Jim Sleeper has some advice for Barack Obama: Come out against race-based affirmative action in favor of income-based preferences. Sleeper's argument relies in part on Richard D. Kahlenberg's cover story this week in The Chronicle Review about the legacy of the New York City school strike that seized the Ocean Hill-Brownsville area of Brooklyn 40 years ago.
Kahlenberg argues that the adoption of race-based preferences by liberals has been a disaster for liberalism. In an effort to remedy the dark history of discrimination in America, liberals succeeded in creating new divisions that continue to plague the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party. Consider that Al Gore lost the non-college-educated white vote by 17 points in 2000, as did John Kerry by 23 points in 2004. "Nothing would galvanize white working-class voters more than a rejection of the racial preferences born in Ocean Hill-Brownsville," Kahlenberg writes.
And Kahlenberg says there is reason to believe that Obama shares his opinion. In his Philadelphia speech on race, Obama observed: "Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. … As far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything." Resentment builds, Obama said, "when they hear that an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed." He warned against seeing those resentments as "misguided or even racist" without understanding that they are "grounded in legitimate concerns."
Sleeper agrees. But the lecturer in political science at Yale wonders why Obama hasn't spoken clearly against race-based preferences. Sleeper writes that Obama is "understandably reluctant to descend to what might seem like pandering to racists, drawing the inevitable assaults from black Clinton 'race industry' loyalists and the worst of the so-called civil-rights establishment."
But Sleeper argues that it is a reasonable risk for Obama to take. "He might lose a few upscale white liberals who like to indulge racial symbolism in order to feel good about their privileged selves far more than they'd like to make the sacrifices and do the heavily lifting that equality of opportunity really requires," Sleeper writes. "But it's unlikely they'd desert [Obama] for Clinton now, and he'd gain tremendous credibility among working-class whites for being substantively trans-racial, in ways that actually benefit them, rather than symbolically trans-racial in color-coded gestures that make the pursuit of equality seem a zero-sum game."
