Chapter 1: From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action and Back Again: A Critical Race Discussion of Racialized Rationales and Access to Higher Education

TLDR

The persistence of the color line in U.S. higher education, highlighted by legal opinions, student concerns, and ongoing racial disparities in access and discrimination, frames the debate over race‑conscious admission policies.

Abstract

A s part of his 1978 opinion in the Bakke v. Regents of the University of California lXcase, Justice Blackmun's quotation speaks to the persistence of of the color line that W. E. B. DuBois identified in 1903. In a letter to Judge Friedman of the U.S. 6th District Court in Detroit, Michigan, the African American high school student's remarks express her worry that the courts will eliminate the single policy in education that aims to account for race. Her comments refer to the University of Michigan's race-conscious admission policy, challenged at the undergraduate and law school levels by White female candidates denied admission to the selective campus (see Gratz v. Bollinger, 2003; Grutter v. Bollinger, 2003). Taken together, these quotations reveal the color-line problem that undergirds affirmative action debates in higher education. Indeed, U.S. schools continue to limit equal educational access and opportunity based on race (Kozol, 1991; Lewis, 2003). Students of color remain severely underrepresented in historically White colleges and universities, and the few granted access to these institutions often suffer racial discrimination on and around campus (Lawrence & Matsuda, 1997; Smith, Altbach, & Lomotey, 2002; Solorzano, Ceja, & Yosso, 2000). Insidiously usurping civil rights language and ignoring the historical and contemporary realities of communities of color, opponents of affirmative