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A History of Affirmative Action, 1619-2000. By Philip E Rubio. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. xviii, 327 pp. Cloth, $48.00, ISBN 1-57806-354-X Paper, $20.00, ISBN 1-57806-355-8.)
The presumption of color attached to slavery has pervaded the United States since its colonial beginnings. Not only bondage was color-- coded; every aspect of status has been color-- coded in a binary system. Being white has meant being privileged. Being black has meant having "no rights which the white man is bound to respect," as Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney put it in the U.S. Supreme Court's infamous decision in Scott v. Sanford (1857). White supremacy has been the nations constant ideal and most insistent ideology. At every turn and level, government policy and practice have promoted that supremacy as a ruling caste agenda of...