If there is one lesson that centrist Democrats have taken from Donald Trump’s startlingly broad-based victory in November, it is that their party will never return to majority status unless it regains the trust of working-class Americans. Those voters — nonwhite as well as white — rejected the language of race and identity that they associate, fairly or not, with the Democrats. So it’s no surprise that the party has scrambled to develop a “credible working-class message” that will “win them back,” in the words of one super PAC that plans to invest $50 million in the effort.
Enter Richard D. Kahlenberg, who has been arguing for virtually his entire adult life that our race-based system of affirmative action pits the white working class against Black people, and aligns the Democratic Party with middle-class or well-to-do beneficiaries of color against Americans who see themselves as the losers in a zero-sum game. His ship finally came in two years ago when the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action violated the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. Kahlenberg’s new book, “Class Matters,” is his personal history of the debate, his victory lap and his spirited argument for a liberal politics of class rather than race.
That victory lap is hard to begrudge: Kahlenberg writes that he has been laboring in the vineyards since he wrote his senior thesis at Harvard in 1984 on Robert F. Kennedy’s attempt to forge a cross-racial working-class coalition in the 1968 presidential election. Kahlenberg found that Kennedy opposed even mild forms of racial preference in favor of economic programs that would benefit all working-class Americans. I was as surprised to learn this now as Kahlenberg was then, though as a biographer of Hubert Humphrey I know that the devastating loss in 1968 sent Humphrey on the same trajectory.
A politics in which elite liberals told ordinary white Americans that they had to make sacrifices — from which elites themselves were largely exempt — in order to compensate for historical injustices was an invitation to disaster.
Just before the 1992 election, Kahlenberg notes, the Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg concluded that the fraction of white voters who felt they had a “personal responsibility” for those injustices was “zero.” Greenberg described affirmative action as a “problem of historic proportions” — as mandatory school desegregation plans had been for an earlier generation of Democrats. Bill Clinton won the 1992 election in part by soft-pedaling race-specific policy solutions; but as president, Kahlenberg concludes, Clinton felt the need to reward civil rights groups by embracing affirmative action.
Unlike many conservatives, Kahlenberg accepts the immense salience of race in American life and thus the unfair disadvantages so many students of color face. But the ugly secret of affirmative action, the author argues, is that most Black beneficiaries are middle-class, while many of the white or Asian applicants left out in the cold are working-class students who have done well in school despite significant disadvantages of their own. Are they less deserving?
Kahlenberg has long argued that we need not choose between these two goods: If universities offered a boost to students who overcame socioeconomic disadvantage, they would admit enough working-class students of color to preserve racial diversity while enhancing class diversity.
He offers many examples of universities that have done just that. When Texas eliminated race-based affirmative action, the state instead adopted a system that admitted students who graduated in the top 10 percent of any public high school. The result was an influx of Black, Hispanic and white low-income and working-class students who had never before been able to attend one of the flagship universities.
So why did the universities keep fighting? Why didn’t they accept a little less racial diversity for a great deal more class diversity? Kahlenberg suggests that the impediments are more structural than ideological.
First, admitting more working-class applicants is very expensive. The economic burden would become greater still if, as Kahlenberg favors, universities stopped giving giant preferences to “legacies,” who are overwhelmingly wealthy (and white), and to the children of plutocrats — potentially a big hit to endowments. Second, economic diversity is not as visible as racial diversity is, and thus is harder to defend in public.
Finally, Kahlenberg argues, disdain for working-class people constitutes one of the few acceptable forms of bigotry in the elite precincts of the university. Administrators are perfectly comfortable with a campus that is racially but not economically diverse. Kahlenberg cites a study showing that low-income students are as severely underrepresented at elite law schools as Black students were before affirmative action.
“Class Matters” is organized around the Supreme Court cases that determined the fate of affirmative action. Kahlenberg traces the evolution from a straightforward claim of compensation — “they owe us,” as Justice Thurgood Marshall put it — to the vastly murkier territory of “diversity,” in which admissions officers were permitted to award a “plus factor” to students from underrepresented groups (which in practice were almost always racial rather than economic).
The opacity of the process led to all sorts of calculations never meant to withstand the glare of exposure, which they received, mercilessly, in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard, a case that targeted Kahlenberg’s beloved alma mater.
The data Harvard was forced to turn over revealed that the admissions department was keeping down the number of Asians by giving applicants lower grades in “integrity, helpfulness, courage” and other personality traits — just as they had, much more informally, with Jewish students several generations before. Athletes and legacies benefited from a giant thumb on the scale, Black students a smaller one and working-class applicants almost none at all.
“Legacy preferences,” Kahlenberg bitingly concludes, “shielded wealthy white applicants from having to sacrifice as part of Harvard’s effort to allocate seats for Black and Hispanic students through racial preferences.” The losers were Asians and working-class whites.
A historically conservative Supreme Court ruled for the plaintiffs. Kahlenberg, who served as an expert witness, was jubilant, but also uneasy about his allies — not only the Trump-appointed justices but the right-wing group that had brought the case. He concedes that some conservatives oppose the race-neutral remedies he proposed as mere proxies for race-conscious ones but feels reassured that none of the justices advanced that claim and that a strong majority let stand a race-neutral system in a subsequent case. But how long can that new equilibrium last under a new Trump administration? Our author may find himself thrown back with his old friends on the left if the only alternatives are racial preferences or none at all.
I do have to report that “Class Matters” is not, by and large, a fun read. The reader must not quail when encountering a passage about “19 nationally representative studies” on barriers to social mobility or about “Simulation 13” of hypothetical race-neutral models. Kahlenberg aims to instruct rather than delight. But if you want to read a serious, measured and fair-minded argument for one side of our all-too-bitter debate over race and class, this is the one for you.
The post Affirmative Action Is Gone. Can Class-Based Admissions Replace It? appeared first on New York Times.
