This book seeks to develop and analyze in detail a key paradox of affirmative action in higher education, employment, and government contracting. This paradox is that the two chief justifications for affirmative action - compensation for past discrimination and achievement of diversity - each raise difficult problems from the point of view of a coherent, neutral, and universalistic legal determination. In addition, a third possible justification, that of achieving a society that is truly colour-blind or without consciousness of race, cannot be achieved by race-based affirmative action policies. As a result of this paradox, it is necessary that the justification of affirmative action policies is not transparent. The process must conceal the way in which it is actually carried out, using means that perhaps violate our common ideas of law based on neutral and universalistic standards, as well as our common commitment to merit-based selection processes

Can affirmative action policies be convincingly justified? And how have they been legitimized over time? In a pluridisciplinary perspective at the intersection of political theory and the sociology of law, Daniel Sabbagh criticizes the two prevailing justifications put forward in favor of affirmative action: the corrective justice argument and the diversity argument.He defends the policy instead as an instrument designed to bring about the deracialization of American society. In this respect, however, affirmative action requires a measure of dissimulation in order to succeed.Equality and Transparency explains why this is so and provides a new interpretation of the strategic component in the Supreme Court's case law while identifying some of its most remarkable side effects.