Obama’s Stand on Affirmative Action
From Newsweek.com
When it comes to the question of race in America, Barack Obama is used to hot tempers, accusations of bias, protests, speeches and pained outrage. In 1990 Harvard Law School was a key battleground in the identity wars. The faculty was angrily split over minority hiring and how to teach race in the classroom. Two years earlier 50 students had occupied the dean’s office, demanding a more diverse faculty; that spring Derrick Bell—the first African-American to get tenure at Harvard Law School—resigned over the issue.
Similar tensions roiled the prestigious Harvard Law Review. “That year was unusual in that there was a group of very assertive conservative types on the Law Review,” says Adam Charnes, who counted himself among them. Obama, who had earned a place on the journal in his first year at Harvard, saw a role for himself that has come to define his pitch for the presidency today—as a bridge-builder. He approached the conservatives, according to one who asked for anonymity in order to speak more freely. Obama explained that while he supported affirmative action as a policy matter, he recognized it came at a cost and didn’t consider them to be racists for opposing it. Charnes praises Obama as “a straight-up guy, who always told you exactly what he thought.” Obama was handily elected Review president….continue…
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