Affirmative Action in American Culture

The civil rights movement was about much more than an abstract legal freedom, formal equality, or voting rights. It was, as Nancy MacLean shows in this sweeping national survey, also about access to good jobs. As many activists understood from the beginning, civil rights were hollow without economic justice, and it took the social movements of the 1950s through the 1970s to dismantle what MacLean calls a "culture of exclusion," which relegated men of subordinated ethnic groups and women of all groups to the worst paying and least esteemed jobs (p. 13). The black freedom movement led the way, providing the women's and Chicano movements new models of organizing and new legal tools for people determined to get jobs offering good wages and dignity. A conservative movement vigorously resisted these efforts, and one of the greatest strengths of Freedom Is Not Enough is MacLean's sustained analysis of conservative tactics alongside her analysis of progressive social movement dynamics. She shifts our attention from recent studies of working-class racism by showing that racism was also an intellectual position, elaborated and strenuously upheld by conservative elites. This book—based on primary research in well over a hundred manuscript collections across the country and synthesizing a vast amount of secondary literature—is a vital contribution to the emerging field of late-twentieth-century history. Readable and engaging, moving effortlessly between biographies of ordinary people and analyses of movement dynamics, it offers much to the student of politics, social movements, African American history, Chicano/a history, women's history, and conservatism.

MacLean's book operates on two levels. On one level are the efforts of African Americans, women of all ethnicities, and Chicanos/as to get better jobs and the efforts of conservatives to restrict their access to these jobs. These conflicts took place at workplaces, in unions, in the courts, in legislatures, and at demonstrations; they were propelled by social movements and given shape by legislation and judicial rulings. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, excluded groups managed to win many of these battles, but structural economic problems and political obstacles from the 1970s through the 1990s slowed the rate of progress and enabled conservatives to gain the upper hand. Disadvantaged groups are economically better off now than they were in the 1960s, but not to the degree they would have hoped; race, sex, and nationality continue to shape, if no longer as fully determine, one's economic prospects.

If economic and social change has stalled, MacLean finds that cultural transformation has persisted, and on the second level of her book we find these broader cultural changes: changes in values, changes in assessments of who deserves what in American society—and of what it is acceptable to express. MacLean argues that the culture of exclusion, in which white men held the good jobs, has been transformed by social movements, individual workers, and their supporters into one of inclusion, in which it now makes sense to most Americans that jobs are not the exclusive property of certain groups of people. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the right wing appropriated the language of fairness and delegitimized affirmative action. The result has been a nominal commitment to "diversity," stripped of commitment to economic justice. Yet even this right-wing success is tempered by the fact that there is no return to the period before the civil rights movement. The genie, as MacLean puts it, cannot be put back in the bottle.

The structure of the book embodies MacLean's central argument that the African American civil rights movement lay at the heart of this transformation and influenced the dynamics of other social movements. Part I, "African Americans Shake the Old Order," describes the culture of exclusion, the explosion of civil rights activism in the mid-1950s that culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, the conservative opposition, and the changes for black workers once...