Critics of Affirmative Action

Overview

* This section of Discover The Networks features the writings of some of the more notable critics of affirmative action in contemporary America.

Additional Resources

Thomas Sowell

An economist and sociologist who has been a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution since 1980, Sowell has written extensively about affirmative action’s injustices and its tendency to breed intergroup animosity wherever it is implemented. Among his major publications are such books as: Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005); The Quest for Cosmic Justice (1999); The Vision of the Anointed (1995); Preferential Policies: An International Pespective (1990); A Conflict of Visions (1987); Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? (1984); and The Economics and Politics of Race (1983).

Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams has been on the faculty of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, as the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics, since 1980. He serves on the Boards of Directors for Grove City College, the Reason Foundation, and the Hoover Institution. He also serves on Advisory Boards for the Cato Institute, the Landmark Legal Foundation, the Institute of Economic Affairs, and the Heritage Foundation.

Shelby Steele

Shelby Steele is the Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He specializes in the study of race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action. He a member of the National Association of Scholars, the National Board of the American Academy for Liberal Education, the University Accreditation Association, and the National Board at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the New American Community. Among his notable publications are: The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (1990); A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America (1999); and White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era(2006).

Ward Connerly

A California Board of Regents member from 1993-2005, Connerly led the 1996 fight to pass Proposition 209, which ended affirmative action in California’s public sector. He is also the founder and chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute, a national non-profit organization that opposes racial and gender preferences.

Dinesh D’Souza

Dinesh D’Souza is currently the Robert and Karen Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. From 2010 to 2012, he was president of The King’s College, a Christian school in New York City. Among his more notable publications are: Illiberal Education (1991) and The End of Racism (1995).

Heather MacDonald

Heather MacDonald is a Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal. A non-practicing attorney, MacDonald has written prolifically on the topics of policing and racial profiling, immigration, homeland security, education, and welfare. She also has authored the following books: The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today’s (2007); Are Cops Racist? How the War Against the Police Harms Black Americans (2003); and The Burden of Bad Ideas (2000).

Larry Elder

Larry Elder was a broadcaster with KABC Talk Radio in Los Angeles from 1994-2008, and again from 2010-14, hosting the highly rated “Larry Elder Show” each weekday. He has authored such books as The Ten Things You Can’t Say In America; Showdown: Confronting Bias, Lies, and the Special Interests that Divide America; and Stupid Black Men: How to Play the Race Card — and Lose.

Stephan Thernstrom

Stephan Thernstrom is the Winthrop Professor of History at Harvard University, where he teaches American social history. He was the editor of the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, and the author of such books as Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City; Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970; and A History of the American People. He collaborated with his wife, Abigail Thernstrom, to write America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (1997), and No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (2003).

Abigail Thernstrom

Abigail Thernstrom was formerly a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York, a member of the Massachusetts state Board of Education, the Vice Chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and a Board of Advisors member of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. She is currently an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She collaborated with her husband, Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom, to write America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (1997), and No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (2003).

Linda Chavez

Linda Chavez is Chair of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a non-profit public policy research organization based in Sterling, Virginia. She held several appointed positions under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. She also writes a weekly syndicated column that appears in newspapers across the United States, and is a political analyst for the FOX News Channel.