The first people to bring it to public attention, more than fifteen years ago, were two of the nation’s most prominent black intellectuals, Lani Guinier and Henry Louis Gates Jr. At a reunion of black alumni of Harvard in the fall of 2003, Gates and Guinier pointed out that most of the alumni in the room were first- or second-generation immigrants from the Caribbean or Africa or the children of mixed-race couples. And that same racial breakdown, they said, was evident at Harvard as a whole. As the New York Times reported the following June, Gates and Guinier said that “only about a third” of
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