Affirmative action in US politics

Book review of THE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION PUZZLE: A Living History From Reconstruction to Today

For two and a half centuries America enslaved its black population, whose labour was a critical source of the country’s capitalist modernisation and prosperity. Upon the abolition of legal, interpersonal slavery, the exploitation and degradation of blacks continued in the neo-slavery system of Jim Crow, a domestic terrorist regime fully sanctioned by the state and courts of the nation, and including Nazi-like instruments of ritualised human slaughter. Black harms and losses accrued to all whites, both to those directly exploiting them, and indirectly to all enjoying the enhanced prosperity their social exclusion and depressed earnings made possible. When white affirmative