The issue of affirmative action continues to dominate the racial justice landscape. It frequently dictates the conceptual and policy framework for increasing access to education and employment. Its preservation has largely defined the strategy and goals of many civil rights organizations. Its operation often substitutes for a more comprehensive effort to address the fundamental structural distortions in the way we allocate educational and employment opportunities for everyone.
Affirmative action is, in our view, a program, rather than a vision.
It is, instead, to shift the overall framework of the debate. We strive to focus attention on developing a long-term, normative vision of racial justice that corresponds to present circumstance, and on generating experiments in institutional redesign that can address problems at this more structural level. The responses to our essay reveal the challenges we have yet to meet in this effort. Perhaps the most intractable challenge, although the easiest conceptually, is to dislodge the prevailing commitment to short-term definitions of efficiency and merit. For example, quibbling with the validity of tests for predicting first-year performance in school largely misses the point.