January 23, 2015
In Cashin’s article on affirmative action published in the PRRAC journal, she concedes that, “Fewer African Americans may enter elite institutions under an affirmative action system based on structural disadvantage rather than under race-based affirmative action.” However, she argued that the social costs of racial-conscious programs outweigh any marginal benefits when race-neutral alternatives are available.
Lia Epperson, a law professor at the Washington College of Law at American University in Washington, D.C., said that addressing racial disparities is not about totally abandoning policies that use race. She said it’s about the robust enforcement of laws that bar discrimination and inequality, existing compliance reviews that have proven helpful at the elementary and secondary education levels and expanding the role of data collection and the dissemination of data. “The reality is that we are in a time that is difficult, because we do have this societal indecision with respect to matters of race,” said Epperson, who formerly led the education law and policy group of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “The reality is also that we have a Constitution that supports remedying a history of slavery and Jim Crow. We have to expand our political imagination beyond the reality of the moment.”
Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute said on the panel:
“There’s no doubt that we need to pretend to be colorblind in the current legal climate, but it’s also very important to realize that we have a separate challenge from the challenge of enhancing equity. And that is the challenge of increasing justice.”
Rothstein added, “We have a constitutional obligation to undue centuries of slavery, segregation and exploitation. As recent events have demonstrated to everybody, we have made very little progress in undoing that unconstitutional placement of African Americans in a caste system in this society.”
