Word: racial
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Last week, the Boston School Committee voted to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court a recent federal court decision striking down racial preferences in admissions to the Boston Latin School, the city's most prestigious public high school. If the high court decides to hear the case, it would be the first appeal involving affirmative action in the realm of public schools. A broad ruling could have widespread national repercussions, setting a precedent for any race-conscious policy in any school district...
While we are in favor of using racial preferences as one factor in school admissions, the Boston Latin standard--which admits 50 percent of its class solely on grades and test scores and the other 50 percent on race, grades and test scores--is too narrow. Though the system admirably attempts to create a diverse class, it excessively compromises standards of fairness which the Boston lower courts have repeatedly recognized...
...although this issue includes an article on an influential black entrepreneur, no people of color make our Top 20. Through most of this century, American business has been dominated by men, white men, despite more than 25 years of modern feminism and some ambitious corporate efforts to achieve racial equality. The next century will certainly be different, although I don't see meaningful change coming soon enough. Yes, our sister publication FORTUNE recently assembled a credible list of the 50 most powerful women in business. But only two women head companies included in FORTUNE's annual list of America...
...creation of some idealized past but a living glimpse of the ticky-tacky future. The social critic Lewis Mumford called it "a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible." Levittown was also tainted at birth by the offhand racism of midcentury America. Though Levittown is racially mixed today, for years Levitt's sales contracts barred resale to African Americans. He once offered to build a separate development for blacks but refused to integrate his white Levitt developments. "We can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem," he once said...
Walker's grooming products, she insisted, did not "straighten" hair--even then, a politically controversial process--but she also sold a "hot comb," which did in fact straighten kinky hair, consciously tapping into a racial aesthetic that favored Caucasian features over "African" physical characteristics. Such celebrities as Nat King Cole, Sugar Ray Robinson and Michael Jackson would become cases in point. Walker's products, aided by before-and-after ads that rivaled anything Madison Avenue would invent, made their way into virtually every black home...