Toeing the Line

The US Supreme Court and Affirmative Action Politics

The first up-close look at how Supreme Court affirmative action rulings approximated America’s racial politics between 1978 and 2023.

Toeing the Line takes us on the first ever deep dive into the constitutional arguments behind Students for Fair Admissions (2023) and how those arguments mirror public preferences. The wealth of data analyzed in the book demonstrates that justices of the Supreme Court wrestle with the same questions about race that preoccupy the body politic. They reason through these emotionally charged matters the same as the rest of us. And they arrive at the same conclusions. Does the history of slavery and racial exclusion still matter today? Are racial disparities explained by discrimination or something else? How do we reconcile racial preferences with individualist and civil rights ideals? Should blacks simply pull themselves up by their own bootstraps the same as Irish, Italian, and Jewish Americans? A majority of Americans, the Democratic and Republican Parties, and presidents from FDR to Biden arrive at the same answers to these questions as the Supreme Court. Hence, affirmative action rulings from 1978 through 2023 are a case of the Supreme Court toeing the line of America's national racial politics.

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