Sublime

Ask any Black student at Princeton or Black students at any peer institution the same, and the odds are quite good that the celebration of their admission was diminished by a claim of unearned benefit. “Affirmative action” is said with a sneer. It is a straw man of the right wing. Because of course college admissions are not an exercise in fairness

If equality of educational opportunity can be established, democracy will be real and justified. For this is the vital truth beneath its catchwords: that though men cannot be equal, their access to education and opportunity can be made more nearly equal. The rights of man are not rights to office and power, but the rights of entry into every avenue

W. E. B. Du Bois

Although Truman had won on the basis of his “Fair Deal” program, that program’s fate would still be controlled by anti–Fair Deal southerners. And in the unlikely event that Truman’s proposals somehow emerged from committee, there was still the filibuster in the Senate. What was the legislation that had been defeated in the Senate in 1948? Legislati

Since antiracists posit that the racial groups are already civilized, antiracist policies are geared toward reducing racial inequities and creating equal opportunity.

WHITE PEOPLE HAVE their own dueling consciousness, between the segregationist and the assimilationist: the slave trader and the missionary, the proslavery exploiter and the antislavery civilizer, the eugenicist and the melting pot–ter, the mass incarcerator and the mass developer, the Blue Lives Matter and the All Lives Matter, the not-racist natio