You were pretty sure the job was yours.
You successfully interviewed, passed a background check, even met the office’s other workers. Everything looked positive—until you got a “we’re sorry, but” letter. Someone else got hired, and there was a small part of you that wondered if it happened that way, not because of your skills but because of your skin.
Hiring on the basis of race or gender is supposedly illegal…but it happens. And in the new book “For Discrimination” by Randall Kennedy, we read why the author believes that affirmative action is an idea that needs to stay.
It should come as no surprise that discussions of an early form of affirmative action came at the end of the Civil War. It may also come as no surprise that Andrew Johnson opposed a Constitutional amendment on the basis that it gave “the Negro” advantages that had never been given to other groups.
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