(Watch) WM Podcast Ep. 15: Can "Economic Affirmative Action" Replace DEI?
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(Watch) WM Podcast Ep. 15: Can "Economic Affirmative Action" Replace DEI? (w/ Richard Kahlenberg)
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On this episode of the Washington Monthly Podcast, Anne Kim and Paul Glastris talk with Richard Kahlenberg, constitutional lawyer and leading advocate for class-based affirmative action. Kahlenberg, who testified against Harvard University in the Supreme Court case that ended racial preferences, discusses how progressives can refocus on economic opportunity while still achieving racial diversity.
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Below is a transcript of their conversation lightly edited for clarity:
Anne Kim: Welcome, Rick, it’s great to have you here.
Richard Kahlenberg: Great to be here, Anne, Paul.
A.K.: So, Rick, people call you a liberal maverick. You are a progressive who opposes race-based affirmative action, and you actually testified against Harvard University in the Supreme Court case that brought down racial preferences in college admissions. For decades now, you’ve been the nation’s leading proponent of affirmative action based on class. For people unfamiliar with this concept, can you explain what this means and how it works in college admissions?
R.K.: College admissions is where this works best. The idea is that if you’re seeking a true meritocracy, you’d want to consider disadvantages that a student had overcome. A college might consider the neighborhood a student grew up in, whether it was a poor or rich neighborhood, the family environment, if their parents went to college, and how much income they had. Those factors can, in my view, provide fairness in the process and also provide significant racial diversity, which I think is important too.
A.K.: And why do you argue that this might be a better approach than race? Are there negatives to this approach as well? Do you get the same outcomes as you would with race-based preference?
R.K.: Let me start with the positives. As a matter of fairness, people understand that providing a leg up to economically disadvantaged students reflects today’s reality. Race matters in American society, but class matters a lot more. When Barack Obama was asked if his Black children who are privileged should get a preference, his answer was, I think, the only answer he could have provided: No. Working-class people of all races deserve a leg up. As a basic matter of fairness, that’s important.
As a matter of legal practicality, race-based affirmative action is now illegal. If one desires racial diversity, as I do, on college campuses, this is the prime avenue to take.
The third issue is political. As a progressive, it’s hard to think of a policy that would more effectively divide the coalition of working-class people than to say we’re going to provide a leg up not to economically disadvantaged people generally, but based on race – and to the most privileged Black and Hispanic students. Politically, it’s disastrous.
If you go back to the history of affirmative action, that’s why Dr. Martin Luther King advocated a bill of rights for the disadvantaged rather than a bill of rights for Black people. He saw that the coalition he was trying to build would be severed by affirmative action based on race. And he said, as a matter of simple justice, we ought to include poor whites in the equation.
Paul Glastris: Rick, you’ve been at this a long time. Your new book is kind of an intellectual biography of your long march from being a rare progressive opponent of race-based affirmative action to actually working with conservatives to overturn it. It started when you yourself went to Harvard, and you’ve focused a big chunk of your career on this idea of a fairer way to guide admissions at select universities. Why was that such an important crusade to you?
R.K.: I’ve been thinking about this issue for a long time. It really started in college when I was at Harvard. I looked around and saw racial diversity, which I appreciated and benefited from, but very little economic diversity – mostly wealthy students of all colors.
As a matter of politics, I was there in the early eighties when Ronald Reagan was riding high. I wrote my thesis on Bobby Kennedy and his ability to bring together working-class people of all races around a common economic agenda. He did very well with Black and Hispanic voters who appreciated his strong commitment to civil rights and economic equality. He also did enormously well with working-class whites, some of whom had even voted for George Wallace previously.
I wanted to understand what he did. Part of it was this message that with the passage of civil rights laws, the big issue was now going to be economic challenges that Black and Hispanic people disproportionately face.
I tried to work with Democrats on this issue. I was excited when Bill Clinton in the ’90s said affirmative action ought to be based on economic disadvantage rather than race. He floated that idea but interest groups shot it down. Jesse Jackson threatened to run for president, and that was that.
I was excited when Barack Obama said his own daughters didn’t deserve a preference and that working-class people do. I tried to work with the administration, offering to help implement it. The answer was that due to pressure from interest groups, they couldn’t do it. The message was that the courts would have to make them do it. That’s how I ultimately ended up in this strange alliance with Edward Blum and conservatives.
P.G.: Edward Blum, just so listeners know, was the gentleman who was the driving force behind that lawsuit.
R.K.: Yes, and he was also a driving force behind gutting the Voting Rights Act, which I completely disagreed with. We were odd bedfellows, but I believed the way to get to class-based affirmative action was to take away the ability to use race. Then universities would use class to achieve racial diversity.
A.K.: I want to get back to the question of outcomes and how well class-based affirmative action compares to racial preferences in college admissions. The most famous example of a race-neutral policy is the Top Ten Percent plan that the University of Texas system employs. For listeners, that’s the idea that you automatically admit the top 10% of every high school in a particular state into the flagship campus. What are the outcomes of those plans regarding racial diversity and economic diversity? Are there downsides to the 10% plan versus the more traditional system we can no longer use?
R.K.: When I started examining that question, I thought there would be substantial downsides. I worried if you were taking students just based on grades, completely ignoring SATs and ACTs, would the students do well? It turned out they did do well at the University of Texas at Austin. They also produced marginally higher levels of Black and Hispanic representation than using race in the past, and they produced a lot more socioeconomic diversity.
There were low-income students from white, Black, and Hispanic neighborhoods who for the first time had access to UT Austin, because they’d been basically shut out until the Top Ten Percent plan. Surprisingly to me, it worked very well to produce racial diversity, economic diversity, and maintain strong academic caliber among the students.
A.K.: There is one thing I want to ask about the Top Ten Percent plan. It seems that the plan is dependent upon economic segregation to work. You’re not going to get that economic diversity unless you have very poor schools and very rich schools, and then draw 10% from each. But if you have economically integrated schools, then lower-income kids are maybe less likely to get a spot because wealthier kids might dominate that top 10%. Is that a real problem? And don’t we want economically integrated high schools too?
R.K.: Absolutely. I wrote a book on that topic called “All Together Now,” arguing that we should have economically mixed and racially integrated schools. We don’t, in fact, and I find it an elegant solution to say we’ve got racial and economic segregation in these schools – that’s terrible, but it’s reality. Let’s try to make something good of it and actually diversify selective colleges as a result.
I’m not holding my breath for American high schools to integrate so effectively that the Top Ten Percent plan no longer works. But even in those cases, I’ve always argued that we ought to look at economic disadvantage within a high school. If there were economically and racially integrated schools across Texas, I would still favor giving a break to economically disadvantaged students of all races within those high schools.
P.G.: Rick, it is now the law of the land that race-based affirmative action in admissions is illegal, with very narrow exceptions, such as students mentioning race in an essay to show they’ve overcome adversity. The military can use race, at least so far, through prep schools. So it’s now over, and as you said, affirmative action primarily affects just a handful of elite schools. I think you would argue—and you do in your book—this is a gift to liberals and Democrats. Tell us why.
R.K.: The support for racial preferences has always been enormously unpopular with the public. Pew Research found that almost three-quarters of Americans, including a majority of Black people, when asked, “Should race be a factor in college admissions?” answer no.
This was an albatross that Democrats had to address, because their base—or at least interest groups in Washington—strongly support racial preferences. Shifting the debate to whether we should have economic affirmative action puts Democrats on much firmer ground. Democrats can now argue that we ought to expand opportunity for working-class people of all races. That’s their bread and butter.
If you look at programs like Obamacare, which had a rocky start but ultimately became very popular, they’re class-based programs. They don’t say wealthy Black people get a subsidy—they say working-class people, low-income people of all races do. That’s where Democrats are strongest, when they can make that economic argument.
P.G.: But do you worry that if Democrats embrace your position—which the Supreme Court has not said is wrong, in fact they’ve sort of embraced it—that Republicans will immediately take the opposite side and say, “That’s bad too”?
R.K.: Well, they’re already beginning to. The Trump administration came out with a “Dear Colleague” letter to universities saying that if part of your purpose in adopting a race-neutral program is to boost racial diversity, that itself is illegal. That’s not a position the Supreme Court has embraced. It’s an extreme position, and most Americans won’t go along with it.
The absurd example is: if a university got rid of legacy preferences—the preferences for mostly wealthy children of alumni—and part of the reason was because they wanted to boost racial diversity, then under that analysis, that would be illegal. You’d have to keep the legacy preferences in place.
This is wonderful ground on which Democrats can argue. Seventy-five percent of Americans oppose legacy preferences. Most Americans want to give a break to economically disadvantaged students. If Republicans want to oppose even class-based programs, I would say to Democrats: bring it on. That’s a debate we can win.
A.K.: Rick, you’re a constitutional lawyer. I want to continue on this vein a bit, because there’s quite a lot in Project 2025—that conservative blueprint that Trump disavowed during the campaign but is now implementing—about challenging disparate impact as the basis for showing discrimination. That’s the idea that a seemingly race-neutral policy can still be discriminatory if it disproportionately affects certain groups.
How do you defend economic integration if it has the impact of disproportionately benefiting racial minorities—because that’s the reality of who is economically disadvantaged? What’s the defense for these policies despite what the administration wants to do?
R.K.: That argument has been advanced by conservatives, and twice the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to take cases where they could have developed that theory and argued that programs like class-based affirmative action or a Top Ten Percent plan are illegal. I don’t think the Supreme Court will go down that road. It would be highly ironic if they did.
It would be an enormous bait and switch, because for years, the most conservative justices have said racial preferences are bad, but of course you can give a break to economically disadvantaged students of all races. In the Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Justice Gorsuch wrote a concurring opinion citing the research that Professor Arcidiacono from Duke and I did, which said if Harvard got rid of legacy preferences and gave a meaningful boost to economically disadvantaged students of all races, they could achieve racial diversity. That doesn’t sound like Gorsuch is opposed to economic affirmative action.
P.G.: Well, Rick, you may have more faith in the logical consistency of our current Supreme Court than I do. I wonder how long this will last. Sign me up for your entire agenda. We’ve been publishing your work in the magazine for about 20 years, and you’re, in our opinion, a righteous fighter for good. But I think there’s maybe more danger here.
You and I have been working the same street, but on different sides of the sidewalk. Your focus has been how to make admissions at elite universities fairer. My focus is how we can ignore elite universities more—because who cares? Nine out of ten, nineteen out of twenty students don’t go to selective colleges. It’s the non-selective colleges that actually provide opportunity for low-income people.
Elite colleges could triple their Pell Grant students, and it would barely register in the vast scheme of upward mobility. Whereas if you focus on improving funding and outcomes of the schools that actually educate low-income and minority students, you could have much more impact.
I worry that the focus on elite education will play into the hands of the right. They’ll use class-based integrative ideas like yours—like mine—and portray it to their base as a liberal plot to destroy America. Whereas if we just ignore these selective universities and fight for more funding to the schools doing the heavy lifting of providing opportunity, I don’t see how conservatives can fight that—other than “We don’t like spending money.”
R.K.: I agree in part and disagree in part. I’ve actually spent a fair amount of time on community colleges as well. I’m with you that we need better funding. I headed two task forces on that question. There is powerful research suggesting that money matters, particularly in the community college sector, with huge payoff for investing more resources in those schools. I completely agree.
I do want to keep fighting on the elite college front, because our leadership class disproportionately comes from these schools. About 50% of government leaders and 50% of private sector leaders come from just 12 institutions. I know you’re not arguing this, Paul, but there’s kind of a neo-Plessy v. Ferguson argument that we’ll accept separate and try to make everything else equal. I don’t think that ultimately will work.
I’m agreeing—yes, let’s invest a lot more in the schools that educate the vast majority of low-income students and students of color, absolutely. And at the same time, let’s make sure those elite institutions that provide so much of the leadership class are also integrated by race and class.
P.G.: I hear you, and that’s a reasonable response. I would just say that elite universities didn’t always produce so many of the leadership class. Corporate CEOs 30 years ago all went to state colleges. Today, they’re all Ivy Leaguers. We’ve allowed the elite to have their way for a long time. The more we focus on those guys, the less we focus on the good guys. But I understand your position.
R.K.: Hopefully we can do both. I definitely agree that focusing on a tiny number of institutions and calling it a day is not a recipe for success.
A.K.: You’ve been writing recently about the political advantages of your approach to economic integration. You wrote an op-ed for The Liberal Patriot with Ruy Teixeira. You also have a new report for the Progressive Policy Institute that suggests a new framing for Democrats and progressives to embrace. You call for “integration, equal opportunity, and belonging.”
I want to quote something you wrote: the current focus on diversity highlights differences between people of different groups. The idea of integration returns to the civil rights movement’s original notion that educational institutions should be open to students of all backgrounds, focused more on what Americans have in common.
Where do you draw the line between integration and assimilation? I ask from a personal perspective as the child of immigrants who grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. The pressure to integrate really meant trying to erase a lot of who I was. As an adult, I regret having to erase part of my identity to feel truly integrated into my neighborhood, school, and state. How would you frame what you’re trying to say in a way that doesn’t strike people like me as more about assimilation than integration?
R.K.: You raise an important point. I’m certainly not advocating for people to erase their identities and focus only on their American identity. People can have multiple identities. There’s a wonderful op-ed from a few years ago by Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, where he said being Black is important to him, being gay is important to him, being from Texas is important to him. But the most important thing is that he’s American.
That’s what I’m seeking—a balance where we preserve racial and ethnic identities that bring enormous meaning to people and at the same time talk about commonality. What you see in many DEI trainings is an emphasis on race essentialism—that there are white values and Black values. That gets away from what Barack Obama talked about, what Martin Luther King talked about, which is that people should celebrate their individual ethnic identity and also see what they have in common as Americans.
The project I’m working on at the Progressive Policy Institute is called the American Identity Project. It comes from Al Shanker, the leader of the American Federation of Teachers, whom I wrote a biography about. His point was, in part, if we want to preserve public schools in this country, which have always been an important potential source for social mobility, you have to teach what’s in common as Americans. That is their fundamental purpose: to teach the civic creed that binds us together.
If we only emphasize diversity and difference, we’ll continue down the road of identitarianism. And it feeds white identity, which is terrifying. People need to feel attached to something bigger than themselves. If we take away American identity and patriotism, I fear many people will follow Trump’s path of white identity politics.
P.G.: I fear that’s already out of the bag and a reality that will mess with our politics going forward. The focus on affirmative action at colleges—even though it’s small in the scheme of things—was a burr under the saddle of the American public and a way for white identitarians, white nationalists, to cohere and create that juggernaut. I really fear for our country because I don’t know how you rein that back in. But I hope your hopefulness is right.
R.K.: We’ve got no choice going forward. We have to offer American identity and patriotism if Democrats want to be viable. David Leonhardt makes the point that most social progress in this country—the civil rights movement, the labor movement, other groups—has always attached itself to patriotism and American values. That’s the secret to success: if we all feel like we’re in it together, then good things can happen.
Ceding patriotism to the right is disastrous. A recent Progressive Policy Institute poll of working-class voters found that Donald Trump—the guy behind January 6th—was seen as more patriotic by a 19 percentage point margin. Kamala Harris did a great job at the convention talking about patriotism and what we have in common as Americans, but it didn’t resonate, in part because the policies weren’t reflective of that view. That’s what I’m pushing for—and remain optimistic.
A.K.: Before we leave you, can you tell everyone where we can find your new book?
R.K.: Yes. It’s published by PublicAffairs Books and you can find it in bookstores. I’m going to be doing an event at Politics and Prose in April if anyone wants to come by. It’s also available online.
A.K.: Well, thank you very much. Our guest has been Rick Kahlenberg. Wonderful to see you, Rick, and hope to see you again.
P.G.: Thanks, Rick.
R.K.: Thanks so much, Anne and Paul. This has been a real pleasure. Appreciate it.
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