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This chapter discusses the relationship between Affirmative Action and whiteness studies, in context of Atlantic Enlightenment. Affirmative action represents concrete remedial measures that have the effect of “outing” and “naming,” as it were a preexisting white advantage accumulated over centuries. On the other hand, whiteness studies forms part of an innovative academic trend. While remedial measures examine people who have been disadvantaged by a racialized system, whiteness studies conduct a psychosocial analysis of the advantaged people—the White. The two issues address two forms of white privilege: one is social and material advantage while the other is subjective and cognitive advantage.

The National Association of Working Women (“9to5”), a labor organization for working women, fought for enforcement of affirmative action regulations. The success of the organization’s efforts depended largely on support—or lack of support—from the Oval Office. American presidents from both political parties declined to support 9to5, leaving corporate officials free to ignore federal strictures.

This chapter discusses the ever-evolving role of race in politics in the history of the US. How the government handled racial and other discrimination has not always been effective. It was not until the 1960s that the US government attempted to make a concrete effort to minimize racial discrimination, which of course effected enrollment at elite US colleges and universities. This chapter then goes onto to discuss the deep ideological divide over affirmative action that exists in the country and provides public opinion data on where whites stand with the subject. This chapter demonstrates that indeed affirmative action is a controversial subject that receives little support from whites.

This chapter provides a positive assessment of Richard Nixon's appeals for minority enterprise as a crucial component of increasing black support for the GOP. As such, it provides a counter to traditional understandings of the Nixon Administration as one that exploited racial tensions through a “Southern Strategy.” The chapter understands minority enterprise initiatives as the echo of a central theme of black Republican ideology: one that wedded liberal appeals for racial equality with a belief in traditional Republican principles of self-help, thrift, entrepreneurship, and free enterprise. The chapter holds that black activists had long called for the implementation of an aggressive movement for economic civil rights and that Nixon's “Black Cabinet”—a loosely assembled group of black Republican appointees—was central to this effort. The cabinet's specialized outreach program used the Nixon administration to advance an alternative social, economic, and political civil rights agenda that viewed economic uplift and political shrewdness as the final, critical step in the struggle for racial equality and black independence.

The attack on affirmative action has come from a select few individuals with resource. This fight was thought to have culminated with the end of affirmative action signaled by the Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin Supreme Court case. However, the policy received a surprising victory and continues to be an object of disdain by many conservatives today. With that being said, this chapter outlines the role of elite actors in framing prominent social issues, including affirmative action. This chapter also describes how certain frames may be used to not only minimize the discussion of race surrounding the policy but will also attempt to use threat and emotion to produce animosity in order to remove the policy from higher education.

This chapter focuses on the socio-legal race problem; namely juridical subordination. The Supreme Court engages in this form of racial subordination when its rulings freeze or impede racial progress for the sake of pursuing a nonracist, competing interest. Juridical subordination most often occurs today in the name of racial progress; in other words, when the Court’s vindication of a black equality norm (such as racial omission or racial integration) in reality inhibits black advancement. Since the end of Jim Crow, the black equality interest has been defined in ways that compete not only with the civil-rights-era norms but with other legitimate norms. Focusing on cases involving antidiscrimination law and racial preference (or affirmative action) law, this chapter illustrates how the Court can avoid juridical subordination in its civil rights cases.

The purpose of this chapter is to bring the discussion back to the broader ideas of the book: racism and framing by elite actors. This chapter discussed the insidious role of think tanks in enlisting Racialized Framing techniques (minimize race while also activating race through threat) to eliminate affirmative action from higher education and reproduce a system that benefits whites. This chapter returns to the idea that civil rights initiative in general are under attack by a few elite actors while support is found among diverse groups most affected by any changes to these policies. This chapter also highlights the broader problem with diversity initiatives within higher education and how they fail to eliminate the problems facing African Americans and other marginalized groups. In conclusion, the authors conclude that affirmative action is, in essence, dead because it has been stripped of its bite by past cases and because it now acts as a call-to-action for whites.

This chapter traces the articulation of colorblindness as a coherent ideology around the issues of busing and affirmative action in the years between 1974 and 1978. The chapter offers a close reading of Rocky, highlighting the manner in which the film offers race-conscious images and implications to colorblind political discourse. Just as the political struggles over integration produced a coherent colorblind ideology, they also, through Rocky, reflected the first appearance of Hollywood’s colorblind aesthetics. Rocky was instrumental in shaping colorblindness, which was fundamental in the opposition to affirmative action and busing. This analysis of Rocky highlights the integral role Hollywood played in both the white backlash of the late 1970s and the articulation of colorblindness. The chapter then turns to the intersection of the rise of colorblindness and neoliberalism. Ultimately, it argues that neoliberal thought gained momentum in the 1970s because it offered solutions to two problems: first, to the economic sluggishness of the decade, and second, perhaps more importantly, to the broad “problem” of excessive government intervention and to matters of racial inequality specifically.

This chapter will delve into the question of what fundamentally concerns multiracial-identity scholars about the discrimination cases despite the fact that the empirical record does not by and large show anti-mixture animus. For multiracial-identity scholars, the primary locus of multiracial discrimination is in any societal resistance to the assertion of multiracial identity. The chapter calls this “Personal Identity Equality” and discusses its dangers. This is because the exotification of racial mixture is something that is now being drawn upon to undermine the pursuit of racial equality public policies. Tracing the challenges to race-based affirmative action over the last ten years, this chapter will demonstrate the ways in which Supreme Court litigation has referred to the growth of mixed-race persons as undercutting the legitimacy of affirmative action policies. The chapter will also demonstrate the ways in which the Supreme Court affirmative action litigation references to mixed-race persons parallels the public discourse notion that the growth of multiracial identified persons signals the decline of racism. The chapter concludes by identifying how the association of multiracial identity with the decline of racism poses challenges to addressing the continuing discrimination against all non-white persons including those who are mixed-race.

This chapter examines Ronald Reagan’s first presidential term, the rise of the War on Drugs, and Rocky III (1982). Reagan took office hopeful that he could ban affirmative action and stop school desegregation orders by reframing racial discrimination as an individual rather than a group is- sue. With this, Reagan’s Justice Department developed a politics of colorblind neoliberalism. Reagan also ramped up the War on Drugs, which targeted low-income black communities and relied on resurrecting popular media representations of urban blacks as animalistic criminals in need of discipline and punishment by the state. Rocky III engages Reagan’s War and, in so doing, reveals that although colorblindness in many ways represented a new racial discourse in America—one based in racially neutral language and neoliberal notions of individualism—beginning in the 1980s it increasingly relied on very old tenets of antiblackness.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between corruption and politics (and politicians) in the Pacific Islands, particularly as revealed in the National Integrity System (NIS) surveys and the arguments over the coup in Fiji. First, it looks at ideas about “politics” itself and ways it might be corrupt, before examining what the NIS reports had to say about corruption and the state (a container in which politics takes place), democracy (a type of politics), and nationalism (a political emotion, ideology, or movement). The chapter then looks in more detail at the relationship between corruption and economic nationalism (a theme in the NIS reports) and Affirmative Action campaigns (a theme in the Fiji cleanup campaign). Finally the chapter discusses the politics of “anti-politics”—a useful idea for understanding the support for the coup in Fiji.

This chapter focuses on the subset of black-white couples who were parents to examine: expectations of their child's racial classification; how parents categorized their children after birth; and the implications for eligibility for university affirmative action. Carioca parents often expected to have black children due to mixture with a black parent. However, after birth, a child's phenotype determined the category they fit into, such that a child could be white, black, or less commonly, “mixed." Affirmative action did not cause Carioca parents to waver in their assessments of their children's race; white children were ineligible. Angelino parents described their child's race as additive: both black and white. They maintained the biracial categorization before and after their child's birth, regardless of the child's appearance. In light of affirmative action eligibility, Angelino parents became more flexible in their assessment, emphasizing blackness if they considered it advantageous. Sometimes they understood “biracial” as a unique minority status adding to institutional diversity. This chapter demonstrates parents' part in the social construction of new ethnoracial boundaries, strengthening of pre-existing ones, and the effect of public policy on understandings of ethnoracial boundaries.

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed the emergence of a media and scholarly panic in Brazil over an alleged racialization of the citizenry. As affirmative action, multiculturalism, and race-based law have become institutionalized parts of Brazilian governance, critics warn that new forms of (violent) racialization of the populace will follow. Chapter 5 examines this racialization thesis by examining the relationship between the quilombo rights grounded in Brazil’s 1988 constitution and the racialization of political consciousness in Alcântara. Against scholarly critics of race-based policies, the chapter shows how social struggles have racialized the law, not, principally, the other way around. New laws, such as the quilombo rights in Brazil’s 1998 constitution have, however, opened a space for social movements to reassess existing racial forms. The chapter also examines how real ambiguity of forms of ethnoracial identification in Alcântara accounts for some divergent perspectives about quilombos among some of the quilombola allies in social movements and universities.

Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan examines surprising changes in agrarian mobilization in the last decade. After decades of opposing affirmative action, dominant castes are mobilizing to demand affirmative action for themselves. Jaffrelot and Kalaiyaasan show that limited employment generation outside of agriculture, along with agricultural stagnation, has led to economic differentiation among the dominant castes. At the same time, reservations for Other Backward Classes and Dalits have enabled the upper echelons of these groups to earn livelihoods that are more desirable than those of many of the less affluent dominant castes. Members of the dominant castes have responded by demanding to be reclassified as OBCs so that they become eligible for reservations. Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan observe that as economic differentiation continues, it will be interesting to see whether mobilization along caste lines persists or whether rural political mobilization enters a new era.