The Civil Rights Act of 1964 stands as one of the greatest achievements in U.S. history. Although the law made discrimination illegal, its effectiveness, especially Title VII covering the employment domain, remains highly contested. The authors argue that legal shifts produce workplace racial integration only to the extent that there are additional political pressures on firms to desegregate. They examine fluctuating national political pressure to enforce equal employment opportunity law and affirmative action mandates as key influences on the pace of workplace racial desegregation and explore trajectories of Black-White integration in U.S. workplaces since 1966. Their results show that although federal and state equal employment opportunity pressures had initial successes in reducing racial segregation in workplaces, little progress has been made since the early 1980s. They conclude that racial desegregation is an ongoing politically mediated process, not a natural or inevitable outcome of early civil ri...

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Race and Workplace Integration: A Politically Mediated Process?

Many scholars note that racial policy issues now focus on color-blind versus race-conscious approaches to racial inequalities, but they have not adequately explained how this development occurred or its consequences. Using work theorizing the role of ideas in politics, this article argues that these changes represent a “critical ideational development.” Diverse strains in earlier racial policy positions were reformulated to advance not just old racial goals but new ones. This critical ideational development produced advantages for conservative coalition building and Republican electoral campaigns, thereby contributing to the Reagan Revolution and later polarization and gridlock, and it helped drive racial issues out of campaigns and into other venues, especially legislative, administrative, and judicial hearings. It has not been associated with great progress in reducing racial inequalities or promoting racial harmony

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1017/S0022381614000541

“Without Regard to Race”: Critical Ideational Development in Modern American Politics

Legislation often prescribes the broad parameters of social development, particularly in the creation of socio-economic entitlements and rights. In some cases such prescriptions may even be quite detailed. However, it is through the courts that these parameters are defined, narrowed, broadened, given substance and, ultimately, applied. It is thus the courts that create the body of jurisprudence that helps us to understand, and thus to analyse, such legislation. This article adopts as its starting point legislation that has been enacted to address the issues of the pervasive inequalities inherent in South African society, goes on to analyse the approaches adopted to solve similar problems in other jurisdictions, and then analyses the approaches adopted by South African courts in interpreting the legislation and giving content to the will of the legislature; ultimately addressing the question of whether affirmative action can now be described as a right. Regular readers of Transformation will note that the article by Morris Montalti and Adrian Bellengere is not presented in the usual Transformation style. The original article we received was written for a legal audience. The editors and our referees felt that the submission was important but needed to be made more accessible to a broader audience. We have, therefore, asked the authors for 'parallel texts', with a narrative that runs along the top, and a further narrative, in the endnotes, that delves deeper into the legal issues for those who may be interested in this.

Is a right to affirmative action the solution to the Orwellian postulate that all are equal but...

It is a pleasure to comment on Nancy MacLean's hugely important book Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace as an example of what I might call “bringing the law back in” to the history of the civil rights movement. A generation ago, the idea that law needed to be introduced into this history would have seemed nonsensical. At that time, law provided one of the central touchstones in the historical narrative of the struggle for racial equality in American life. Scholarship in this area built on C. Vann Woodward's pioneering work on the rise of Jim Crow, which itself was written shortly after Woodward's participation in the Brown v. Board of Education litigation. The dominant narrative began with the legal construction of Jim Crow in the late nineteenth century and continued with the founding of the NAACP. Other actors came along at various points in the story, prominent among them New Deal–era racial liberals, World War II–era activists, midcentury social scientists, Southern civil rights leaders and movements, and eventually black power. The end point was marked by the litigation and legislative victories of the 1950s and '60s, which finally wrote back into law what had been taken away by segregationist white Southerners and a compliant Supreme Court in the late nineteenth century. The implicit methodological take on law was that state and federal statutes, as well as court decisions, provided an important impetus, or at the very least a validation, for racial change—first for white Southerners as they created the Jim Crow legal regime and later for segregation's opponents as they reinscribed racial equality onto the core narrative of American life.

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Bringing the Law Back into the History of the Civil Rights Movement

The sociology of affirmative action is a strongly interdisciplinary subfield within sociology. It is concerned with understanding the causes and consequences of policies that use membership in certain social groups to determine the allocation of resources or opportunities. It is also concerned with understanding the level and sources of public support and opposition to such policies. This article summarizes developments in these areas and identifies the areas that seem most promising for future researchers.

John David Skrentny

Papers

From Direct Action to Affirmative Action: Fair Employment Law and Policy in America, 1933–1972