Affirmative action—a set of policies and practices that aim to promote the inclusion of racial and ethnic minorities, women, and members of other historically disadvantaged groups in education and employment—is one of the more curious policy developments in American political history. It evolved in apparent defiance of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which seemed to prohibit group-based remedies for discrimination, and it has never had the deep reserve of support among the American public that is generally a prerequisite for important and salient policymaking. Despite pointed opposition and a recent spate of prominent political defeats, it has burrowed its way into American institutional life; corporations, private universities, and many governments remain committed to its goals and have internalized its practices. Above all, affirmative action challenges the fundamental assumption of colorblindness that lies at the heart of American liberalism because it depends precisely on attention to group consciousness as a way of overcoming group inequality. In his opinion in the landmark affirmative action case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), Justice Harry Blackmun gave this paradox its starkest expression: “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.”

This quotation furnishes Daniel Sabbagh with an epigraph for his excellent book, which is animated by Blackmun's paradox. Sabbagh, first of all, painstakingly and penetratingly excavates the philosophical and legal rationale that underlies the use of race-conscious strategies for achieving racial equality. This rationale, he shows, has evolved from one that emphasized compensatory justice for historical exclusions toward an embrace of “diversity” in workplaces, universities, and other regulated settings as a policy goal. The historical pivot in this development was Bakke, the case in which the Supreme Court ruled that universities could take race into account in making admissions decisions in order to ensure a diverse student body but not as a vehicle for rectifying past injustices (and without using strict numerical quotas). Bakke was a complicated decision, with multiple opinions and rather byzantine ramifications, and Sabbagh's account of the complex alignments, arguments, and consequences of this case is the best I know of.

But Sabbagh's account of the shift in justification is not just historical but also philosophical. He closely examines the reasoning behind these two positions side by side and suggests that neither provides quite satisfactory grounds for race-conscious policies. The compensatory approach effectively penalizes people who are not themselves to blame for contemporary patterns of inequality, even if they benefit from them, while the diversity argument risks diluting the effects of affirmative action by widening the focus from race discrimination to other forms of group difference. Building on his deconstruction of these approaches, Sabbagh derives an alternative justification for affirmative action. Following the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, he proposes a sophisticated and largely persuasive claim for affirmative action as an ironically race-conscious means of “deracializing” the American political economy with the goal of eliminating the pernicious correlation between racial identity and class status or life chances.

Sabbagh advances this argument both as a philosophical claim and as a hypothesis about affirmative action practices in the United States—that the deracialization paradigm depends on a certain amount of strategic ambiguity in public discussion of affirmative action. Affirmative action, he argues, seeks to deploy race-conscious means to achieve colorblind ends, but public skepticism of race consciousness and the universalistic norms of American liberalism and legal argumentation suggest that too much attention drawn to race-conscious practices would threaten affirmative action's legitimacy. Consequently, we should expect to observe “dissimulation strategies” on the part of affirmative actions supporters—attempts to conceal how the policy actually operates—and Sabbagh carefully traces productive ambiguities in antidiscrimination jurisprudence from the 1970s to the 1990s. Thus, he shows the turn from the relatively transparent world of compensatory affirmative action to the murkier world of “diversity” and multiculturalism becomes not just a legal or philosophical transformation, but above all, a strategic and political one.

This strategic perspective on affirmative action is at once the book's greatest strength and the source of its few weaknesses. Very few works have considered affirmative action—and American race politics and policy more generally—as an explicitly political problem (as opposed to a philosophical or legal one), and Sabbagh's analysis very usefully connects the fundamental substantive dilemmas of race in the United States to the political processes of policymaking in the American state. Sabbagh focuses on the courts, which have been the arena of much affirmative-action politics, but the approach might fruitfully be extended to other policymaking institutions.

At the same time, Sabbagh might perhaps have bolstered his case by discussing the counterstrategies of affirmative action's opponents, who have generally tried to call attention precisely to the race-conscious nature of affirmative action. Several states, for example, have undermined affirmative action by banning the use of individual racial identification as an admissions criterion to public universities. Some states have attempted (unsuccessfully thus far) to prevent the government from collecting race data, which would make affirmative action as we know it impossible. More generally, Sabbagh's rendering of affirmative action in these political terms suggests the need for a more fully worked out strategic perspective that considers the interactive and iterative nature of political strategy more fully.

Sabbagh's strategic emphasis also draws attention to another underdeveloped aspect of his analysis. An analysis that understands affirmative action as a form of political strategy needs to offer more political and institutional context than Sabbagh provides. The unlikely convergence on affirmative action as an antidiscrimination strategy in the late 1960s and 1970s depended not only on American ambivalence about race consciousness and colorblindness or the rhetorical conventions of American jurisprudence but also on distinctive features of American political institutions—the separation of powers, for example, which engendered a legislative compromise that stripped the state of clear administrative power to enforce antidiscrimination law and pushed the civil rights community toward alternative strategies. In the original French-language version of this book (L'égalité par le droit, 2003), Sabbagh develops the historical-institutional setting of affirmative action politics more extensively, and his analysis in Equality and Transparency would be enriched by a fuller account of the political context of affirmative action.

But these limitations do not ultimately detract from the book's importance as both a case study of an important area of public policy and an analytically innovative account of the politics of race in the United States.