Randall Kennedy

That's what the black kids read.

The white kids read the newest textbooks.

on and on and on.

So reparative justice, we're gonna try to repair the scars left by past racial injustice.

And so it's sort of an effort to overcome the vestiges of past misdeeds.

That was one justification for affirmative action.

And frankly, I think that's the justification that has always been the predominant justification, whether people owned up to it or not.

But that's one justification.

The distributive justice justification is there.

Like I say, people...

we want an integrated America, we want an America that looks like America.

In that justification, legitimacy is sometimes mentioned.

So for instance, people will say things like, well,

you know, if we're going to, in the armed forces, you can't have an armed forces in which the, you know, the sort of the, the, the people on the ground are, you have a lot of people on the ground who are people of color, but none of the people calling the shots, none of the generals, none of the main, you know, colonels are people of color.

No.

And then, you know,

the people on the ground are not going to stand for that.

So for purposes of legitimation, we need to, for purposes of buy-in, we need to have a situation in which people get the sense that even if they're sort of low down, they're still part of the story.

They're part of the team.

So that's part of the sort of