In 1974, when the Supreme Court heard DeFunis v. Odegaard, a challenge to the University of Washington Law School's affirmative-action program, Pauli Murray unburdened herself in letters to Justices William O. Douglas and Thurgood Marshall. A veteran of the civil rights and feminist movements, Murray believed strongly in proactive measures to remedy discrimination. But she confessed profound discomfort with the use of race and sex classifications in affirmative-action programs. She wrote to Marshall, “The moral question, it seems to me, is how do we facilitate the overcoming of past discrimination … without violating the rights of the individual person[?]”. To Douglas, she expressed gratitude: his lengthy dissent from the Court's dismissal for mootness reflected the same ambivalence – even anguish – that Murray felt.

Murray does not appear in DeSlippe's history of anti-affirmative-action efforts in the 1970s, but his study helps to explain her otherwise puzzling position. DeSlippe's deeply researched account complicates our understanding of a perennially controversial issue. He traces early opposition to affirmative action among three distinct groups: “labor unionists,” “colorblind liberals,” and “colorblind conservatives,” through a mostly chronological narrative punctuated by two case studies: one of the DeFunis case, and the other of white police officers' opposition to affirmative action in Detroit.

DeSlippe highlights an often forgotten breed of affirmative-action critic – the “loyal opposition” – a sometime coalition of otherwise liberal thinkers, politicians, and activists who supported “soft affirmative action” efforts to fight racial and economic inequality but recoiled at “hard affirmative action” (“quotas,” in the parlance of the day). Adherents to this view included, at various points, Bayard Rustin, Rep. Edith Green, and even Thurgood Marshall himself. Particularly prominent in DeSlippe's story are Jewish, mostly male, academics, politicians, and organizations whose misgivings about affirmative action stoked tensions within the civil rights coalition. Liberal labor unionists also found themselves torn, especially when feminists and civil rights advocates challenged seniority systems' “last hired, first fired” rule, the last bastion of job security in a contracting economy.

In the end, DeSlippe concludes, these reform-minded critics of affirmative action yielded influence to conservatives, whose clarity of message and political ascendance eventually eclipsed their more progressive predecessors. He identifies mid-1970s litigation as one point at which momentum shifted to “colorblind conservatives,” pushing liberal critics to seek redress through the political process. Unable to agree on the scope of permissible affirmative action, color-blind liberals ceded ground to opponents who did not share their commitment to the eradication of “structural barriers to equality.” By the time the Court decided Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the next major affirmative-action case, in 1978, conservatives’ “moral clarity” dominated the opposition. After Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, unleavened antipathy came to define anti-affirmative-action sentiment.

DeSlippe strikes a delicate balance, treating his subjects respectfully but not uncritically. He persuasively explains opposition to affirmative action as a mixture of “parochial” and “principled” views: many participants in the debate felt they unfairly bore the burden of historical injustices they had not committed and had been powerless to prevent. For some, legitimate grievance combined with racism and sexism in a virulent and even violent reaction. For others, classifying by race and sex epitomized an offensive identity politics that undermined the quest for universal progressive policies such as full employment, labor law reform, and “true nondiscrimination” laws.

DeSlippe's juxtaposition of affirmative-action protesters as disparate as industrial workers, medical-school applicants, Ivy League faculty, and law-enforcement officers allows us to see unexpected parallels. Both policemen and professors, for instance, reacted against affirmative action as part of a counterculture that scorned values they held dear. Both embraced meritocracy, only a recent and partial development in police departments and academia. At the same time, DeSlippe's analysis might benefit from a more careful parsing of various policies and contexts. “Higher education affirmative action,” for instance, includes both college admissions policies and faculty employment, different settings governed by different legal rules. To be fair, the blurry lines between these categories – and between “soft” and “hard” affirmative action, for that matter – likely reflect DeSlippe's sources. So too does DeSlippe's focus on race- as opposed to sex-based policies mirror affirmative-action discourse itself, though his brief but intriguing references to the role (or absence) of gender sometimes leave the reader wanting more. But it is difficult to think of a more timely historical topic: persistent ambivalence about affirmative action again collides with an economic downturn as an increasingly conservative Supreme Court considers landmark cases that may resolve some legal questions but are unlikely to end the almost half-century-old moral and political debate.