James Meadows

Pronouns: he/him/his

Email: jcmeadows@wisc.edu

Address:
Advisor: Patrick Iber

James Meadows headshot

Biography

My dissertation project follows from a simple question: when did affirmative action begin in the United States? Origin stories abound within a voluminous and multi-disciplinary academic literature. That said, by the end of the 20th century, a rough scholarly consensus emerged around the idea that policies that granted preferential race- and gender-based access to institutions conferring social and economic advantage found their footing sometime during the 1960s. According to this consensus, modern affirmative action policy was the result of federal interventions designed to “level the playing field” first, for African Americans and then for other “discrete minorities” who had endured invidious racial discrimination.

Layered within this consensus view is the proposition—advanced primarily by sociologists—that affirmative action policies either affirmed the principles of the civil rights movement’s early 1960s “golden age” or repudiated the perceived excesses of an increasingly radical, late 1960s Black Freedom Movement. Either way, this 1960s origin story is foundational to the now-dominant view that affirmative action is and always has been, anti-American. Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with the policy, the 1960s origin story supports the commonly held understanding that affirmative action was born an unpopular policy prescription that transgressed quintessentially American meritocratic values.
My project offers an altogether different affirmative action origin story, one that begins during the immediate post-World War II era. By revising the affirmative action origin story in this way, I contribute to a small but growing body of scholarship that not only relocates the story chronologically but also positions it within an older social order governed by different meritocratic norms. In my project, I reveal the underexplored but important role played by American colleges and universities in affirmative action’s alternative origin.

Education

M.A. University of Wisconsin Educational Policy Studies
M.A. Naropa University
A.B. University of Chicago

Field

  • U.S./North American History

Working Dissertation Title

  • A Genealogy of Silence: Courts, Colleges and a History of Reverse Racism