The Color of Law A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (z-lib.org).epub

duped. Integration cannot wait until every African American youth becomes
a model citizen.
Affluent suburbs may experience a decline in property values after
integration, because racial and economic snobbery is now part of their
appeal to buyers.
Offering incentives to encourage African Americans to settle in white
neighborhoods will involve substantial financial costs. If we include lowincome
children in upper-middle-class schools, we will have to divert
resources to special counseling and remedial programs, and taxes will have
to rise to pay for them or elective programs may have to be cut. If we
mislead white parents into thinking that integration will be cost-free, they
will be enraged, understandably so, when these costs become apparent.
Affirmative action programs are reasonable ways to address the legacy of
state-sponsored segregation. African Americans whose opportunities have
been limited because their families were locked in ghettos should be given
some compensation in the form of access to jobs and educations that their
forebears were denied. But affirmative action is also not without costs. In his
book For Discrimination, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy ridicules
Barack Obama’s claim in The Audacity of Hope that affirmative action “can
open up opportunities otherwise closed to qualified minorities without
diminishing opportunities for white students.” Kennedy retorts, “How can
that be?” If college slots are limited and affirmative action admits a handful
of African Americans who wouldn’t otherwise attend, an equal number of
nonfavored applicants must be rejected. That number may be small relative
to the thousands of qualified applicants denied admission because of space
limitations, but it is not zero.
By not acknowledging this cost, we invite opponents of affirmative action
to exaggerate it, wildly in some cases, as they did in recent Supreme Court
challenges to University of Texas admission procedures that give a tiny
advantage to otherwise qualified African Americans. The plaintiff, Abigail
Fisher, was a white applicant who was less qualified than African Americans
who were admitted. By failing to acknowledge that a few whites might have
to give up their places in an affirmative action program, we encourage any
white student rejected by an elite university to feel victimized and to blame
affirmative action for his or her failure.