The following is an excerpt from Jason Riley's new book, The Affirmative Action Myth, available now.
Blacks were making rapid progress before the 1960s. Racial preferences didn’t help, and if anything they slowed the improvement.
Derrick Bell is best known for his contributions to critical race theory—which claims that racism is embedded in American law and institutions and that the historical mistreatment of black people largely explains current social and economic disparities.
Before becoming the first black tenured professor at Harvard Law School in the 1970s, Bell was a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, where he worked on school desegregation cases under the tutelage of Thurgood Marshall. Bell was once a critic of racial favoritism. But over time, he grew unhappy with the pace of black progress and came to believe that racism is so deeply ingrained in our society that colorblind remedies were destined to fail.
Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and the unrest that ensued nationwide, including on college campuses, schools stepped up efforts to recruit black students and faculty. To expedite the push for racial diversity, elite colleges began lowering admissions and hiring standards. Previous black recruitment efforts had involved searching for capable students who met existing admission criteria and could handle the rigor of the institution. For the first time, schools started creating special programs to recruit black students with academic deficiencies.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
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