He is also completing his next book, tentatively titled The Rights Revolution . The public often thinks that a lot of academics study questions and issues that are important for scholarly reasons but which may be shockingly irrelevant to most Americans. I wanted to be a social scientist who wrote about something most Americans knew about and cared about. This topic came to mind because, as I began to study, I discovered that almost everything written about affirmative action was a polemic, an argument either strongly for or against, and there were almost no dispassionate, even-handed attempts to understand the origins and politics of the policy. In fact, I was warned that it would be hard to publish credible research on this subject because it's so highly politicized.
Affirmative action has a strange history.
The major irony is that people today assume that this was a policy pushed on the government by black civil rights groups. In fact, the most important proponents of affirmative action were actually white males, the group that is seen to lose the most by it. And one of the most prominent proponents was a Republican, Richard Nixon, who gave crucial support right at the moment when it could have died. Another irony is that the policy is often debated in terms of meritocracy, with affirmative action seen as a violation of that, and I wanted to point out that there's not much evidence that we have a meritocracy. One study I discuss showed that sixty percent of all Americans who get jobs do it through connections, and not meritocratic competition.