The Richmond Times Dispatch had an editorial on Friday, “Race Again,” that both displayed and discussed class. The edit notes that by deciding to review racial school assignments the Supremes have given themselves an opportunity to “do the country a favor by clearly distinguishing between affirmative action and diversity.”
Affirmative-action programs aim to redress past discrimination, and may do so only through narrowly tailored means — chiefly because they grant special advantages to a particular class of individuals. Diversity programs seek simply to achieve a mixture of backgrounds in a school, agency, or company. From time to time institutions whose affirmative-action policies have been struck down for being too broadly constructed have sought to justify discriminatory policies on the grounds of diversity. The cases the court has accepted crystallize a distinction between the two.
The edit goes on to argue that
racial preferences are particularly pernicious because, as the Educational Testing Service has determined, the most under-represented group of Americans at the nation’s top colleges and universities is not blacks or Hispanics, but students from low-income families. In other words, the blacks and Hispanics admitted to the best schools generally come from middle-class families — fatally undermining the affirmative-action rationale. Racial preferences in college admissions are giving a leg up to minority students who need no special treatment while doing nothing for the underclass minorities who might still be suffering the lingering effects of racial discrimination.
My only complaint about the edit (and it is not a strong one) is its conclusion, which strikes me as a bit pollyannaish:
Programs honestly aimed at achieving diversity — rather than merely using diversity as a fig leaf for racial preferences or even quotas do not work to any one group’s advantage or disadvantage. They still operate on certain suspect assumptions of racial essentialism (i.e., an individual is inescapably defined by his racial background), but schools also make similar assumptions about geographic or economic background. Most important, genuine diversity programs do not give special privileges to one class of persons solely because of race. Perhaps that distinction will enable the court’s current members to get the issue — finally — right.
This is generally fine, except that I’m not aware of many programs that are “genuine diversity programs” by this definition or that in fact “honestly aim[] at achieving diversity.”
