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13 May 2008 08:50 am

It Would Help In Kentucky

Richard Kahlenberg, for the umpteenth time, suggests Obama back class-based affirmative action:

Class-based affirmative action reconciles both points of view. It avoids the explicit use of race that working-class whites resent, moving us beyond the “racial stalemate” Obama described. But a carefully conceived economic affirmative action program would also try to capture the full legacy of discrimination of which Obama spoke. It would be colorblind but not blind to history.

Discrimination has economic manifestations, and college admissions officers could give a leg up to smart students who overcome various obstacles which disproportionately affect African Americans: growing up in a low-income household, one headed by a single-parent, a family lacking in accumulated wealth, and residing in neighborhoods with concentrated of poverty, and attending low quality schools. Under such a program, low-income and working-class kids of all races would benefit — people like the young Barack Obama or John Edwards — but not students like Barack Obama’s own children.

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