We Won't Go Back; Making the Case for Affirmative Action

Lawrence, Charles R. III and Matsuda, Mari J.

ISBN 10: 0395791251 / ISBN 13: 9780395791257

Published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1997

About this Item

xx, 314 pages. Notes. Index. Inscribed by Mari J. Matsuda to Betsy Levin on the Title page. Also signed by Charles Lawrence. Inscription read: To Betsy Levin With thanks for all you've done to bring equality to legal education. Betsy Levin was the first tenured woman on the faculty at Duke Law. Her primary interests focused on education, local government, and constitutional law. While she was on the Duke Law faculty she was also a Residential Fellow at the National Institute of Education and General Counsel at the Department of Education. Levin authored and edited several books on education and school financing such as Future Directions for School Finance Reform in 1975 and The Courts as Educational Policymakers and Their Impact on Federal Programs in 1977. Levin served on several committees on education, educational financing, and women's rights including the ACLU. In 1966 Levin obtained an LL.B. at Yale, where she was Topics Editor of the Yale Law Review. In 1981 Levin became Dean and Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School, a position she held until 1987. Levin remained on the Colorado faculty until 1993. She served as the executive director of the Association of American Law Schools from 1987 to 1992. Levin continued to teach in a variety of adjunct and visiting professor positions until her retirement in 2009. Reviews the original intent of affirmative action policies and argues for their critical role in the health of American society, emphasizing the need for an expanded and more humane version of affirmative action. Professor Lawrence is best known for his prolific work in antidiscrimination law, equal protection, and critical race theory. Mari J. Matsuda (born 1956) is an American lawyer, activist, and law professor at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaii. She was the first tenured female Asian American law professor in the United States, at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law in 1998 and one of the leading voices in critical race theory since its inception. Matsuda specializes in the fields of torts, constitutional law, legal history, feminist theory, critical race theory, and civil rights law. In the compassionate yet frank meditation, two of America's leading voices on affirmative action make the convincing case that it is time for a more humane understanding of this controversial policy. Told from the richly personal and occasionally diverging perspectives of an African American man and an Asian American woman, We Won't Go Back offers an impassioned, generous vision for the policy's expansion - one that see affirmative action as a gain for all. Combining personal memoir, careful analysis, and the stories of those who have shaped the policy over the decades, Lawrence and Matsuda reveal what affirmative action has meant in real terms, in people's lives - from the communities that struggled for its initial passage to parents who fight today for their child's fair shot. In the process, the authors eloquently consider some of the policy's most divisive issues: How do African Americans feel about the judicial ascendancy of Clarence Thomas? Why have the majority of women remained silent on affirmative action? Do Asian Americans need the policy? How are issues of hate speech and political correctness tied to it? Perhaps most striking is the human face of affirmative action today, which emerges radiantly from the stories gathered here. We meet Anthony Romero, a Latino raised by his immigrant parents in a Bronx housing project, now director of a prominent human rights organization; Robert Demmons, a trailblazer who successfully tackled discrimination in his local fire department; LaDoris Hazzard Cordell, the first African American woman to become a Superior Court judge in her county; and Bernadette Gross, a carpenter who rose triumphantly in a male-dominated profession. Their tales and others' force the question: Which people are in the room because of.

Seller Inventory # 81623

Bibliographic Details

• Title: We Won't Go Back; Making the Case for Affirmative Action
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, Boston
• Publication Date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0395791251
• ISBN 13: 9780395791257
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: Second printing [stated].
• Condition: Very good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very good
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Discrimination
  • Feminism
  • Civil Rights
  • Racism

About this title

Synopsis

Reviews the original intent of affirmative action policies and argues for their critical role in the health of American society, emphasizing the need for an expanded and more humane version of affirmative action.

Reviews

Responding to the current wave of affirmative-action backlash, two Georgetown law professors, each proud beneficiaries of the policy, stand as zealous advocates brooking no retreat. ``Our parents taught us that . . . the struggle to make a place at the table for ourselves was also the struggle to free the souls of those who would exclude us,'' write Lawrence (who is African-American) and Matsuda (Japanese-American) of their individual family legacies of political idealism and civil rights activism. The two authors--colleagues who are also married to each other--here form a tireless tag team to continue the relay. They alternate in writing 11 complementary essays that argue for muscular affirmative-action programs as the best tool to end the residual racial, gender, and economic subordination running through our society. As legal scholars, each is a leading proponent of an analytical perspective known as critical race theory, which documents how race, gender, and socioeconomic status shape our social and legal system, as well as our varied individual experiences navigating that system. In this book they acknowledge that overt bigotry has been rejected by our culture, but trace the unconscious prejudices that still prevail and structure access to real opportunity. What today's affirmative-action opponents want to push back, they argue, is the very effort to redistribute opportunity that is essential to dismantling institutionalized privilege of all kinds. The authors earnestly believe that attaining a freer and more just society will benefit everyone and justify the difficulty of a contentious transition. Extending the discussion beyond the combative rhetoric of reverse discrimination and racial preference, Matsuda and Lawrence have written a compassionate call to conscience, imprinted with their inspirational vision of American democracy and complex sense of a national community. But not everyone will buy into their communal vision of justice, which will remain anathema to unreconstructed rugged American individualists. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Law professors Lawrence and Matsuda (Where Is Your Body, and Other Essays, LJ 12/96), a husband-and-wife team, have written a most provocative defense of affirmative action. Until now, much of the current debate has been fueled by conservative scholars of color opposed to affirmative action, such as Dinesh D'Souza (The End of Racism, Free Pr., 1995), Stephen Carter (Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, LJ 9/15/91), and Shelby Steele (The Content of Our Character, LJ 8/90). The present work begins with the historical development of affirmative action in the 1960s. For Lawrence and Matsuda, this history is still fresh: while people of color have made some statistical gains in employment and education, they are still locked out of boardrooms, classrooms, and many types of jobs. Affirmative action is necessary, they argue, because America's race and gender divide has not yet healed. Moreover, affirmative action is workable, as their biographies of affirmative action recipients testify. Their work provides some much-needed balance to what has been a lopsidely conservative debate. Highly recommended.?Steven Anderson, Baltimore Cty. Circuit Court Law Lib., Towson, Md.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The husband and wife team of Charles Lawrence, an African American, and Mari Matsuda, a Japanese American, pair up to make the case for affirmative action. As law professors, they analyze affirmative action policy from its turbulent beginning to the current challenges. As they point out in the preface, "a black man and an Asian women sometimes see things differently," yet their collective insight on the issue is the strength of their book. Each chapter includes narratives from beneficiaries of affirmative action along with the authors' personal experiences. The authors look at the debate related to color blindness, meritocracy, feminism, and class. Lawrence and Matsuda have done an excellent job of presenting the facts and have added a humanistic angle that allows one to explore the impact of the policy in the U.S. The book puts forth a strong case that as a society we should not want to regress to a time when such a policy was necessary to provide the liberty and justice a democracy promises. Lillian Lewis