Affirmative Action

President Bill Clinton is a Southerner. That fact alone may explain why, given the opportunity to rethink the logic and effect of affirmative action, he failed. In his July speech at the National Archives before a largely black audience, the president floated old platitudes. Several weeks earlier, I was talking to a roomful of black teenagers, most of them street kids or kids from the projects. Only one of them in a room of thirteen had ever heard of anything called affirmative action.