bobbyw24
11-23-2011, 06:50 AM
President Obama, facing high unemployment and a sluggish economy, may soon encounter a new obstacle in his quest for re-election: the re-emergence of affirmative action in higher education as a political issue. The odds seem increasingly likely that the U.S. Supreme Court will take up a suit against the University of Texas at Austin, re-introducing the issue of racial preferences that has been largely dormant since the 2003 Supreme Court Grutter decision affirming the use of race in admissions.
The tricky politics of affirmative action for Obama is an important feature of two new books, Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama’s America by Desmond S. King of Oxford and Rogers M. Smith of the University of Pennsylvania (a volume I reviewed this week in The New Republic); and The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, a trenchant analysis by Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy.
Obama has thus far been able to dodge affirmative action in part because he’s been fortunate that his opponents have not exploited the issue. As Kennedy writes: “For reasons that are unclear, John McCain refused to pull out all of the racial stops at his disposal in his fight with Obama…McCain could have done more to create a problem for Obama by calling attention to their differences over the volatile issue of racial affirmative action,” but McCain “never seriously broached the matter; remarkably, in three nationally televised presidential debates, the issue of affirmative action never surfaced.”
http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/what-should-obama-do-on-affirmative-action/30905
The tricky politics of affirmative action for Obama is an important feature of two new books, Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama’s America by Desmond S. King of Oxford and Rogers M. Smith of the University of Pennsylvania (a volume I reviewed this week in The New Republic); and The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, a trenchant analysis by Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy.
Obama has thus far been able to dodge affirmative action in part because he’s been fortunate that his opponents have not exploited the issue. As Kennedy writes: “For reasons that are unclear, John McCain refused to pull out all of the racial stops at his disposal in his fight with Obama…McCain could have done more to create a problem for Obama by calling attention to their differences over the volatile issue of racial affirmative action,” but McCain “never seriously broached the matter; remarkably, in three nationally televised presidential debates, the issue of affirmative action never surfaced.”
http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/what-should-obama-do-on-affirmative-action/30905