Chapter 1: From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action and Back Again: A Critical Race Discussion of Racialized Rationales and Access to Higher Education

school student’s remarks express her worry that the courts will eliminate the single policy in education that aims to account for race. Her comments refer to the University of Michigan’s race-conscious admission policy, challenged at the under-graduate and law school levels by White female candidates denied admission to the selective campus (see Gratz v. Bollinger, 2003; Grutter v. Bollinger, 2003). Taken together, these quotations reveal the “color-line problem ” that undergirds affirma-tive action debates in higher education. Indeed, U.S. schools continue to limit equal educational access and opportunity based on race (Kozol, 1991; Lewis, 2003). Students of color remain severely under-represented in historically White colleges and universities, and the few granted access to these institutions often suffer racial discrimination on and around campus