Last month, California voters passed proposition 209, thereby effectively ending affirmative action in that state. What, one wonders, would have happened to Fair, now a black academic at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, had it passed a decade ago? In his first book, a lively but sometimes disconnected report that is by implication at least, to be a response to Stephen Carter's Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, Fair draws on both his training as a law professor and his experiences as the eighth of 10 children born to a single mother on public assistance in Columbus, Ohio. Fair grew up eating bread and sugar sandwiches when the food stamps ran out, but he beat the odds with a combination of supportive mentors and his own determination. He attended Duke University and UCLA law school in the wake of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the 1978 Supreme Court decision which outlawed fixed racial quotas but permitted schools to consider race, among other factors, in admissions. Encapsulating court rulings and historical anecdotes with the details of his own struggle, Fair shows how racially sensitive policies can give disadvantaged minorities a leg up in a society where the best jobs go to the best educated students. "I was a special admit student at Duke, one of the new students ?black as well as white?from around the country that would bring greater diversity to the class of 1982," reports Fair, who notes that though he had almost all A's in high school, his SAT scores "were far below Duke's median." Fair adroitly combines legal and personal history but the book is sometimes marred by an excessively polemical tone.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
Larger social science collections may wish to consider this multiangled approach to affirmative action issues by a University of Alabama^-Tuscaloosa administrator and law professor. Fair's Notes blends a "Personal Narrative" of the author's childhood in poverty, and the role of federal affirmative action policy in helping him and most of his siblings escape from that dead-end world, with thoughtful analysis of the history of racial caste in the U.S. ("White Privilege and Black Despair"), and of the roots of remedial affirmative action and Supreme Court decisions about it. "The United States cannot survive another century of white supremacy and black caste," Fair declares in his afterword. "America cannot continue to treat some of its citizens as throwaways. . . . White males are not the only Americans who are angry." A demanding but sometimes eloquent study that offers some new insights on a topic more debated than understood. See the "Point . . . Counterpoint" boxed review (p.1001) for popular approaches to this subject. Mary Carroll --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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