Invisible Men: race is no longer the unacknowledged dividing line in America. Class is.

• Author: Kahlenberg, Richard D.
• Position: Z - Book review

The Trouble With Diversity By Walter Benn Michaels $23, Metropolitan Books

For more than a decade, I've been appearing at forums on affirmative action and playing a strange role. Panels typically include a proponent of affirmative action, an opponent of affirmative action, and then there is me--a supporter of affirmative action based on class rather than race. In these discussions I ask my fellow liberals, Why is it "progressive" to support a college admissions program that favors the son of a wealthy black doctor over the child of a poor white waitress? Why not give a leg up to the children of poor black secretaries, poor Hispanic gardeners, and poor white waitresses, and let the doctors' kids make it in on merit?

At first I appear to be making some headway with the audience, arguing that hidden beneath racial issues are deeper issues of class inequality. Then I'm stopped cold. Invariably, someone from the audience gets up and accuses me of trying to change the subject and avoid the issue of race. "No one in America wants to talk about race," the individual say. Heads in the audience will nod in unison. The idea that America runs from race is part of the catechism. Suddenly I become the sellout, the guy who won't face up to the reality of race in America.

Now, along comes Walter Benn Michaels, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, to argue that the catechism has it exactly wrong. In his slender new book, The Trouble With Diversity, Michaels writes, "Although no remark is more common in American public life than the observation that we don't like to talk about race, no remark ... is more false." He explains, "[I]n fact, we love to talk about race. And, in the university, not only do we talk about it; we write books and articles about it, we teach and take classes about it, and we arrange our admissions policies in order to take it into account." We don't use class as a proxy for race, Michaels says; we use race as a proxy for class. Indeed, we talk incessantly about race in part, he argues, to avoid talking about class.

Affirmative action in college admissions is a perfect example of what Michaels is talking about. A 2004 Century Foundation study by the researchers Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose found that racial affirmative action at 146 of the nation's most selective colleges and universities ensured that three times as many African American and Latino students got in than would have based on grades and test scores alone. By contrast, while virtually every university will tell you that they also give a preference to low-income students who overcome obstacles, Carnevale and Rose found that economically disadvantaged applicants receive no boost in admissions. Former Princeton President William Bowen's study of selective institutions came to the same conclusion. Most (though not all) of those universities that pursue class-based affirmative action do so because they are banned from using race...