Race Matters: Class-Based Affirmative Action Won't Heal

Late last year, in a speech on economic mobility, President Obama dismissed the idea that income inequality was an “exclusively minority concern.” “The opportunity gap,” he said, is “now as much about class as it is about race,” adding that “we have to reject a politics that suggests any effort to address it in a meaningful way somehow pits the interests of a deserving middle class against those of an undeserving poor in search of handouts.”