Through an informative professional literature review, Faye Crosby intends to educate affirmative action critics and a skeptical public about the real-life operation of and continuing need for a largely misunderstood social policy. Her book's key question is “why does the policy of affirmative action which appears reasonable to many social scientists attract so much negative comment?” (p. 22). Despite confusion with illegal quotas and with the Supreme Court's newly minted diversity justification, Crosby is convinced that social science studies prove that properly implemented affirmative action is largely beneficial and still necessary to overcome overt or subtle in-group prejudice, discrimination, and exclusion.

According to the author, “classical affirmative action” in employment and then in higher education was largely passive and nonthreatening. It simply involved organizational self-monitoring of race and gender statistics mandated for federal contractors and voluntarily enacted by other institutions. Federal enforcement was lax and sanctions infrequent. Why, then, do critics and the public see affirmative action as generating injustice, reverse discrimination, quotas, waste, and corruption?

Crosby argues that Americans have simplistic and idealistic views of equity and justice. This obscures taken-for-granted organizational procedures that appear to treat everyone equally but do not—especially minorities and women. She wishes that the public would turn its skepticism of affirmative action toward the testing industry. She discusses numerous studies demonstrating the hidden biases and unfairness in the employment and education tests, as well as attempts to revise and supplement such restrictive concepts and measures of merit. (Outreach and “extra efforts” in this regard, she properly notes, generate little dissent.)

In her chapter on “Semantics Versus Substance,” Crosby examines evidence indicating that the public does not know much about how affirmative action really works and that it readily assumes that the programs entail gross preferences and illegal quotas. She also examines data on the role of self-interest, personal experience, and different worldviews in shaping perception and understanding of affirmative action.

Another factor giving affirmative action a bad image is the presumption that costs vastly outweigh benefits. Much empirical research points to the contrary. Federal contractors required to have affirmative action programs generally increased the percentage of women and minorities at a greater rate than did noncontractors. After initial start-up efforts, compliance expert Jonathan Leonard estimates that costs are equivalent to providing employees with an annual holiday turkey. Reverse discrimination lawsuits and complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) are exceedingly rare. Economists Harry Holzer and David Neumark find no negative impact of affirmative action upon organizational performance. And experimental psychology studies using student subjects, as well as more limited research in the workplace, suggest that, by and large, the “medicine does not kill the patient” by producing stigma or self-blame among women and minority beneficiaries.

Insofar as professionals or the public think affirmative action is passé because racism and sexism have waned, Crosby reviews studies showing continued discrimination against women in pay and occupational sex segregation, as well as underlying sexism toward affirmative action. Likewise, the overwhelming extent of ethnic disparities in occupations, education, health, and other areas, though often the result of a combination of factors, still indicates endemic overt or covert racism. Indeed, Crosby cites Samuel Gaetner's findings that subtle “aversive racism” can affect thinking even of those allegedly devoted to egalitarian principles.

In her concluding chapter, the author finally confronts affirmative action's chief nemesis: Changing demographics have hopelessly muddled the black–white race relations focus of the 1960s that gave rise to affirmative action. She briefly ponders the illogical inclusion of some immigrant groups in affirmative action (most Hispanics) but not others (most Asians and Middle Eastern groups). She wishes to preserve affirmative action by a “pragmatic adjustment” to these new realities. She fails to see that, in both theory and practice, affirmative action already has been absorbed and supplanted by a new “managing diversity” policy apparatus attuned to twenty-first-century demographics. The new rationales incorporate much of her affirmative action defenses (that racism/sexism continue and that equal treatment is not, necessarily, fair treatment) but positively recast ethnic and cultural diversity as an institutional asset, rather than as a negative, regulatory remedial burden.

Crosby's tilt towards psychological research leaves analytical gaps regarding law and organizational realities. The most glaring flaw is her failure to mention—much less discuss—the twin mechanisms that converted affirmative action into proportional formulae, that is, “quotas.” The first was the “goals and timetables” feature of standard affirmative action plans, metrics designed to correct “underutilization” of women and an expanding list of minority groups. The second factor was the “disparate impact” legal doctrine that placed the burden of proving nondiscrimination on personnel selection procedures. Failure to hire percentages of women and minorities as reflected in applicant pools could seriously damage an organization in court or in regulatory proceedings. Fears of being found “guilty by the numbers” led to widespread quota-style solutions through use of secret (now illegal) “race-norming” of test scores, contracting set-asides, and “targets of opportunity” positions reserved for minorities—a practice hardly unknown in universities. Thus, the public's presumption that affirmative action entails quotas is quite understandable.

Crosby and other affirmative action researchers are up against two formidable obstacles: methodological and ideological. She pointedly tries to present “balanced” views and not misrepresent data. She elicited criticisms of drafts from students and one well-known policy foe. But the best intentions and social science methodologies collide with the research-resistant, multiple realities of a controversial top-down policy revolution. Moral posturing, public relations sensitivities, official duplicity, and legal shell games wrought by shifting political winds and constitutional currents make affirmative action assessments difficult, if not impossible. Informal rules enhance or subvert official law and policy. Rhetoric and reality are hard to differentiate, much less quantify. (For example, Crosby and other researchers are unaware that EEOC data on reverse discrimination complaints is all but useless because of agency rules shielding employers with valid affirmative action plans.)

And then there is the political minefield. Crosby recognizes that until legal challenges in the 1990s, there was a dearth of journalistic and social science investigations on these 40-year-old policies. But she does not ask why. Nowhere does she acknowledge that criticism of affirmative action in thought, word, or research risks the label of “racist” and professional oblivion. To her credit, she is careful about inferring racism or sexism on the part of critics and the skeptical public. But needless “adjective” advocacy occurs throughout the text. The few policy critics are almost always labeled as “conservative”—a pejorative in many academic circles. Proponents or studies with positive findings are not politically identified but are too often heralded as “towering above the rest” (John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 1971), as an “eminent jurist” (Derek Bell), as “a critically acclaimed, monumental study” (Derek Bok and William Bowen's The Shape of the River, 1998), or as “rigorous quantitative studies” (Patricia Gurin's diversity research). Indeed, Crosby ignores equally “rigorous” published critiques of both The Shape of the River and Gurin's studies.

Crosby achieves a core goal of providing a current bibliography, and she clearly discusses complex issues on a difficult topic. Although the chapters sometimes veer into “filing cabinet social science” (serial summaries of other people's studies), Affirmative Action Is Dead provides a scholarly platform for further debate and research of understudied—though still treacherous—policy terrain.