Class, Not Race, Is the Issue

By Shlomo Maital  

   Is class discrimination, rather than race, the core problem in our society?  Is there a class ceiling, not just a glass ceiling?

   Richard Kahlenberg, non-resident scholar at Georgetown University, makes the case, specifically on Megna Chakrabarti’s On Point NPR show. He was an expert witness for the plaintiffs in affirmative action cases heard before the Supreme Court  and 2023 and made the case against it, even though he is a liberal!  Why?   Because affirmative action largely led to upper-class Black students being admitted.  Feel-good policy, not effective.  

    His latest book is:  “Excluded: How Snob Zoning, Nimbyism and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See.”

      Consider this.  “Studies by the Urban Institute and the US Treasury have both found that about half of the families who start in either the top or the bottom quintile of the income distribution are still there after a decade, and that only 3 to 6% rise from bottom to top or fall from top to bottom.“

    The American dream?  Rags to riches?  Horatio Alger?    Repeat:  3-6% rise from bottom to top, or fall from top to bottom. One in 30, to one in 16.  Poor odds.  So much for class mobility.

     There is widespread racial discrimination in the US, still.  But it does not appear that affirmative action significantly improved the lot of middle- and lower-income-class Black people.  Far more effective would be a kind of affirmative action to invest proportionately more on schools in poor areas – and Kahlenburg notes, some counties do this.  And, Kahlenburg notes, what about de facto segregation, when rich areas ban multi-family dwellings and keep out lower income people.