Richard Kahlenberg, who’s been campaigning for class-based affirmative action for years, has an article on InsideHigherEd yesterday arguing, quite persuasively, that
nothing could carry more potent symbolic value with Reagan Democrats than for Obama to end the Democratic Party’s 40 years of support for racial preferences and to argue, instead, for preferences — in college admissions and elsewhere — based on economic status….
… to catch the attention of working-class whites, he needs to do something striking, which further distances himself from the Rev. Wrights of the world, who view life through the lens of race, and also signals to working-class whites that he understands that they deserve a helping hand too. Switching the basis of affirmative action policies from race to class would do just that.
Kahlenberg’s right. Of course it would. It’s such an obvious good move for Obama that he may well do it. But will he? Who knows? His hints — primarily saying to George Stephanopoulos once that his own daughters “probably” don’t deserve preferential treatment — so far have been guarded, tentative, opaque, and quite confusing, as no doubt they were intended to be.
It’s not as though Obama has said nothing about affirmative action — in fact, he’s been as close to it as he has been to Rev. Wright — and to reject race preferences now he’d have to reject just about everything he’s said in the past. Of course, since he’s now rejected Wright he could reject preferences as well. In fact, following his shock! shock! at learning, after all these years, what Wright really stands for, he could claim, with similar persuasiveness, that in all the years he supported affirmative action he never realized that in practice it amounted to actual racial preferences.
If anyone wants to follow a fairly detailed trail of what Obama has said about affirmative action, and what others have said about what he’s said, you can begin by looking here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Since I agree with the excellent points made in all those posts (I should, since I made them!), I’m sorely tempted to reprise them all here. But — you may issue a sigh of relief now — I’m not going to. The reason I’m not — other than my confidence that I don’t need to because you remember them all— is that the purpose of this post is to point you to Kahlenberg’s article, and Kahlenberg doesn’t argue that Obama will substitute economic preference for race preference, only that he should. (In that wish, although he might shudder at the thought, he agrees with Ward Connerly.)
Now, if you doubt my fear that Kahlenberg reads too much into Obama’s opaque utterances (utterances that I’ve called a “model of waffling obfuscation” on more than one occasion), that at best all Obama wants to do is substitute preferences for some poor whites for some rich blacks while leaving the massive structure of race preference intact, then you’ll need to repair to the above posts and study Obama’s quoted comments carefully.
If you do that, let me ask you to take the following quiz that I asked readers to take last November, some four months before The Speech but as relevant now as then, if not more so, after I quoted from Obama’s verbose but obfuscatory comments on affirmative action in an interview:
- Does Obama believe it is wrong to burden some and benefit others because of their race? Always? Usually? Sometimes? Never?
- Are “qualities such as leadership, motivation, teamwork, and ability to effectively communicate” found primarily among disadvantaged blacks? If race were not a factor, would placing more weight on those qualities increase or decrease the proportion of blacks who are admitted to selective colleges?
- How can affirmative action programs that treat race in a preferential manner be “properly structured” so that they give additional opportunities to blacks “without diminishing opportunities for white [or Asian] students”?
- What is the nature of the “diversity” provided by blacks and Latinos in math and science, and why is it important?
- How would “a scholarship program for minorities interested in getting advanced degrees in these fields … broaden the pool of talent that we need to prosper in the new economy” more than a scholarship program that was not racially restrictive? If such a program were racially restrictive, why would it not “keep white [and Asian] students out of such programs” who could not attend without a scholarship?
- Does Obama believe [as I’ve already asked, here and here] that all minority applicants who, like his daughters, “are pretty advantaged” should receive no preferential treatment?
- Would Obama award preferences to those “who are still struggling, … who are in the middle class [but] may be first-generation as opposed to fifth- or sixth-generation college attendees” only if they are “African-American kids,” or would he “take into account” those facts equally for all applicants, regardless of their race?
- In short, does Obama support or oppose preferences based on race? If he opposes them, why did he make ads opposing their abolition in Michigan?
I now repeat what I said back in November:
Done? Good. Now you’ll have to grade your own quizzes, since I don’t know the correct answers.
The fact that we still don’t know the answers to these questions (and many more, but I’ll refrain for now) is a sad commentary on the lack of probing analysis and questioning from the mainstream press.
