1/ “To get past racism, we must here take account of race.”
As the Supreme Court prepared to hear arguments in the Bakke case, McGeorge Bundy wrote an essay for our November 1977 issue defending affirmative-action policies: theatlantic.com
As the Supreme Court prepared to hear arguments in the Bakke case, McGeorge Bundy wrote an essay for our November 1977 issue defending affirmative-action policies: theatlantic.com
2/ The essay made its way to Justice Harry A. Blackmun as he crafted his opinion in Bakke, informing his very words:
“In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race,” Blackmun wrote:
theatlantic.com
“In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race,” Blackmun wrote:
theatlantic.com
3/ “There can be no blinking the enormous and unique set of handicaps which our whole history, right up to the present, has imposed on those who are not white,” Bundy, a former Harvard dean who served as national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, wrote in 1977.
4/ “It is not the fault of today’s laws or of the present Supreme Court that racism should be our most destructive inheritance. But that reality makes the effort to overcome it a matter of the most compelling interest.”
5/ Read the full essay, part of our newly digitized archives, here: theatlantic.com
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