No Clue, by Jonathan Stubbs and Oliver Hill, is an ambitious, comprehensive, yet compact book that demonstrates clearly the huge economic, social, and educational advantages white people have created for themselves through the law throughout American history. As the authors show, these advantages continue into the present, despite some small progress in small areas. From the colonies to the Constitution to the present, American law has been written almost entirely by white men mostly for their own benefit. Slave codes legalized the forced, unpaid labor of enslaved persons, and violence against them if they sought escape into freedom. Law facilitated the theft of native lands and their redistribution to white people. Racist administration of New Deal-era law resulted in much of today's racial wealth gap. The authors make excellent use of legal history to demonstrate these and many more examples of legal preferences for whites that have built the racial disparities that we observe today. Despite all the evidence, most white Americans have no clue about how law and power have been used to create their well-being at the expense of others.

For these reasons, the authors have written this excellent book. We need this book to correct the record and to provide an evidentiary basis for why affirmative action is as necessary today as it has ever been. The authors write with hope and optimism that the story they tell will help others understand the need for remedial action in response to white racism.