Ask the Scholars

It's certainly one idea to use class. The advantages are that it preempts a couple of the major criticisms of affirmative action policy as it now stands. If you make it a class-based system, it becomes less obviously coded with race and therefore less stigmatizing. It also might ensure that these policies get to the people who need it the most; i.e., poor minorities. But if class is interpreted in traditional ways (using parental income or education level), you're going to perpetuate the...

The complicating thing about this is that race and class are intermixed in a way that they can't actually be separated. Race in a way gets used to qualify class. As the documentary shows very well, the post-war circumstances that created a suburban middle class was also implicitly racial: it was predominantly white at the expense of blacks. Because we focus on its racial effect, we forget that post-war housing programs were class-based policies aimed at increasing opportunities for socia...

I think also that affluent racial minorities face an enormous amount of discrimination in their educational and professional lives: they're passed over for promotions, they get different treatment from educators, their contributions are often not given equal weight. While I agree that there's a lot to be said for an affirmative action agenda that is partially class derived, affluence and status alone don't necessarily make a person of color's experience a smoother one, even in the middle...

You know, attacks on affirmative action that play the "class card" are really quite ironic. People who have been at the forefront of crafting affirmative action policies have in fact often pursued race and class policies. For example, the affirmative action program at UC Davis medical school which was stricken by the Supreme Court in the historic 1978 Bakke case was a race and class program. Through a series of conservative legal decisions and political maneuvering, these race/class form...