Undermining Racial Justice

Matthew Johnson is Associate Professor of History at Washington & Jefferson College. Follow him on X @matthist83.

• Introduction: Preserving Inequality1. Bones and Sinews2. The Origins of Affirmative Action3. The Rise of the Black Campus Movement4. Controlling Inclusion5. Affirmative Action for Whom?6. Sustaining Racial Retrenchment7. The Michigan Mandate8. Gratz v. BollingerEpilogue: The University as Victim

If I were asked to identify a single book published in 2020 that profoundly changed the way I look at higher education, it would be Matthew Johnson's Undermining Racial Justice.(Inside Higher Ed) In his groundbreaking book, Undermining Racial Justice, Matthew Johnson does an excellent job examining how, over the last sixty years, 'campus leaders embraced racial inclusion only so far as it could coexist with [their] long-standing values and priorities.' As Johnson writes, we must understand the policies and the people who created them if we are to ever understand that 'inequality is a choice' and that we can 'demand choices that lead to equality.' We must remain vigilant, and Undermining Racial Justice will help us fight back.(History of Education Quarterly) Matthew Johnson's Undermining Racial Justice: How One University Embraced Inclusion and Inequality provides a critical account of how the University of Michigan, long heralded as an exemplar of campus diversity policy, made racial inclusion compatible with inequality, largely through co-optation of the demands of student activists over decades. Though Johnson examines the implementation of race-access policy at the Michigan over a fifty-year period, his insights are fruitful for a contemporary landscape rife with threats to affirmative action, critique of diversity rhetoric, and proposed reform. Johnson's text greatly contributes to scholarship on affirmative action in higher education, the bureaucracy of diversity, and more broadly policy making and social movement demobilization.(The Journal of African American History)