Since September 11, 2001, the George W. Bush administration has unilaterally assumed the power to detain thousands of people, mostly immigrant men from Muslim or Middle Eastern countries, holding them indefinitely and incommunicado, denying them access to the courts, and interrogating them; and it has deported thousands more.¹ It has convinced Congress to pass hundreds of new laws that give the executive branch dramatically expanded powers.² In early 2003 the Justice Department’s draft “Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003” was leaked to the press.³ More commonly known as “PATRIOT II,” it proposed expanding the already impressive list of powers given...

On October 26, 2001, President George W. Bush signed the so-called USA PATRIOT Act—the title is actually an acronym standing for Uniting and Strengthening of America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism—thereby initiating what has been called “the most sweeping revocation of constitutional rights [and] civil liberties in the history of the United States.”¹ Usually referred to simply as “the Patriot Act,” the new law has been subjected to a range of substantive and often bitter critiques, most of them centering on the premise that, while it offers little by way of securing the...

In recent years there has been a proliferation of studies revolving around globalization, benevolent imperialism, empire, and U.S. hegemony. First, there is the ongoing debate over whether Pax Americana during the current wave of globalization constitutes hegemony or empire. Most of these studies compare and contrast the British and American experience with empire.¹ Patrick Karl O’Brien and Armand Clesse, for example, expend most of their efforts in trying to clarify the relationship between empire, imperialism old and new, and globalization. These studies are concerned with the uniqueness of Pax Americana in comparison with the trajectory of the British efforts at...

Latinos, or Hispanics, are persons of Latin American origin. Despite varying national origins, they are widely seen as a singular group and have been much in the news of late.¹ Due largely to record-breaking immigration, Latinos have recently surpassed African Americans in sheer numbers, even though they trailed the latter group by over 20 million persons some three and a half decades ago.² Hence, Latinos have become the nation’s largest minority, a widely heralded “achievement.”

Drawing on a vast array of literature and U.S. Census Bureau data, this chapter explores one major contributor to this dramatic growth and examines several...

In spring 2006, several million residents took to the street demonstrating solidarity with immigrants and calling for humane immigration reforms in the United States. Dozens of U.S. cities had never witnessed such an outpouring of popular participation in such large numbers until the immigrant marches of that spring.¹ On May Day, the day of the nationwide boycott, one landscaping business in Indiana reported that 90 percent of its workforce (twenty-five workers) did not show up for work.² Rural Homestead, Florida, a town of fewer than 50,000 people, saw more than 1,200 people marching through its historic district. The world’s largest...

In 2002, at a forum on globalization at the City College of San Francisco I presented a paper coauthored with Steven Shulman on the economic impact of immigration on African Americans. Shulman, an economist at Colorado State University who has written extensively on immigration and ethnic inequality, and I came together because of our shared concern that illegal immigration–especially from Mexico–was having deleterious effects on the well-being of low-income African Americans and that African American leaders had been derelict in their responsibilities to address the problem (Shulman and Smith 2005). To our surprise, fellow panelists (Latino and Anglo)...

Transcending and moving beyond the various, at times complex political and legal definitions of affirmative action that surfaced between the 1935 National Labor Act and the political and social reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, how can we more holistically understand and contextualize affirmative action in the new millennium? How can the “core black studies” discipline, history, inform our interpretations of affirmative action? How can we better understand the deeper implications—historical, contemporary, and future—of the 2003 Supreme Court decisions about affirmative action at the University of Michigan? Using Ira Katznelson’s WhenAffirmative Action Was White: An Untold History...

A white woman changes her hiring practices to engage in “affirmative recruitment,” and so she works hard to recruit as many people of color as possible for open positions in her organization (Harris and Schaupp 2004, 159). White members of a church join a march of solidarity in response to a drive-by shooting of a black teen (Hodges 2006). A white friend of mine observes a situation in a store in which a person of color is ignored by the salesperson, and my friend utilizes his racial status to make sure that this person is treated right. By themselves these...

The 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides the moral norms and indices of achievement for the indivisible and inalienable rights due to all individuals. Affirmative action constitutes a set of policies and programs that specifically seek to promote the unrealized rights and freedoms of racialized and ethnic minorities in all member states of the United Nations. This essay proposes a research and policy agenda that focuses on the instrumental linkages between affirmative action in higher education and the promotion of universal human rights in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC).

The construction of a Latin American and...

In my bookRace, Racism, and Reparations, philosophical arguments were adduced in favor of reparations to American Indians and blacks, grounding such policies in a genealogical analysis of ethnic identity in order to properly identify those who ought to receive reparations.¹ That genealogical conception of ethnicity has important normative and ethical implications for public policy administration in general, and reparations and affirmative action programs in particular. For present purposes, the argument herein assumes that reparations and affirmative action are in principle morally justified primarily on the basis of backward-looking reasons. The main focus, however, is on affirmative action.

It will...