Image by Jon Tyson.

In a recent opinion articleLydia Polgreen said if Kamala Harris is labeled a DEI candidate, then JD Vance must be too. She backs this up with research from a Tufts scholar who says elite schools, like Yale, where Mr. Vance earned his law degree, give extra attention and resources to poor white students to help them succeed. In other words, affirmative action does apply to those who suffer from class deficits. There is no doubt that colleges and universities support poor students. But, of course, they must first survive the entrance exam. And once at the institution, white students cannot obtain DEI-protected status, according to a University of California, Irvine administrator. It does not protect students who suffer harm from exclusion and who do not fit into any racial category. The “equity” component does not include the category of class, despite claims to the contrary in the popular press.

But that should at a time when more and more wealth is concentrated at the top and at the expense of the working class – where inequality continues to widen. Skin color trumps social class for people from already protected racial and ethnic groups. But accounting for class in affirmative action guidelines will provide even stronger protection for people of color who are also class deprived.

A recent Harvard University study studied the relationship between race and class. It targeted fifty-seven million subjects from generations X and Y (Millennial), those born in the late 1970s and those born in the early 1990s, comparing low-income black and white populations. In the white population, it was found, the millennial group suffered a decline in income compared to the generation X group. However, in the black population, these results were reversed. For the entire low-income population, whites experienced an income decline of $2,050, and blacks experienced an income increase of $1,420 during this generation. In one generation, the income gap between blacks and whites has narrowed. Of course, these figures are not really striking. But whites outperformed blacks economically for generations before the period covered by this study. And these results preceded the peak of “wokeness” that occurred in 2020 following the killing of George Floyd, the top-down cultural revolution that grew in step with the Biden administration’s tenure.

The conclusion: “Between two generations, Americans’ ability to access the middle class has changed. Race now plays a lesser role in upward mobility, while economic class plays a larger role.

But it is also true, according to German Lopez and Ashley Wuwho assessed the study, that “people’s lives are not guided by immutable facts like class and race.” In other words, success also depends on the quality of the community in which the individual grows up, the status of the family, the availability of work, social networks, the effectiveness of the school system, the presence beautiful parks, absence of crime. , etc. The more there are in a community, the more positive feelings there will be about the chances of success. And destinies are linked: success breeds success. These have always benefited the white population disproportionately. But that too is changing. The study found that the presence of these factors among low-income blacks contributed to their success, while their relative absence among low-income whites inhibited theirs. The greater incidence of these factors in black communities was the result of pockets of improvement in social, economic, and daily life over the past twenty years. Progressive legislative progress and ongoing civil rights activism generated enough changes that prevented these improvements from being clawed back (as SCOTUS attempted to do in the mid-1990s with affirmative action).

The results by region are revealing. For blacks, improvement was relatively consistent across the country, although the Southeast performed better. For whites, the millennial overthrow has occurred primarily in rural America, from the Midwest to the mountain states.

This was particularly evident in regions that have seen a loss of jobs to China, India and elsewhere due to technology and globalization. It began in the 1970s and was responsible for the deindustrialization of much of the country’s heartland, where manufacturing companies once paid high union wages. This destroyed the cultural and financial livelihoods of these communities, with negative consequences still evident today. This is well known. But the impact on black and white employment, Lopez and Wu say, is a surprise. Whites were excluded from the job market while blacks found other jobs.

They offer the following explanations for this disparity:

“White workers could have had more wealth or savings to cope with unemployment than their black counterparts, but at the expense of their social advancement. They may also have been less willing to find another job. A steel mill that closed could have employed not just a worker, but his father and grandfather, making it a family business. People in this situation may feel like they have lost something more than a job and may not settle for another job. Places where black workers live have generally been less affected by job flight than places where white workers live. And compared to previous generations, today’s Black workers are less likely to face racial bias in the workforce, making it easier for them to find work. While a white worker may have a generational connection to a job in a steel mill, a black worker often does not, because segregation kept their parents and grandparents apart. These trends add up to decades of lost economic progress for low-income whites, and vice versa for Black Americans.

This only affects low-income black and white populations. As the study highlights, the real problem we face is worsening global inequality.

(this increased under the Biden administration). He refers to this evil in relation to the white population, but this enlargement is also present in the black population. The structural workings of neoliberal, monetarist capitalism that oppresses such a formidable portion of American society continue to expand the capital of the 1% exponentially, regardless of the color of their skin.

The question going forward is whether this systemic force can be controlled so that this enlargement begins to reverse while gains can be made across all low-income populations. And rethinking affirmative action to account for class in a way that preserves the strength of race will help accelerate this progress.