The `quota' smokescreen. (Comment).

Nation, The, February, 2003 by Guinier, Lani

George W. Bush mounted his bully pulpit on Martin Luther King's birthday and took aim at the University of Michigan's affirmative-action policies, calling them "a quota system." He tried to soft-pedal his quota-slinging rhetoric with an "I strongly support diversity of all kinds" statement and then fired off several more rounds of anti-quota talk directed at the "method used by the University of Michigan to achieve this important goal." His sympathy for the goal but condemnation of the method harked back to the compassionate conservatism of white moderates in Birmingham in 1963, whose equivocations prompted Dr. King to write his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." King posited that the Ku Klux Klaner and the White Citizens Councilers may not be "the Negro's great...

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