Place, Not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America by Sheryll Cashin (Beacon Press, 176 pgs, $25.95)

In May, we commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education and the end of de jure racial segregation in American public education. The Brown decision ushered in the end of legalized apartheid in the United States, but implementation of the decision took decades, and today, of course, our schools remain highly segregated by race and class—in fact if not in law.

The discouraging post-Brown history surely helps explain why Thurgood Marshall—who had argued Brown—abandoned his commitment to colorblind policy and strongly defended racial preference programs for minority students in higher education when he became a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. In the 1978 case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Marshall supported a racial quota that set aside 16 of 100 seats at UC Davis Medical School for minority students. In making the case for racial preferences, Marshall explained that past discrimination left a crippling legacy and cited data showing that blacks were almost four times as likely to live in poverty as whites and were twice as likely to be unemployed. In the Bakke deliberations, Marshall privately told other justices that racial preferences would be necessary for another 100 years.

More than 30 years later, a former Supreme Court clerk to Justice Marshall, Georgetown University Law Professor Sheryll Cashin, makes a powerful case that it’s time to rethink her former boss’s support for racial preferences. The place to begin, she argues in her brilliant new book, is an affirmative action that responds directly to the failure of the Brown decision to desegregate schools.

In Place, Not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America , Cashin calls racial preferences a crude instrument that tends to benefit wealthy students of color; alienates working-class whites who should be part of the progressive alliance; and is, in any event, legally and politically unsustainable. Skillfully blending her personal story as an upper-middle-class black professional with a wide range of research on what constitute the biggest barriers to success today, Cashin provides a compelling blueprint for a new, much stronger, form of affirmative action based on actual disadvantage.

Many proponents of affirmative action, like Justice Marshall, cite high poverty rates among minority students in part to paint a sympathetic picture of applicants who have overcome obstacles. But in practice, Cashin notes, universities “create optical blackness but little socioeconomic diversity.” She cites Walter Benn Michaels’s suggestion that the war over affirmative action is a battle “over what skin color the rich kids have.” Cashin notes that today, the achievement gap by income is twice the size of the gap by race, and that affluent parents spend nine times as much money developing the talents of their children as low-income parents. Today’s affirmative action policies, she writes, enable “high-income advantaged blacks to claim the legacy of American apartheid.” Class-blind racial preferences fail the fairness test, she suggests, but they also undercut the legal rationale for affirmative action: creating a diverse learning environment. At Dartmouth, where the minority students often come from prep schools, one former student (who is biracial) tells Cashin, “The person I had most in common with was a white guy from a small town.”