In response to the recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on affirmative action in college admissions, the Department of History faculty wish to provide a list of resources over the history of affirmative action in our country. A huge thank you to James Gregory, Moon-Ho Jung, and Margaret O'Mara for their assistance in curating this list.
The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action by Terry H. Anderson (Oxford University Press, 2005)
The Minority Rights Revolution by John D. Skrentny (Harvard University Press, 2004)
Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th Century by Christopher P. Loss (Princeton University Press, 2014)
“The New Racial Preferences: Rethinking Racial Projects,” by Devon Carbado and Cheryl I. Harris, in Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Daniel Martinez HoSang et al. (University of California Press, 2012)
The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics by George Lipsitz (Temple University Press, 2018 original edition published 1998)
For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law by Randall Kennedy (Pantheon Books, 2013)
Protesting Affirmative Action: The Struggle over Equality after the Civil Rights Revolution by Dennis Deslippe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014)
The Law of Affirmative Action: Twenty Five Years of Supreme Court Decisions on Race and Remedies by Girardeau Spann (New York University Press, 2000)