The new religion might be called “antiracism,” but it features a racial essentialism that’s barely distinguishable from racist arguments of the past. Fortunately for Black America, and for all of us, it’s not too late to push back against woke racism. McWhorter shares scripts and encouragement with those trying to deprogram friends and family. And most importantly, he offers a roadmap to justice that actually will help, not hurt, Black America.

Does "Asian American" denote an ethnic or racial identification? Is a person of mixed ancestry, the child of Euro- and Asian American parents, Asian American? What does it mean to refer to first generation Hmong refugees and fifth generation Chinese Americans both as Asian American? In Disoriented: Asian Americans, Law, and the Nation State, Robert Chang examines the current discourse on race and law and the implications of postmodern theory and affirmative action-all of which have largely excluded Asian Americans-in order to develop a theory of critical Asian American legal studies. Demonstrating that the ongoing debate surrounding multiculturalism and immigration in the U.S. is really a struggle over the meaning of "America," Chang reveals how the construction of Asian American-ness has become a necessary component in stabilizing a national American identity-- a fact Chang criticizes as harmful to Asian Americans. Defining the many "borders" that operate in positive and negative ways to construct America as we know it, Chang analyzes the position of Asian Americans within America's black/white racial paradigm, how "the family" operates as a stand-in for race and nation, and how the figure of the immigrant embodies a central contradiction in allegories of America. "Has profound political implications for race relations in the new century" —Michigan Law Review, May 2001

The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality. In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

In this book, Bonilla-Silva explores with systematic interview data the nature and components of post-civil rights racial ideology. Specifically, he documents the existence of a new suave and apparently non-racial racial ideology he labels color-blind racism. He suggests this ideology, anchored on the decontextualized, ahistorical, and abstract extension of liberalism to racial matters, has become the organizational matrix whites use to explain and account for racial matters in America.