Sign up for the On Point newsletter here. 

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