It’s not hard to argue that affirmative action is – at the very least – a generally good thing for the US. It makes sense that, after centuries of discrimination against people of color, 30 years of lending a hand hasn't cut the trend dead in its tracks. It also makes sense that, having been a major component of past discrimination, race should be part of the remedy. So what's up with people trying to get rid of affirmative action, and what's all this shit about getting back to class?

California's infamous Proposition 209, Washington state's November referendum, and court decisions in Texas and Maryland have eliminated the consideration of race, ethnicity and gender in the admission policies to public universities and in the awarding of scholarships or state government contracts. Despite the fact that women have made the most gains under affirmative action, race has become the sticking point of these programs as white students have brought claims to the courts that they were denied admission because a "less-qualified" black student was admitted instead.

Left-of-conservative pundits, in a rush to avoid claims of "reverse discrimination," have reacted by suggesting that class-based systems should replace race-sensitive admissions considerations. Indeed, Richard Kahlenberg argued in the New Republic that "the left pushes racial preferences, even for the most advantaged minorities, in order to promote diversity and provide role models for disadvantaged blacks - an argument which, if it came from Ronald Reagan, the left would rightly dismiss as trickle-down social theory."

Many diehard lefties (who somehow manage to mostly be white men) urge us to abandon a political approach that focuses on racial, gendered, ethnic, and sexualized identities, pushing us to instead embrace the unifying protection afforded under the umbrella of class struggle. Clearly minorities and working class whites have both got class issues to worry about, but that doesn't fix all the other issues they face.

Reverting to class doesn't solve everything – far from it. Race sensitive affirmative action does not just provide remedy to past discriminations but also addresses the continuing institutional discrimination of bad public schools, biased SATs, limited access to advanced courses, lack of loans for minority-owned businesses, etc. The racial playing field is about as level as the Andes.

This isn't meant to deny that a large part of the existing racial inequalities is rooted in class differences, but the inequities between whites and non-whites aren't going to disappear if we just talk about class. Proponents of switching to class-based affirmative action argue that by using class as the lens, many deserving minorities will be affirmatively admitted, but that argument has holes in it you could drive a Mack truck through.

To give you an idea of what we could expect if we "went back to class," take a look at the work of Harvard economist Thomas Kane, who argues that universities would lose much of their racial diversity under a class-based system that doesn't also consider separate racial inequities. Kane studied national data for 1992 high school seniors. He found that blacks and Latinos are three times more likely than whites to come from families with incomes of less than $20,000. Initially, these data seem to support the idea that class, rather than racial remediation, would still encourage a racially diverse applicant pool, but the situation looks more bleak when you take the overall numbers into account. Blacks and Latinos make up less than half of all low-income high school students, and constitute only 17% of low-income students who have high standardized test scores. Focusing on class would simply favor poor whites and the few minorities who manage to do well on racially- and class-biased tests, leaving the rest to flounder in America's inadequate public education system.

Class-proponents argue that we need to abandon the politically controversial idea of race-sensitivity. Since it's pretty obvious that substantial racial obstacles exist at all class levels, that seems short-sighted. So does ignoring class – poor whites aren't exactly livin' large either. What makes sense is to consider both race and class as components of diversity along with universities' eternal preferences for athletes and legacies. Create economic boxes to check next to the race boxes; ask parental education attainment and income levels, while keeping need-blind admissions intact. It's no rocket science to figure out that taking both class and race into account is what will give us the most egalitarian kind of affirmative action.

Kytja Weir