This chapter explores symmetry’s implications for equal protection jurisprudence. A stark political divide has emerged between two understandings of legal equality, particularly with respect to race: conservatives generally favor an “anti-classification” approach focused on ensuring government neutrality, while progressives typically favor an “anti-subordination” approach that allows affirmative governmental action to redress historical group disadvantages. Although the Supreme Court has increasingly aligned its jurisprudence with the anti-classification perspective, symmetry should encourage an approach that gives something to both sides. The Court might accomplish this goal in at least three ways: by returning to the focus on diversity reflected in its earlier decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke while giving this framework greater “bite”; by allowing majority groups to disadvantage themselves, so long as they are genuinely dominant at the relevant level of government; and by sometimes allowing selection of government criteria with a view to their demographic effects, so long as these criteria are themselves facially neutral.

Chapter 6 turns to affirmative action. I begin with a discussion of two affirmative action-based hypotheses, one instrumental and the other symbolic. Both hypotheses point to these race-targeted policies as explanations for the reclassification reversal. I then test these hypotheses in several ways. First, I analyze priming and list experiments to probe for evidence of strategic manipulation in response to affirmative action. Second, I return to the municipal panel dataset and conduct a difference-in-difference analysis of state-level affirmative action on identification. And finally, I analyze an original panel dataset of university students, constructed from embargoed surveys held by the Ministry of Education in Brazil, to compute difference-in-difference estimates of the effects of affirmative action usage on the identifications of university applicants. Overall, evidence is mixed and inconsistent. Evidence suggests that, as part of the broader array of policies that expanded education, affirmative action does boost the effects of education. But the reclassification reversal cannot be reduced to, nor solely explained by, affirmative action policies.

In Chapter 12, the optimal properties of contests from a social perspective are outlined. It presents three main criteria for evaluating contests from a social welfare standpoint by considering the total effort, average effort, and effort of the contest winner. Additionally, the chapter delves into the discussion of how to organize different simultaneous contests and how free entry in several exclusive contests leads to social welfare maximization. Furthermore, the chapter examines the social optimality of aggregating local contests –limited to participants from specific areas, like EU countries – into a larger, open contest, such as one based in Brussels. Finally, the chapter provides a new perspective on two significant issues, compulsory education and affirmative action, by illustrating how active public policies can improve social welfare.

Chapter 28 reviews in detail how economists study the supply and demand for academic labor, presents a model of the factors that enter into academic salaries, and – because academic labor markets differ considerably across countries and these differences produce very different conditions in the way academic staff are hired and promoted – the review includes international aspects of faculty labor markets. The chapter also reviews studies that attempt to explain the factors that predict academic salaries in the United States, notably research productivity and teaching, the relation of those salaries to types of higher education institutions, and gender differences in academic pay, both in the United States and internationally. The chapter then analyzes various types of student admission systems across countries, including economic models of the higher education market for high- and low-ability students, and how students make choices among higher education institutions. The chapter ends with a discussion of affirmative action in the United States and the major affirmative action programs in India and Brazil.

Much has changed in the fifty years since the passage of Title IX. Although opportunities for women have shifted from wholesale exclusion, full equality remains unrealized. Our findings reveal a series of institutional barriers, many of which are baked into the structure of college sports. Sex segregation, intransigent androcentric culture, and lackluster market demands impede women’s progress. This concluding chapter includes discussion of steps that could be taken to move toward improving equality, addressing the hurdles, and making inroads on the way to major policy shifts. We also consider the implications of our findings for understanding the possibilities for using policy to address the concerns of marginalized groups more generally. We discuss the ways in which addressing these concerns will also benefit inclusion for transgender and gender-diverse athletes. Institutional context and embedded hierarchies of power can constrain such groups’ possibilities in their quest toward equality and inclusion.

Part Three: “Solidarity/Disavowal,” looks at how Asian Americans developed a distinct political subjectivity during the Asian American movement, against the backdrop of emergent Black Power and the nation’s imminent turn toward mass incarceration. Asian American activists and thinkers denounced white supremacy and expressed solidarity with Black people under the Third World rubric, but they did not theorize structural anti-Blackness or recognize their own not-Blackness. Reproducing the fallacy of minority equivalence, their half-finished critique has hampered Asian Americans’ ability to understand and respond to numerous Asian–Black conflicts that have unfolded in the post-movement era—including the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992, the controversy around NYPD Officer Peter Liang’s killing of Akai Gurley in New York City in 2014, and protracted tensions over race-conscious admissions in secondary and higher education, culminating in the anti-affirmative action lawsuit Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard. With the dramatic rise of a right-wing Chinese immigrant politics that seeks to dismantle affirmative action once and for all, the ethical–political crisis that has always faced Asian Americans—namely, what they should do about being participant–beneficiaries in an anti-Black order—has become more urgent than ever.

This chapter explores the positive obligations accompanying artistic freedom, and discusses the linkages between artistic freedom and ‘participation’ in cultural life under article 15 ICESCR. It focuses in particular on obilgations related to effective judicial remedies concerning censorship of performances (e.g. Pussy Riot’s Punk Prayer) and demolition of art installations (e.g. the ‘Bridges of Memory’ installation in the Mapocho River in Chile), as well as those related to artists’ cultural mobility (e.g. artists living in a situation of occupation). In this respect, the chapter makes a parallel between international obligations to protect artistic freedom as part of the right to participate in cultural life with forms of artistic performance that require the participation of the public (as in the case of Kaprow’s work, and the ‘Reinventions of Yard’). It further examines the impact of non-discrimination and equality in the artworlds – including for instance discriminatory laws on male guardianship that have an impact on womens’ ability to work as artists, display their work or participate in artistic events and performances. Finally, the author wonders whether de facto equality is ever possible in the artworlds, discussing the application of affirmative action and the so-called special measures in the artworlds.

Since the 1970s, the rise of identity politics has had a crucial impact on debates about the relationship between education and diversity. A new focus was placed on cultural and linguistic differences, as both sources of discrimination in the school environment and indispensable components of multicultural curricula (Vavrus 2015). In normative terms, this perspective contributed to popularising two major policy initiatives: intercultural (bilingual) education (IBE) and race-focused affirmative action (AA) measures. I term these initiatives, which, in different ways, have sought to account for ethno-cultural diversity in education, the ‘identity policies in education’. More than three decades after these initiatives were launched, IBE and AA remain popular policies for ethno-cultural management in education across the world. I include these policies under the ‘means of recognition’ category, as their main effect rests on the crystallisation of ethnic categories in education norms and implementation, while their impact on redistribution is indirect and less substantial compared to other explicitly distributive recognition policies (e.g. agrarian reforms).

This chapter provides an assessment of the shifting terrain of 1960s-era political radicalism through an analysis of Sam Greenlee’s novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969/1973). It argues that the novel employs and challenges recognizable Civil Rights and Black Power discourses of social change to destabilize institutionalized racism and socio-economic discrimination and to begin to imagine untested paths to resistance. The chapter also considers how Greenlee uses espionage to reconfigure familiar political ideals and modes of leadership and to explore how the imagined integration of the CIA becomes a device for critiquing employment discrimination and the state’s half-hearted deployment of affirmative action. It closes by showing how spy training and spycraft offer Greenlee opportunities to rethink the connections among gender, sexuality, and revolution, while additionally illustrating how heterosexual masculinity dominates the space of the revolutionary. Through the frame of espionage, Greenlee reimagines Black identity and activism.

This chapter examines Uruguay’s radical shift from an almost complete denial of its Afro-Uruguayan population to official state recognition. While Uruguay follows a larger Latin American movement for multiculturalism that began in the late twentieth century, Uruguay is unique in the specific path it took to overcome the invisibility of its black population, a change critically tied to the military government’s treatment of Afro-Uruguayans from 1973–1985. This chapter argues that the push for legal visibility occurred as a result of the twin pressures of Afro-Uruguayan mobilization in the aftermath of the dictatorship, combined with a larger global shift towards support for state-sponsored ethnoracial recognition. Using interviews and sources from Uruguayan and international archives, it locates the importance of official recognition in the context of building a powerful civil rights movement that has had tangible policy outcomes, such as inclusion in the census and an affirmative action law.

Argued December 4, 2006.Decided June 28, 2007.

Justice Charles LAWRENCE delivered the opinion of the Court.1

Plaintiffs Parents Involved in Community Schools (“Plaintiffs”) brought suit against Seattle School District No. 1 (“Defendant”); challenging an assignment plan that relied in part on racial “tiebreakers” to assign slots in oversubscribed high schools. In a separate action, McFarland v. Jefferson County Public Schools, parent and student plaintiffs challenged a school district’s race-conscious student assignment plan. In the Seattle case, the District Court granted the school district summary judgment, finding, inter alia, that its plan survived strict scrutiny on the federal constitutional claim because it was narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest. The Ninth Circuit affirmed. In the Jefferson County case, the District Court found that the school district had asserted a compelling interest in maintaining racially diverse schools, and that its plan was, in all relevant respects, narrowly tailored to serve that interest. The Sixth Circuit affirmed.

Argued October 12, 1977.Decided June 28, 1978.

Mr. Justice HARRIS announced the judgment of the Court.1

This case presents a challenge by the Respondent, Allan Bakke, to the Task Force Program of the Petitioner, the Medical School of the University of California at Davis (Davis). The Task Force Program was designed to open the admissions process to students of color who throughout its history the Medical School had largely excluded. The Superior Court of California, California’s trial court, sustained Bakke’s challenge, holding that Davis’ program had violated the California Constitution, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d et seq., and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It enjoined Davis from considering Bakke’s race or the race of any other applicant.