Image by Jon Tyson.

In a recent op-edLydia Polgreen said that if Kamala Harris is labeled as a DEI candidate, then so must be JD Vance. She backs this up with research from a Tufts University researcher who says elite schools like Yale, where Mr. Vance graduated from law school, give extra attention and resources to poor white students to help them succeed. In other words, Affirmative Action effectively applies 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 competitive process for admission. And once in the institution, white students cannot obtain DEI protection status, according to an administrator at the University of California, Irvine. It does not protect students who suffer harm from exclusion and who do not fit into one of the racial categories. The “equity” component does not include the category of class, despite claims to the contrary in the popular press.

But this should in these times when more and more wealth is concentrated at the top and at the expense of the working class—when the inequality gap continues to widen. Skin color is ranked for those in racial and ethnic groups that are already protected. But including class in affirmative action guidelines will provide even stronger protections for people of color who are also disadvantaged by class.

A recent Harvard University study investigated the relationship between race and class. It looked at fifty-seven million subjects from the Gen X and Gen Y (Millennial) generations, those born in the late 1970s and those born in the early 1990s, comparing black and white low-income populations. In the white population, it found, the Gen Y group experienced a decline in income relative to the Gen X group. In the black population, however, these results were reversed. For the total low-income population, whites experienced a $2,050 drop in income and blacks accrued a $1,420 increase in income over this generational period. Over a generation, the black-white racial income gap has narrowed. Of course, these are not very striking numbers. But whites outperformed blacks economically for generations before the period covered by this study. And these results preceded the rise of the “awakening” that took place in 2020 in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, the top-down cultural revolution that blossomed in lockstep with the Biden administration’s mandate.

The bottom line: “In the space of two generations, Americans’ ability to break into the middle class has changed. Race has come to play a smaller role in upward mobility, while economic class plays a larger role.”

But it is also true, appropriate 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, on the status of the family, on the availability of work, on social networks, on the efficiency of the school system, on the presence of beautiful parks, on the absence of crime. , etc. The more of these there are in a community, the more positive feelings there will be about the chance of success. And destinies intertwine: success begets success. These have always disproportionately benefited the white population. But that too is changing. The study found that the presence of these factors for low-income blacks contributed to their success, while their relative absence for low-income whites inhibited theirs. The higher incidence of these factors in black communities has been the result of pockets of improvement in social, economic, and daily life over the past twenty years. Progressive legislative gains and continued civil rights activism generated enough change to prevent these improvements from being rolled back (as SCOTUS attempted to do in the mid-1990s with Affirmative Action).

The results for the region were revealing. For blacks, the improvement was relatively steady across the country, although the Southeast performed better. For whites, the Gen Y reversal occurred mostly in rural America, in the Midwest through the mountain states.

This has been especially evident in areas that have experienced job loss in China, India and elsewhere due to technology and globalization. This began in the 1970s and was responsible for the deindustrialization of a significant part of the heartland where manufacturing companies once paid high union wages. This destroyed the cultural and financial means of these communities, the negative consequences still evident today. This is well known. But the impact on black and white employment, according to Lopez and Wu, is a surprise. Whites were excluded from the labor force, while blacks found other jobs.

They propose the following explanations for this disparity:

“White workers may have had more wealth or savings to deal with unemployment than their black counterparts, but at a cost to their upward mobility. They may also have been less willing to find another job. A steel mill that closed down could have employed not just one worker, but his father and grandfather, making it a family occupation. People in this situation may feel that they have lost something more than a job and may not settle for any other 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, black workers today are less likely to face racial bias in the workforce, making it easier for them to find work. While a white worker might have a generational connection to a steel mill job, a black worker often did not because segregation kept parents and grandparents away. These trends add to decades of lost economic progress for low-income whites and the opposite for black Americans.

This only applies to low-income black and white populations. As the study shows, the real problem we face is widening inequality across the board

(which grew in the Biden administration). It refers to this disease in relation to the white population, but this extension is also present in the black population. The structural functions of neoliberal, monetarist capitalism, which oppresses such a formidable sample of American society, continue to exponentially expand the capital of the 1%, regardless of skin color.

The question going forward is whether this systemic force can be checked so that this widening can begin to reverse while gains can be made across all low-income populations. And redesigning Affirmative Action to account for class in a way that preserves the power of race will help spur that progress.