Affirmative action encompasses a complex variety of government and private practices designed to address racial--and gender--inequalities in the United States. Since its origins in the 1960s, there have been occasional bursts of public attention to the subject, usually in response to efforts to eliminate affirmative action in a single state or at a particular university. The U. S. Supreme Court and the lower federal courts have issued a number of decisions about the use of affirmative action, since the landmark BAKKE case in 1978. There is now a substantial literature on the subject from political scientists, sociologists, and historians, as well as public policy and legal scholars. Because much of the scholarly literature and political symbolism surrounding the subject pertain to higher education, John David
Skrentny's new and more comprehensive anthology on affirmative action is a welcome addition.

This volume has a number of distinguishing characteristics. First, many of the contributors focus on the less-studied workplace, offering views of entry-level jobs where racial and ethnic conflicts are particularly common. Second, most of the writers connect immigration and the experiences of recent immigrants with affirmative action policies, thereby highlighting unanticipated policy ramifications. Third, most of the authors draw upon empirical data-indeed, an interesting methodological mix of highly quantitative survey data, census data, ethnographic studies, and focus groups. Finally, the book's closing essays address race, ethnicity, and affirmative action-like policies (or their absence) in three other countries, offering opportunities for cross-cultural analysis.

In his introduction to the volume, Skrentny sets the tone for this distinctive examination of affirmative action. He establishes the multicultural emphasis of the book by arguing that W. E. B. Du Bois' "color line" of the 20th century has become "color lines" in the 21st century, as a result of large demographic changes fueled by post-1965 immigration policies. Known for his iconoclastic views on affirmative action (see, for example, his article in THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 2001), Skrentny believes that a black-white focus on racial issues has now given way to a more complicated mosaic, in which people from different racial and ethnic groups face varying levels of discrimination and disadvantage. Skrentny also highlights the different contexts and laws pertaining to affirmative action, paving the way for the book's splendid discussions of the multitude of goals, effects, and ambiguities of affirmative action in practice.

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Historian Thomas Sugrue provides a useful first look at workplace discrimination in 20th century America by focusing on the construction industry, in particular the building trades and their unions that formed a "niche of whiteness." Describing an array of federal anti-discrimination and affirmative action programs beginning in the 1960s, Sugrue concludes that today's world of 'hard hats' remains a largely white industry, though more ethnically heterogeneous, because of exclusionary hiring networks, racial harassment and hostility on the job, and persistent housing and school segregation.

In a later section on "Afro-Americans and Immigrants in the Workplace," two of the book's most provocative essays provide empirical data on race and ethnicity in workplace hiring and on-the-job interpersonal relationships. Sociologists Michael Lichter and Roger Waldinger examine workforce diversity in the mainstream economy of restaurants, department stores, hospitals, and furniture manufacturers, focusing on entry-level jobs. Drawing upon their interviews with the owners and managers of such businesses in Los Angeles, they conclude that the preferences of co-workers and, especially, customers lead managers (often white or Asian) to hire diverse workers, especially Latinos and African-Americans. They also effectively describe the tenor of conflicts between workers from different racial and ethnic groups. Sociologist Jennifer Lee's ethnographic study of hiring practices in inner city neighborhoods in Philadelphia and New York City is even more revealing.
Drawing upon interviews of Jewish, Korean, and both native-born and immigrant black merchants, as well as her own participant observation (she logged time as a cashier in several of the businesses), Lee documents and thoughtfully analyzes the hiring dilemmas facing "mom and pop" stores in urban areas. The owners' reported beliefs about which racial and ethnic groups are more willing to work long hours at minimum wage juxtaposed with Lee's nuanced discussion of worker exploitation makes for informed argument and unsettling reading.

Sociologists Erin Kelly and Frank Dobbin provide a complementary perspective on the workplace by focusing on corporate America. In their analysis of hiring and human resources practices over a thirty-year period, they describe the birth and transformation of affirmative action in the private sector. As support for affirmative action programs waned in the 1980s, a period marked by the Reagan presidency and conflicting court decisions, many affirmative action and EEO officers in large companies changed their focus. Just as corporate leaders began to talk openly about the business need for a diverse workforce, Kelly and Dobbin closely document
the efforts of human resource professionals and their national networks to adapt to a changing political environment, by transforming the focus of their offices from affirmative action to the promotion and management of diversity.

The rationales for affirmative action in higher education have also changed in parallel ways. Emphasis on correcting past injustices or current discrimination has given way to an articulated need to promote diverse campuses and classrooms as integral to the educational mission of colleges and universities. However, this volume will disappoint readers hoping for a similarly insightful analysis of higher education dilemmas. Although a few of the contributors refer to or briefly discuss affirmative action in higher education, only one essay is devoted to this topic. Education

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scholar John Aubrey Douglas revisits the relatively well-known story of affirmative action at the University of California (UC). He provides helpful historical context to the story of admissions at UC, while also highlighting the contemporary dilemma of the statistical over-representation on UC campuses of one "minority" group, Asian-Americans--who currently enroll at almost three times their numbers among California high school graduates. However, he fails to analyze the political or educational implications of a "parity" model of admissions, gives short shrift to the impact of BAKKE (1978), and doesn't address whether parity should be a goal of each campus or, as in the case of the three-tiered California higher education program, a system wide goal. As other recent studies of California and Texas higher
education have shown, the under-representation of targeted racial and ethnic groups occurs only at the most elite campuses.

Public opinion has been a key factor in the changing political landscape of affirmative action. Sociologist and Afro-American studies scholar Lawrence Bobo offers a theoretically sophisticated analysis of Americans' beliefs about affirmative action. Using data from a Los Angeles county social survey, Bobo concludes that white attitudes about affirmative action are not nearly as monolithic as the media suggest. Finding that group (i.e., economic) interests are central to racial attitudes, Bobo urges a more practical, less morally-grounded rhetoric about race. Political scientist Carol Swain and her colleagues utilize six focus groups to address public
perceptions of affirmative action. Listening to racially-homogeneous groups of Latinos, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and whites, they found that all groups tended to equate affirmative action with quotas. Their comparisons of group differences about the moral and practical value of affirmative action are interesting, but they fail to uncover (or discuss) the striking within-group differences that several other contributors, including Bobo, report.

In a concluding section on "Civil Rights and Affirmative Action beyond America," the volume offers case studies of Britain, France, and India. Political scientist Steven Teles deftly describes Britain's aversion to U. S.-style preferential hiring and university admissions, while also analyzing how anti-discrimination and equal opportunity are nevertheless protected. He attributes this in part to strong antidiscrimination statutes and the British sense of fairness, but also to Britain's relatively small minority population (about 7 percent) of which no one group is numerically dominant. Teles also identifies institutional practices, such as the decentralization of
university admissions in Britain, which differ from the United States and serve to limit the use of racial and ethnic preferences.

Political scientist Sunita Parikh offers a view of the pervasiveness of affirmative action policies in higher education and employment in India, where such policies are often referred to as "reservations." She analyzes Indian politics and political party perspectives in detail from the 1930s to the present day, concluding that reservation policies have evolved from protecting political representation for castes to programs that now cover more than one-half of the Indian population. Parikh's finding about the popular acceptance of a widespread program of reservations in India echoes the views of some U.S. policy analysts such as Richard Kahlenberg (1996), who argue that broader economic and class-based affirmative action

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programs would be more equitable and more popular.

Political scientist Erik Bleich contributes an excellent essay on the French model of color-blind integration. He comfortably synthesizes French culture, politics, and demography, attributing the French resistance to affirmative action to strong support for a unified nation, to the lingering memories of racial categorization under Nazism, and to a determination to avoid what French leaders see as the mistakes of the U. S. in responding to a multicultural society. Bleich also very effectively draws comparisons with both the United States and Britain, helping to integrate the case studies.

One reason for this anthology's high degree of coherence is that most of the contributors have read and refer to each other's chapters. Nowhere is this more evident than in law professor Deborah Malamud's superlative "Afterword" on how the law views the affirmative action practices described by other contributors. She differentiates between the strict scrutiny standard applied to racial preferences and the intermediate scrutiny standard applied to gender differences. Malamud argues that affirmative action decisions arising from the workplace, including ADARAND CONSTRUCTORS (1995) before the Supreme Court again this term, cannot be exported directly to the higher education setting; her analysis of both the law and the underlying factual situations is excellent. Her discussion of the legal status of
"ethnic niches" in the workplace is particularly revealing: although many of these niches are, in her view, illegal under current laws and judicial interpretations, for a variety of reasons they continue to be pervasive, yet infrequently the subject of lawsuits. As a result, the courts have not addressed many of these real-world practices, which might lead some observers to conclude that legislatures are better equipped than courts to formulate national policy on this subject, a point that the case studies for Britain and India seem to illustrate.

This anthology raises a number of hard questions about affirmative action in practice. Should affirmative action be used only as a tool to correct past injustices and discrimination or also as a means to promote diversity? Should affirmative action be limited to the "soft" variety (i.e., expanding equal opportunity through aggressive forms of outreach) or should it extend to the "hard" form of racial preferences? Should newly arrived immigrants benefit from affirmative action policies? (Historian Hugh Davis Graham's chapter focuses on this question, using the Small Business Administration's "Minority Business Enterprises" program as an example). Why
has affirmative action for women apparently succeeded so well? How heterogeneous, with respect to family resources, life experiences, and past discrimination, are distinct racial and ethnic groups, such as African-Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans? (Political scientist George La Noue and legal scholar John Sullivan put this question at the forefront of their chapter on deconstructing affirmative action categories). Of what significance, if any, is this heterogeneity for affirmative action policies? Does an expansion of the "color line" diminish our national resolve to remedy the longstanding effects of discrimination on African-
Americans? To its credit, the volume does not shy from asking hard, or sometimes politically incorrect, questions, or from providing a variety of interpretations and responses. As a result, Skrentny's anthology represents a thoughtful, interdisciplinary contribution to the literature on affirmative action, one that political scientists and

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public law scholars can use in their research and teaching.

REFERENCES:

Kahlenberg, Richard. 1996. THE REMEDY: CLASS, RACE, AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION. New York: Basic Books.

Skrentny, John D. "Affirmative Action and New Demographic Realities." THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION (Feb. 16).

CASE REFERENCES:

ADARAND CONSTRUCTORS V. PENA, 512 U.S. 200 (1995).

REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA V. BAKKE, 438 U.S. 265 (1978).

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Copyright 2001 by the author, John Paul Ryan