Race-based diversity favored by the rich over class-based diversity?

[dumpster_baby]

>>>>>>>>>>

...

We are often reminded of how white our classrooms would look if we did away with affirmative action. But imagine what Harvard would look like if instead we replaced race-based affirmative action with a strong dose of class-based affirmative action. Ninety percent of the undergraduates come from families earning more than $42,000 a year (the median household income in the U.S.) -- and some 77 percent come from families with incomes of more than $80,000, although only about 20 percent of American households have incomes that high. If the income distribution at Harvard were made to look like the income distribution of the United States, some 57 percent of the displaced students would be rich, and most of them would be white. It's no wonder that many rich white kids and their parents seem to like diversity. Race-based affirmative action, from this standpoint, is a kind of collective bribe rich people pay themselves for ignoring economic inequality. The fact (and it is a fact) that it doesn't help to be white to get into Harvard replaces the much more fundamental fact that it does help to be rich and that it's virtually essential not to be poor.

....

In the end, we like policies like affirmative action not so much because they solve the problem of racism but because they tell us that racism is the problem we need to solve. And the reason we like the problem of racism is that solving it just requires us to give up our prejudices, whereas solving the problem of economic inequality might require something more -- it might require us to give up our money. It's not surprising that universities of the upper middle class should want their students to feel comfortable. What is surprising is that diversity should have become the hallmark of liberalism.

This, if you're on the right, is the gratifying thing about campus radicalism. When student and faculty activists struggle for cultural diversity, they are in large part battling over what skin color the rich kids should have. Diversity, like gout, is a rich people's problem. And it is also a rich people's solution. For as long as we're committed to thinking of difference as something that should be respected, we don't have to worry about it as something that should be eliminated. As long as we think that our best universities are fair if they are appropriately diverse, we don't have to worry that most people can't go to them, while others get to do so because they've had the good luck to be born into relatively wealthy families. In other words, as long as the left continues to worry about diversity, the right won't have to worry about inequality.
/////////////////////
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/magazine/11ESSAY.html?ex=1397016000&en=3bef5db5e7b21145&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND

[bigbillhaywood]

1. Yes! Great post. You hit the nail on the head. Keep em coming!

Not only that, but racism has economic roots as well. As long as the current economic system is allowed to thrive, so will racism. Affirmative action merely puts a small percentage minorities in the ruling class, whereby they become a part of the problem of racial oppression caused by class inequites.

[leftyandproud]

2. please explain...

How does racism come from "class inequities"? I really don't think if we elminated the wealth gap tomorrow AM, racism would disappear. If anything, it would get worse, because this would necessarily involve taking from the "haves" (white people), and giving to the have nots, including many blacks and other minorities. This would aggravate existing racial tensions and piss off a bunch of non racists in the process.

[papau]

4. racism is not about wealth - it is about "not in my tribe" - and exists

in places where there are no "whites".

The Greeks knew that "class inequities" if they grew out of hand made a mess of society - and that is what is happening in the US.

[papau]

3. Excellent post

:-)

[dumpster_baby]

5. a "no war but the class war" kick