Protesting Affirmative Action: The Struggle over Equality after the Civil Rights Revolution

by Dennis Deslippe

Overview

A lightning rod for liberal and conservative opposition alike, affirmative action has proved one of the more divisive issues in the United States over the past five decades. Dennis Deslippe here offers a thoughtful study of early opposition to the nation’s race- and gender-sensitive hiring and promotion programs in higher education and the workplace.

This story begins more than fifteen years before the 1978 landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Partisans attacked affirmative action almost immediately after it first appeared in the 1960s. Liberals in the opposition movement played an especially significant role. While not completely against the initiative, liberal opponents strove for “soft” affirmative action (recruitment, financial aid, remedial programs) and against “hard” affirmative action (numerical goals, quotas). In the process of balancing ideals of race and gender equality with competing notions of colorblindness and meritocracy, they even borrowed the language of the civil rights era to make far-reaching claims about equality, justice, and citizenship in their anti–affirmative action rhetoric.

Deslippe traces this conflict through compelling case studies of real people and real jobs. He asks what the introduction of affirmative action meant to the careers and livelihoods of Seattle steelworkers, New York asbestos handlers, St. Louis firemen, Detroit policemen, City University of New York academics, and admissions counselors at the University of Washington Law School. Through their experiences, Deslippe examines the diverse reactions to affirmative action, concluding that workers had legitimate grievances against its hiring and promotion practices.

In studying this phenomenon, Deslippe deepens our understanding of American democracy and neoconservatism in the late twentieth century and shows how the liberals’ often contradictory positions of the 1960s and 1970s reflect the conflicted views about affirmative action many Americans still hold today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421413709
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	03/15/2014
Series:	Reconfiguring American Political History
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Dennis Deslippe is an associate professor of American studies at Franklin & Marshall College and author of Rights, Not Roses: Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945–80.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Acronyms and Initialisms
Introduction
1. "The Best 'Affirmative Action Program' Is Creating Jobs for Everyone": Organized Labor Responds to Affirmative Action, 1960–1974
2. "This Strange Madness": The Origins of Opposition to Higher Education Affirmative Action, 1968–1972
3. "This Issue Is Getting Hotter": The Struggle over Affirmative Action Policy in the Early 1970s
4. "Treat Him as a Decent American!": DeFunis v. Odegaard (1974) and Colorblindness in the Courtroom
5. "Do Whites Have Rights?": White Detroit Policemen and the "Reverse Discrimination" Protests of the 1970s
6. "The Fight for True Nondiscrimination": The Politics of Anti–Affirmative Action in the 1970s
Conclusion
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index

What People are Saying About This

Edward D. Berkowitz

Treats the very important subject of affirmative action in a way that respects the various participants in the debate and in a manner that illuminates a critical part of recent American history.

— Edward D. Berkowitz, George Washington University

From the Publisher

Treats the very important subject of affirmative action in a way that respects the various participants in the debate and in a manner that illuminates a critical part of recent American history.
—Edward D. Berkowitz, George Washington University

Editorial Reviews

Ambitious and timely . . . The detail Deslippe provides in the creation of a 'reverse populism' that, in effect, made past discrimination into a union principle, is very powerful.

Labor Studies Journal - Bill Barry

A welcome examination of affirmative action opposition in the often-overlooked period before Bakke.

Choice

In uncovering the murky and complex pre-history of contemporary affirmative action debates, Deslippe shows how changing social and economic circumstances shaped diverse understandings of the meaning of race, sex, opportunity, and disadvantage.

American Studies - Katherine Turk

Deslippe's treatment of labor's resistance in particular is balanced, detailed, and nuanced, and he includes an excellent chapter on the precursor of Bakke, DeFunis v. Odegaard (1974) . . . A valuable discussion that clearly adds to the scholarship on this crucial subject.

Journal of American History - Kevin Yuill

A welcome examination of affirmative action opposition in the often-overlooked period before Bakke.
—Choice

Deslippe's treatment of labor's resistance in particular is balanced, detailed, and nuanced, and he includes an excellent chapter on the precursor of Bakke, DeFunis v. Odegaard (1974) . . . A valuable discussion that clearly adds to the scholarship on this crucial subject.
—Kevin Yuill, Journal of American History

Ambitious and timely . . . The detail Deslippe provides in the creation of a 'reverse populism' that, in effect, made past discrimination into a union principle, is very powerful.
—Bill Barry, Labor Studies Journal

It is difficult to think of a more timely historical topic: persistent ambivalence about affirmative action again collides with an economic downturn as an increasingly conservative Supreme Court considers landmark cases that may resolve some legal questions but are unlikely to end the almost half-century-old moral and political debate.
—Serena Mayeri, Journal of American Studies

The detail Deslippe provides in the creation of a “reverse populism” that, in effect, made past discrimination into a union principle, is very powerful.
—Bill Barry, Labor Studies Journal

In uncovering the murky and complex pre-history of contemporary affirmative action debates, Deslippe shows how changing social and economic circumstances shaped diverse understandings of the meaning of race, sex, opportunity, and disadvantage.
—Katherine Turk, American Studies

From the Publisher

It is difficult to think of a more timely historical topic: persistent ambivalence about affirmative action again collides with an economic downturn as an increasingly conservative Supreme Court considers landmark cases that may resolve some legal questions but are unlikely to end the almost half-century-old moral and political debate.

Journal of American Studies - Serena Mayeri