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Liberal academic Richard Kahlenberg thinks the only way to truly solve America’s deep inequities is to look at class, not race.
“When we focus exclusively on race and ignore the class issues, we are missing a huge part of what makes society unfair in America today.”
Kahlenberg says class should be the driving factor in workforce development, higher education, K-12 schools to housing assistance.
Today, On Point: Richard Kahlenberg on how class bias “builds the walls we don’t see.”
Guests
Richard Kahlenberg, non-resident scholar at Georgetown University. Expert witness for the plaintiffs in affirmative action cases heard before the Supreme Court in 2016 and 2023. Author of many books, including “The Remedy: Class, Race, And Affirmative Action” and “Excluded: How Snob Zoning, Nimbyism and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See.”
Transcript
Part I
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots broke out in cities across the country. That night, Robert F. Kennedy spoke to a majority Black crowd in Indianapolis, Indiana. Kennedy stood on the back of a flatbed truck. He wore an overcoat that had belonged to his brother, the late President John F. Kennedy, who’d been assassinated five years earlier.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY: What we need in the United States is not division. What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be Black.
CHAKRABARTI: Robert Kennedy had entered the 1968 presidential race, barely a month earlier, in March of that year. The most potent theme of his campaign gelled in Indiana. Kennedy’s vision was of a cross-race coalition based on class as much as skin color. One that could unite around what Kennedy saw as the biggest injustice of the plight of the working class and the poor in America.
KENNEDY: I’ve been to the Delta area of Mississippi, and I’ve seen young children starve, not the possibility that they’re starving, but starving, just as I’ve seen them in Asia, and I’ve seen them in Africa. I’ve seen them with the distended stomachs, and I’ve seen them covered with the sores of starvation. And I’ve had talked to doctors who have gone down there and looked at them after we had our hearings.
Who said that they are destroyed for life because they didn’t have enough to eat through their third and fourth year, that they will never be mentally well again. And here we have this great produce here. We have a gross national product of 800 billions of dollars, and we have children starving to death in the United States.
CHAKRABARTI: This is from a campaign speech Kennedy gave at Indiana University on April 24, 1968. He connects the hunger of Black children in the Mississippi Delta to the hunger endured by the children of a disabled white coal miner in Kentucky.
KENNEDY: These are not men that never worked. These are not men that just sat around, but the man was disabled from a mining accident. 20 years. He got $80 a month. He had six children. They received milk once a month for those children and for the rest of the family. They, the day that I was there, they had bread and gravy for breakfast. They’re going to have beans for lunch, and they’d have bread and gravy for supper, if they had anything at all.
CHAKRABARTI: Kennedy was also clear about the sources of that class inequality. In that same speech, given at Indiana University, Kennedy told the students that they were the beneficiaries of a system that diminished the prospects of working-class Americans.
KENNEDY: The chance of going to a college or a university is much greater if you’re affluent or if you’re wealthy in the United States. So that, to begin, I’ll give the example of my own family. The fact is that I have seven sons and the fact is that I know that I could get any one of those sons into a college someplace in the United States.
But I know also that there is a father in Mississippi. Or that there’s a father in Harlem, or there’s a father in Bedford-Stuyvesant, or there’s a father in Watts who can’t do that. And whose son can’t go on to college or can’t go on to a university. So why should my children? Or my sons be treated any differently and why should theirs be sent to fight the war in Vietnam. (CHEERS)
CHAKRABARTI: This is On Point. I’m Meghna Chakrabarti. On May 7, 1968 — RFK won the Democratic primary in Indiana. According to a Harris poll, “Kennedy’s victory went a long way toward establishing his claim as perhaps the likeliest Democrat in 1968 who can deliver both the Black and the lower-income white urban vote.”
Historians now have a more complex and nuanced view of RFK’s 1968 campaign. And the difficult truth is – we will never know if that coalition could have won Kennedy the Democratic nomination, let alone the presidency. Because Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in California on June 6, 1968, forever freezing him in that moment of history, and in the minds of American progressives.
About 20 years later, in 1984/’85, a young Harvard undergrad named Richard Kahlenberg found inspiration in Kennedy’s run, and wrote his senior thesis on it. It was titled: “Coalition Building and Robert Kennedy’s 1968 Presidential Campaign.”
And since then, Kahlenberg has become one of the most influential champions of assistance policies based on class more than race. He’s written many books, including 1996’s “The Remedy: Class, Race, And Affirmative Action.” All the way to his latest book on class and housing called: “Excluded: How Snob Zoning, Nimbyism and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See.”
And he joins us today. Richard Kahlenberg, welcome to On Point.
RICHARD KAHLENBERG: Oh. Thanks so much for having me, Meghna.
CHAKRABARTI: I understand that to this day you still have a photograph or a portrait of Robert Kennedy hanging in your office, is that right?
KAHLENBERG: I do. He’s for all the reasons you just outlined. He’s an enormous inspiration to me and many others. He really was moving our country towards a moment of unity among people who were at each other’s throats.
Working class white and Black people were having strong disagreements over a variety of issues. And yet he, he brought those folks together. And I still hold on with some hope that the right politician with the right message can bring these groups together again.
In 1985, as I mentioned, you were a Harvard undergrad and I understand that your father had also gone to Harvard. So in a sense, you were a legacy student there. Your grandfather helped pay for your Harvard tuition. So what was it, though, specifically about Kennedy that so captivated a 20- or 21-year-old Richard Kahlenberg walking the Red Bricks in Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Massachusetts?
KAHLENBERG: I had been raised as a traditional upper middle class white liberal who cared a lot about racial injustice. I continue to care a lot about racial injustice, but as I got to Harvard, I saw that that even many of the Black and Hispanic students who were there came from upper middle-class backgrounds, and the white and Asian students, for the most part, were much wealthier.
And Harvard had done a good job of bringing children of different races together, which is an important thing to do. But effectively, Harvard had excluded working class people of all races from attending.
And I thought, “Wow. Robert Kennedy was really onto something here when he said that we in essence use race as a proxy for class in America, and use it in order to avoid some of these larger issues of class inequality that are, they’re frankly, more expensive to address than racial inequality.”
In the recent litigation came out that 71% of the Black and Hispanic students at Harvard came from the richest one fifth of the Black and Hispanic populations, nationally. And the white students and the Asian students are even wealthier. And yet, when we try to create racial diversity without class diversity, we’re missing something that’s enormously important.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay. So your argument then is that affirmative action in places like Harvard worked to make campuses more racially diverse, but they were bringing in, as you said, the highest income Black and Hispanic, white and Asian students.
KAHLENBERG: That’s right.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Now, the recent litigation that you mentioned is, of course, that Supreme Court case where the court recently overturned affirmative action programs at Harvard and other universities that use them.
You actually filed, I believe, expert testimony or expert briefing in that case on behalf of the students who were arguing, the students and the groups that were arguing against affirmative action. That’s actually made you somewhat of a persona non grata amongst some of your fellow progressives for having done that.
But do you stand by your position there that affirmative action was not necessarily the best way to achieve whatever goals Harvard had set out for itself?
KAHLENBERG: Absolutely. To be clear, I’m very much a strong proponent of ensuring that our colleges are racially diverse. It’s just, I’d like to see colleges have both racial and class diversity. And that’s not what the current, the existing system of race-based affirmative action was producing. In essence, racial affirmative action made institutions like Harvard and University of North Carolina feel good that they had created a fair system because there was some racial representation.
And that was used to paper over an enormously unequal system of admissions that provides massive advantages for legacy students, for the children of faculty, for those who apply early in the admissions process. The deck is stacked against working class and low-income students at these selective colleges. And affirmative action made people feel better. Because it did provide phenotypic diversity, but it didn’t get, working class Black students and Hispanic students were very rare on campus.
And I thought we could create something better if universities weren’t able to try to get racial justice on the cheap by just admitting upper middle-class students of color.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. You know how we’re living in an age where far right conservatives look at more centrist Republicans and call them rhinos, right?
Republican in name only. I imagine that perhaps some of your progressive colleagues looked at you and your support for ending affirmative action and may wanted to have called you a lino, a liberal in name only. Is that sort of the feedback that you got when you supported this case?
KAHLENBERG: Certainly, I have some liberal friends who strongly disagree with my position, and I understand that. I think they’re coming from a good place trying to promote racial diversity. I just, I think all the evidence suggests that places like Harvard and UNC can produce racial diversity if they use class-based affirmative action programs that, that employ the right measures of class.
Part II
CHAKRABARTI: You’re back with On Point. I’m Meghna Chakrabarti, and Richard Kahlenberg joins us today. He’s a leading liberal thinker who has been arguing for years that class is a more effective way to create policy or class-based policies in order to achieve true equality in America. More effective than race, exclusively.
And he takes his analysis far beyond affirmative action. And his recent, most recent book, in fact, looks at the world of housing. It’s called “Excluded: How Snob Zoning, Nimbyism and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See.” And Richard, I’d love to quote a little bit from an article that you wrote in The Atlantic that sort of crystallized what’s in your book here.
And it opens with a pretty good paragraph, I have to say. You say, “Across the country, a lot of good white liberals, people who purchase copies of White Fragility and decry the U.S. Supreme Court for ending affirmative action, sleep every night in exclusive suburbs that socially engineer economic segregation by government edict.
The huge inequalities between upscale municipalities and their poorer neighbors didn’t just happen. They are in large measure the product of laws that are hard to square with the inclusive ‘In this house, we believe’ signs on lawns and in many highly educated deep blue suburbs.”
So you’re not pulling your punches there.
Give me an example of neighboring communities where you see this hypocrisy, let’s call it that.
KAHLENBERG: Yeah. In that article I talk about Scarsdale, New York, a suburb of New York City which delivered 75% of its votes to Joe Biden, and yet essentially bans any form of multifamily housing.
So the idea is, “Anyone is welcome to live in Scarsdale. It doesn’t matter your race, your background, but you have to be able to afford a single-family home.” And then they go further at times and say, “You have to be able to afford that single family home on a lot that’s no smaller than a quarter acre, half an acre.”
And so it’s building a wall to keep people of modest means out. So you can have people in nearby Port Chester, which is much poorer, who will come over to Scarsdale and mow the lawns and take care of the kids. Maybe some of them teach in the public schools, but they’re not allowed to live in the community.
They’re excluded. And people don’t want their kids attending the public schools. And I saw recently in The Atlantic, there was a defense of this type of zoning. They said it makes sense because the kids, the parents of those who are less fortunate aren’t going to pay their weight in taxes.
They’ll educate, they’ll be educated in the school, but not pay enough. Which I found really appalling. And yet it’s an acceptable form of prejudice. We would never say and shouldn’t say that we want to keep Black people out of a neighborhood.
But I’ve been astounded to see in comments to articles I’ve written, people are very perfectly fine saying that they don’t want poor and working-class people to live in their communities.
CHAKRABARTI: Oh, that’s interesting. Because I was just going to say that when I read your article and the book also, I just thought, we’re trying to avoid the pitfall of stereotyping.
But in hearing you say that the folks living in these wealthier suburbs are trying to keep people out, trying to keep lower income families and their children out of the neighborhoods. I was going to say that seems a little unfair because viewing it from another perspective.
Our folks living in these suburbs, not necessarily just trying to be exclusive of others, but trying to, instead, they see it as preserving the character, the livability of their neighborhoods in their suburbs, of the quality of the schools because of the high taxes and property values. That it’s not exclusionary rather, but instead a preservationist approach.
What do you think?
KAHLENBERG: I guess that’s one way to put it.
CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS)
KAHLENBERG: And to be clear, I’m not —
CHAKRABARTI: Because otherwise you make them sound like the George Wallace’s and Bull Connors, as you say, of the 21st century.
KAHLENBERG: Yes. I want to be clear that people living in exclusive communities, I think, for the most part, are not bad people.
I think in many cases they move to an area for the good public schools, and they probably don’t give a whole lot of thought to the issue of zoning. And what the book is trying to do is make people who do have good hearts realize that to defend the existing zoning policies is to exclude, unfairly, people who want something better for their kids but can’t have it. Because the government is engineering local governments or engineering class segregation.
For the book I interviewed KiAra Cornelius, who is a mother who lives in lived in a dangerous neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio. She just wanted better schools for her kids. She had one kid, one child who was a straight A student. And yet she was not happy with the local school.
And she’s not going to bring crime or be an unpleasant neighbor. She wants to live the American dream. And by banning any form of multifamily housing, communities are frustrating that American Dream. And they’re also limiting the supply, overall supply of housing in an area, driving up costs for everyone.
So I think it’s not that the individuals in these exclusive communities are nefarious. It’s that I don’t think they fully realize the harm that these invisible walls are imposing on the rest of society.
CHAKRABARTI: You know what’s so interesting to me and disheartening, I have to say, it links back to what you said earlier, that class-based bias may be one of the few remaining forms of bias, which is perfectly acceptable to express, openly. Because you had been saying that some of the folks in these neighborhoods that you profiled were saying, if we change zoning laws and allow more affordable or multifamily housing that we would suddenly have neighbors who were louder, or littered more, made more noise, things like that.
And I thought, “Huh.” That reminded me of one of Harvard University’s responses in the in the affirmative action case where Harvard said if we looked at more class-based means of admissions, A) it might not achieve the diversity they wanted, but B) I think they also said that it would reduce the academic quality of the students coming in.
So is it, do you think that’s Harvard’s version of being overt about its class bias? Just like you were talking about the neighbors in these wealthier suburban neighborhoods?
KAHLENBERG: I do. The common theme is exclusion of working-class people. And in the litigation the expert report that I worked on with a colleague from Duke University found that Harvard could substantially expand its socioeconomic diversity. Allow a lot more working-class students in. And the mean SAT score would go from the 99th percentile to the 98th. And when you think about the fact that there’s an average SAT score at the 98th percentile, even though you have a whole lot more students who’ve overcome odds, they haven’t had everything given to them, the way many of the current Harvard students have.
It, to my mind, that’s a more impressive group of students. So it’s a myth to say that there aren’t enough low income and working-class students out there who can do well at selective colleges. And the common theme is that one can look down upon those who have been less fortunate and get away with it in American society.
The comments that I wrote, some pieces for the New York Times and the comment sections were astounding people engaging in the worst kinds of stereotypes about working-class people coming into their neighborhoods. If you reformed the zoning laws, I had one guy who said, “You don’t understand the dogs of poor people bark louder.”
It was just astonishing to me the way people would assume that those who’ve faced extra odds are somehow beneath them.
CHAKRABARTI: Wow. Tell me more then about the differences between Scarsdale and Port Chester in Westchester County in New York. Because I want to get a more granular understanding of how you see zoning and purposeful exclusion working here.
For example, I think you had said earlier that Scarsdale’s median household income was more than a quarter million dollars, and that was three times that of Port Chester. What were some of the other differences in the communities, specifically regarding the homes people live in and the kind of zoning laws that they had to encounter, that they would encounter in each of those communities?
KAHLENBERG: Yeah. In Scarsdale, you have, in essence, a ban on multi-family housing. And as a result, the prices of the homes exceed a million dollars. And in Port Chester they allow all sorts of different types of housing. It’s healthy to have people of different backgrounds and different forms of housing. And yet because there’s such exclusion, and in places like Scarsdale and other exclusive communities in Westchester County, in New York, you end up seeing a real reduction in the opportunities of students in Port Chester. So the level of academic achievement is much lower, in part because the students are poor and therefore face more obstacles in life.
They’re less likely to have nutrition, health care, and that shows up on test scores. But the other piece which Scarsdale could do something about, is that there are concentrations of low-income students in places like Port Chester. There is research to suggest that low-income students, if given the right environment, can do phenomenal things.
And there was one housing intervention, for example, in Montgomery County, Maryland, right outside of Washington, D.C., where low-income housing was built in modest numbers in wealthy communities. And a researcher, Heather Schwartz at the Rand Corporation, studied how those students did over time.
And they closed the math gap by half with the wealthier students, the reading gap by one third. And there was no harm done to the middle class and the upper middle-class students. So there are just real costs that are born by people when we build these exclusionary walls.
CHAKRABARTI: Richard, you also point out just to underscore the differences that come with, let’s call it economic segregation, which then also, there’s a strong overlap with race, but with these lower income communities, you said that in Port Chester, there was, between Port Chester and Scarsdale.
So, Scarsdale being the higher income community, there was a 55%-point gap in achievement or performance at grade level in both English and math. So students in Scarsdale were 55% points ahead in terms of how many of their students were achieving at grade level.
So a huge difference. But one thing that we often hear is we don’t necessarily have to build more middle- or low-income housing in the wealthier communities. Instead, what we ought to do at the state level is increase funding for schools in those lower income communities. Because in fact, lots of people say this, not just residents in rich communities, teachers’ unions in various states, et cetera.
Because then with that increased funding, the money wouldn’t be so much of a difference. We could raise achievement in lower income schools. Why isn’t that an adequate solution?
KAHLENBERG: Let me say a couple things. One is, I support. The idea of spending more money in higher poverty schools, because I think it can make some difference.
But going back to that Montgomery County study, Montgomery County does that, they spend $2,000 extra per pupil in the higher poverty schools. And even though they were spending less in the upper middle-class schools, the low-income students did far better with integrated schools than they did with the compensatory spending approach.
Essentially that’s what 95% of education reform is about. It’s, “Let’s try to make separate but equal work as best we can.” And I’m certainly in favor of making sure that. Higher poverty schools have the resources they need. But what about chipping away at the segregation itself? The underlying segregation that is based in race and also based in class.
If you look at trends over time, we’ve seen about a 30% reduction in racial segregation since 1970. And we’ve seen a doubling of income segregation during that time period. And that’s what really impacts academic achievement. It’s not that Black students somehow improve academically when sitting next to white students.
It’s always been that low-income students do better in middle class environments, and there are a number of school districts that are trying to address this issue. And the Century Foundation where I worked has identified 171 places, school districts and charter schools that are trying to address the economic segregation of schooling.
But I think complimentary to that, we should just eliminate some of the outright class discrimination in zoning that perpetuates income segregation in America.
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