Color schemes: can affirmative action be reconciled with liberal individualism? . - Culture and Reviews - The Anatomy of Racial Inequality - book review

Reason, July, 2002 by Richard A. Epstein

Rather, they are an outgrowth of a multidimensional deliberative process that has converged on the same outcome time after time. That virtually every major private corporation and private university embraces some form of affirmative action suggests that state institutions doing the same tasks should be allowed the same latitude. A bar against any form of affirmative action is a tough position to defend inside any organization, public or private. The great danger here is legislative flat, such as California's Proposition 209, which forces all public universities to conform to Ward Connerly's monochromatic vision of human nature.

Loury should recognize that decentralized social institutions offer the greatest prospect for improving race relations. The Civil Rights Acts were important in securing the demise of Jim Crow, but those laws have long since outlived their usefulness in the regulation of private behavior in competitive markets. Now we need a return to freedom.

Richard A. Epstein (r-epstein@uchicago.edu) is the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago and the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also the author of Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws (Harvard University Press).