How the luxury beliefs of an educated elite erode society

Whether attacking marriage, calling out white privilege or seeking to defund the police, the university class espouse ideas that confer stat

thetimes.co.uk

Born in Los Angeles into what many would consider the American lower class, I entered the foster system aged three after my drug-addicted birth mother, originally from Seoul, was unable to care for me. Over the next five years, I moved through seven different foster homes. I grew up without knowing my father, only discovering his Hispanic heritage, with roots in Mexico and Spain, through a genetic test last year.

When I was seven, I was adopted by a working-class family and subsequently settled in a dusty town called Red Bluff, California, in one of the poorest counties in the state. My adoptive parents divorced shortly thereafter, and my adolescence was marked by substance abuse, violence, family tragedy and financial catastrophe. I fled as soon as I could at 17, enlisting in the US air force right after high school. Eventually, after several missteps, I managed to gain admission to one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

I came to Yale to major in psychology, but my curiosity soon overflowed the boundaries of my degree. In my attempt to understand class distinctions, I spent a lot of time thinking and reading about class divides and social hierarchies, and compared what I’d learnt with my experiences on campus. Gradually, I developed the concept of “luxury beliefs”, which are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.

The upper class includes (but is not necessarily limited to) anyone who attends or graduates from an elite university and has at least one parent who is a university graduate. Research has found that parental educational attainment is the most important objective indicator of social class. Compared with parental income, parental education is a more powerful predictor of a child’s future lifestyle, tastes and opinions.

It is a vexed question whether first-generation graduates can truly enter the upper class. Paul Fussell, the social critic and author of Class, wrote that manners, tastes, opinions and conversational style are just as important for upper-class membership as money or credentials, and that to fulfil these requirements, you have to be immersed in affluence from birth. Likewise, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu stated that a “triadic structure” of schooling, language and taste was necessary to be accepted among the upper class. Bourdieu described the mastery of this triad as “ease”. When you grow up in a social class, you come to embody it. You represent its tastes and values so deeply that you exhibit ease within it.

People with parents who are university graduates are often better equipped to gain and maintain status — they tend to be more adept at navigating organisations, smoothly interacting with colleagues and positioning themselves for advancement. Consistent with this, in 2021 the Pew Research Center found that among US households headed by a graduate, the median wealth of those who had a parent with at least a bachelor’s degree was nearly $100,000 greater than those who don’t have college-educated parents.

This bonus of being a “continuing-generation” (as opposed to a “first-generation”) college graduate has been termed the “parent premium”. I don’t have the parent premium. For extended periods of my youth, I had the opposite. It’s impossible to say that every individual in a particular class or category has the exact same features across the board. Still, graduates of elite universities generally occupy the top quintile of income, often wield outsized social influence and are disproportionately likely to hold luxury beliefs that undermine social mobility.

For example, a former classmate at Yale told me “monogamy is kind of outdated” and not good for society. I asked her about her background and if she planned to marry. She was raised in a stable two-parent family, just like the vast majority of our classmates. And she planned on getting married herself. But she insisted that traditional families are old-fashioned and that society should “evolve” beyond them.

My classmate’s promotion of one ideal (“monogamy is outdated”) while living by another (“I plan to get married”) was echoed by other students in different ways. Some would, for instance, tell me about the admiration they had for the military, or how trade schools were just as respectable as college, or how college was not necessary to be successful. But when I asked them if they would encourage their own children to enlist or become a plumber or an electrician rather than apply to college, they would demur or change the subject.

Later, I would connect my observations to stories I read about tech tycoons, another affluent group, who encourage people to use addictive devices while simultaneously enforcing rigid rules at home about technology use. For example, Steve Jobs prohibited his children from using iPads. Parents in Silicon Valley reportedly tell their nannies to closely monitor how much their children use their smartphones. Don’t get high on your own supply, I guess. Many affluent people now promote lifestyles that are harmful to the less fortunate. Meanwhile, they are not only insulated from the fallout; they often profit from it.

In the past, people displayed their membership of the upper class with their material accoutrements. But today, luxury goods are more accessible than before. This is a problem for the affluent, who still want to broadcast their high social position. But they have come up with a clever solution. The affluent have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.

Human beings become more preoccupied with social status once our physical needs are met. Research has shown that sociometric status (respect and admiration from peers) is more important for wellbeing than socioeconomic status. Furthermore, studies have described how negative social judgment is associated with a spike in cortisol (a hormone linked to stress) that is three times higher than in non-social stressful situations. We feel pressure to build and maintain social status, and fear losing it.

It seems reasonable to think that the most downtrodden might be most interested in obtaining status and money, but this is not the case. Denizens of prestigious institutions are even more interested than others in prestige and wealth. For many of them, that drive is how they reached their lofty positions in the first place. They persistently look for new ways to move upward and avoid moving downward.

The French sociologist Émile Durkheim understood this when he wrote: “The more one has, the more one wants, since satisfactions received only stimulate instead of filling needs”. And research supports this. A psychology study in 2020 revealed that “Upper-class individuals cared more about status and valued it more highly than working-class individuals … Furthermore, compared with lower-status individuals, high-status individuals were more likely to engage in behaviour aimed at protecting or enhancing their status.” Plainly, high-status people desire status more than anyone else does.

You might think that, for example, rich students at elite universities would be happy because their parents are in the top 1 per cent of income earners, and that statistically they will soon join their parents in this elite guild. But remember, they’re surrounded by other members of the 1 per cent. For many elite university students, their social circle consists of baby millionaires, which often instils a sense of insecurity and an anxiety to preserve and maintain their positions against such rarefied competitors.

www.thetimes.co.uk

Thorstein Veblen’s famous “leisure class” has evolved into the “luxury belief class”. Veblen, an economist and sociologist, compiled his observations about social class in his classic 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class. A key idea is that because we can’t be certain of the financial standing of other people, a good way to size up their means is to see whether they can afford to waste money on goods and leisure. This explains why status symbols are so often difficult to obtain and costly to purchase.

In Veblen’s day, people exhibited their status with delicate and restrictive clothing such as tuxedos, top hats and evening gowns, or by partaking in time-consuming activities like golf or beagling. Veblen suggested that the wealthy flaunt these symbols not because they are useful but because they are so pricey or wasteful that only the wealthy can afford them, which is why they are high-status indicators.

During my first year at Yale in 2015, it was common to see students at Ivy League colleges wearing Canada Goose jackets. Is it necessary to spend $900 to stay warm in New England? No. But kids weren’t spending their parents’ money just for the warmth. They were spending the equivalent of the typical American’s weekly income ($865) for the logo. Likewise, are students spending $250,000 at prestigious American universities for the education? Maybe. But they are also spending it for the logo.

As the New York University professor Scott Galloway said in an interview in 2020: “The strongest brand in the world is not Apple or Mercedes-Benz or Coca-Cola. The strongest brands are MIT, Oxford, and Stanford. Academics and administrators at the top universities have decided over the last 30 years that we’re no longer public servants; we’re luxury goods.”

This is not to say that elite colleges don’t educate their students, or that Canada Goose jackets don’t keep their wearers warm. But top universities are also crucial for induction into the luxury belief class. Take vocabulary. Your typical working-class American could not tell you what “heteronormative” or “cisgender” means. But if you visit an elite university, you’ll find plenty of affluent people who will eagerly explain them to you. When someone uses the phrase cultural appropriation, what they are really saying is, “I was educated at a top college”. Only the affluent can afford to learn strange vocabulary, because ordinary people have real problems to worry about.

White privilege is the luxury belief that took me the longest to understand, because I grew up around a lot of poor white people. Affluent white college graduates seem to be the most enthusiastic about the idea of white privilege, yet they are the least likely to incur any costs for promoting that belief. Rather, they raise their social standing by talking about their privilege. When policies are implemented to combat white privilege, it won’t be Yale graduates who are harmed. Poor white people will bear the brunt.

The upper class promotes abolishing the police or decriminalising drugs or white privilege because it advances their social standing. The logic is akin to conspicuous consumption: if you’re a student who has a large subsidy from your parents and I do not, you can afford to waste $900 and I can’t, so wearing a Canada Goose jacket is a good way of advertising your superior wealth and status. Proposing policies that will cost you as a member of the upper class less than they would cost me serves the same function. Advocating for sexual promiscuity, drug experimentation or abolishing the police are good ways of advertising your membership of the elite because, thanks to your wealth and social connections, they will cost you less than me.

A well-heeled student at an elite university can experiment with cocaine and will, in all likelihood, be fine. A kid from a dysfunctional home with absentee parents will often take that first hit of meth to self-destruction. This is perhaps why a 2019 survey found that less than half of Americans without a college degree want to legalise drugs, but more than 60 per cent of Americans with a bachelor’s degree or higher are in favour of drug legalisation.

Similarly, a 2020 survey found that the richest Americans showed the strongest support for defunding the police, while the poorest reported the lowest support. Throughout the remainder of that year and into 2021, murder rates throughout the US soared as a result of defunding policies, officers retiring early or quitting, and police departments struggling to recruit new members after the luxury belief class cultivated an environment of loathing toward law enforcement.

Consider that compared with Americans who earn more than $75,000 a year, the poorest Americans are seven times more likely to be victims of robbery, seven times more likely to be victims of aggravated assault and 20 times more likely to be victims of sexual assault. And yet many affluent people are calling to abolish law enforcement.

Most personal to me is the luxury belief that family is unimportant or that children are equally likely to thrive in all family structures. In 1960, the percentage of American children living with both biological parents was identical for affluent and working-class families — 95 per cent. By 2005, 85 per cent of affluent families were still intact, but for working-class families the figure had plummeted to 30 per cent. The Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam said at a 2017 Senate hearing: “Rich kids and poor kids now grow up in separate Americas … Growing up with two parents is now unusual in the working class, while two-parent families are normal and becoming more common among the upper middle class.”

Affluent people, particularly in the 1960s, championed sexual freedom. Loose sexual norms caught on for the rest of society. The upper class, though, still had intact families. Generally speaking, they experimented in college and then settled down. The families of the lower classes fell apart.

This deterioration is still happening. In 2006, more than half of American adults without a university degree believed it was “very important” that couples with children should be married. Fast-forward to 2020, and this number has plummeted to 31 per cent. Among university graduates, only 25 per cent think couples should be married before having kids. Their actions, though, contradict their luxury beliefs: the vast majority of American university graduates who have children are married. And yet, despite their behaviour suggesting otherwise, affluent people are the most likely to say marriage is unimportant.

Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class by Rob Henderson is published by Forum

Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. -- Rob Henderson

In the same way that you don’t notice the specifics of your own culture until you travel elsewhere, you don’t really notice your social class until you enter another one. As an undergraduate at Yale a decade ago, I came to see that my peers had experienced a totally different social reality than me. I had grown up poor, a biracial product of family dysfunction, foster care and military service. Suddenly ensconced in affluence at an elite university—more Yale students come from families in the top 1% of income than from the bottom 60%—I found myself thinking a lot about class divides and social hierarchies.

I’d thought that by entering a place like Yale, we were being given a privilege as well as a duty to improve the lives of those less fortunate than ourselves. Instead, I often found among my fellow students what I call “luxury beliefs”—ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class but often inflict real costs on the lower classes. For example, a classmate told me “monogamy is kind of outdated” and not good for society. I asked her what her background was and if she planned to marry. She said she came from an affluent, stable, two-parent home—just like most of our classmates. She added that, yes, she personally planned to have a monogamous marriage, but quickly insisted that traditional families are old-fashioned and that society should “evolve” beyond them.

My classmate’s promotion of one ideal (“monogamy is outdated”) while living by another (“I plan to get married”) was echoed by other students in different ways. Some would, for instance, tell me about the admiration they had for the military, or how trade schools were just as respectable as college, or how college was not necessary to be successful. But when I asked them if they would encourage their own children to enlist or become a plumber or an electrician rather than apply to college, they would demur or change the subject.

In the past, people displayed their membership in the upper class with their material accouterments. As the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen famously observed in his 1899 book “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” status symbols must be difficult to obtain and costly to purchase. In Veblen’s day, people exhibited their status with delicate and restrictive clothing, such as top hats and evening gowns, or by partaking in time-consuming activities, such as golf or beagling. The value of these goods and activities, argued Veblen, was in the very fact that they were so pricey and wasteful that only the wealthy could afford them.

Today, when luxury goods are more accessible to ordinary people than ever before, the elite need other ways to broadcast their social position. This helps explain why so many are now decoupling class from material goods and attaching it to beliefs.

Take vocabulary. Your typical working-class American could not tell you what “heteronormative” or “cisgender” means. When someone uses the phrase “cultural appropriation,” what they are really saying is, “I was educated at a top college.” Only the affluent can afford to learn strange vocabulary. Ordinary people have real problems to worry about.

When my classmates at Yale talked about abolishing the police or decriminalizing drugs, they seemed unaware of the attending costs because they were largely insulated from them. Reflecting on my own experiences with alcohol, if drugs had been legal and easily accessible when I was 15, you wouldn’t be reading this. My birth mother succumbed to drug addiction soon after I was born. I haven’t seen her since I was a child. All my foster siblings’ parents were addicts or had a mental health condition, often triggered by drug use.

A well-heeled student at an elite university can experiment with cocaine and will probably be just fine. A kid from a dysfunctional home with absentee parents is more likely to ride that first hit of meth to self-destruction. This may explain why a 2019 survey conducted by the Cato Institute found that more than 60% of Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree were in favor of legalizing drugs, while less than half of Americans without a college degree thought it was a good idea. Drugs may be a recreational pastime for the rich, but for the poor they are often a gateway to further pain.

Similarly, a 2020 Yahoo News/YouGov survey found that the richest Americans showed the strongest support for defunding the police, while the poorest Americans reported the lowest support. Consider that compared with Americans who earn more than $50,000 a year, the poorest Americans are three times more likely to be victims of robbery, aggravated assault and sexual assault, according to federal statistics. Yet it’s affluent people who are calling to abolish law enforcement. Perhaps the luxury belief class is simply ignorant of the realities of crime.

Most personal to me is the luxury belief that family is unimportant or that children are equally likely to thrive in all family structures. In 1960, the percentage of American children living with both biological parents was identical for affluent and working-class families—95%. By 2005, 85% of affluent families were still intact, but for working-class families the figure had plummeted to 30%. As the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam stated at a 2017 Senate hearing: “Rich kids and poor kids now grow up in separate Americas.”

In 2006, more than half of American adults without a college degree believed it was “very important” that couples with children should be married, according to Gallup. Fast-forward to 2020, and this number had plummeted to 31%. Among college graduates polled by Gallup, only 25% thought couples should be married before having kids. Their actions, though, contradict their luxury beliefs: Most American college graduates who have children are married. Despite their behavior, affluent people are the most likely to say marriage is unimportant. Their message has spread.

I noticed that many Yale students selectively concealed their opinions or facts about their lives. More than one quietly confessed to me that they were pretending to be poorer than they really were, because they didn’t want the stigma of being thought rich. Why would this stigma exist at a rich university full of rich students? It’s a class thing. For the upper class, indicating your social position by speaking about money is vulgar. Sharing your educational credentials is a classier shorthand, but broadcasting your seemingly altruistic and socially conscientious luxury beliefs is the best of all.

It is harder for wealthy people to claim the mantle of victimhood, which, among the affluent, is often a key ingredient of righteousness. Researchers at Harvard Business School and Northwestern University recently found evidence of a “virtuous victim” effect, in which victims are seen as more moral than nonvictims who behave in exactly the same way: If people think you have suffered, they will be more likely to excuse your behavior. Perhaps this is why prestigious universities encourage students to nurture their grievances. The peculiar effect is that many of the most advantaged people are the most adept at conveying their disadvantages.

Occasionally, I raised these critiques with fellow students or graduates of elite colleges. Sometimes they would reply by asking, “Well, aren’t you part of this group now?” implying that my appraisals were hollow because I moved within the same milieu. But they wouldn’t have listened to me back when I was a lowly enlisted man in the military or when I was washing dishes for minimum wage. If you ridicule the upper class as an outsider, they’ll ignore you. The requirements for the upper class to take you seriously—credentials, wealth, power—are also the grounds to brand you a hypocrite for daring to judge.

But negative social judgments often serve as guardrails to deter detrimental decisions that lead to unhappiness. To avoid misery, I believe we have to admit that certain actions and choices, including single parenthood, substance abuse and crime, are actually in and of themselves undesirable and not simply in need of normalization. Indeed, it’s cruel to validate decisions that inflict harm. And it’s a true luxury to be ignorant of these consequences.

Rob Henderson is the author of “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class,” which will be published on Feb. 20 by Gallery Books.

The Failure of Affirmative Action

For the Black poor, a world without affirmative action is just the world as it is—no different than before.

The Atlantic

Most of my colleagues are college-educated. I am often the only product of felons, addicts, and foster care whom my peers have encountered outside of time spent volunteering in homeless shelters and group homes. Over the years, whenever affirmative action in higher education has come under threat, these folks have offered their sympathies. They believe that I—a child of a Black father and white mother who grew up in poverty and instability—feel the attacks more acutely. Most Americans seem to think affirmative action sits at the foundation of some beneficent suite of education policies that do something significant for poor Black kids, and that would disappear without the sanction of affirmative action. But the reality is that for the Black poor, a world without affirmative action is just the world as it is—no different than before.

In 2012, 6 percent of Harvard’s freshmen identified as Black. At the time, Black Americans made up 14 percent of the population and 15 percent of the country’s young adults. Harvard was then a far cry from racial parity. But in just three years, the university increased the number of Black freshmen by 50 percent. By 2020, The Harvard Crimson was reporting that more than 15 percent of incoming freshmen were Black, which meant the university had acquired perfect representation. This progress—Black progress—appears poised to recede with the expected loss of affirmative action due to the Supreme Court’s coming decisions on the Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina cases. But to endure a loss, one must have first enjoyed a gain. Diversity at Harvard was not the result of some intricate system for sourcing talent from the whole of Black America. With the permissions granted in 1978’s Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Harvard used race-conscious admissions to saturate itself with students drawn from the highest-earning segments of Black America.

The same year that Harvard achieved perfect Black representation, a group of celebrated economists published a study examining income segregation across America’s colleges.

From 1999 to 2004, the years examined by the study, about 16 to 18 percent of American children were living below the federal poverty line. Families living below the FPL struggle to afford enough food, clothing, or shelter to stave off biological decline. In the absence of income segregation, children from poverty would make up a proportional 16 to 18 percent of college students. But according to the study, only 3 percent of the students at Harvard in that time period came from families in the bottom 20 percent. (The researchers later found that the percentage had increased to about 5 percent for a cohort of students at Harvard from 2008 to 2013.)

In October of 2020, Harvard reported 154 Black first-year students. Given that the child-poverty rate in Black America hovers north of 30 percent, in an equitable society, some 40 Black freshmen would have come from poor families. The income segregation study did not disaggregate income brackets by race, and neither does Harvard, but the university does disclose that about a quarter of its latest freshman class comes from families with incomes below $85,000, its threshold for full financial aid. This is far above the federal poverty line and therefore not a good indicator of how many poor students attend Harvard. But if we extrapolate the study's findings, only seven or eight of said 154 Black freshmen would have come from poor families. The other 140 or so Black students at Harvard were likely raised outside of poverty and probably as far from the bottom as any Black child can hope to be.

Writing in the American Journal of Education in 2007, the Princeton sociology professor Douglas Massey observed that 40 percent of Black students in the Ivy League were first- or second-generation immigrants. Black immigrants are the highest-earning and best-educated subset of Black America.

The Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., a director of the university’s African American–studies center, once estimated that as many as two-thirds of Harvard’s Black students in the early 2000s were the fortunate sons and daughters of Black immigrants or, to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples. A Black woman who was a Harvard senior at the time told The New York Times in 2004 that there were so few other Black students whose grandparents had been born in the U.S. that they had begun calling themselves “the descendants.”

The Supreme Court affirmed race to be an acceptable criterion within a holistic admissions framework in 1978. The regime described here persisted for 45 years without manifesting any progress of note for the Black poor, and it strains faith to imagine that the trickle-down was on its way in year 46. The coming eulogies for affirmative action should acknowledge this history. No policy that hesitates to say class prioritizes the impoverished, and the people we do nothing for should at least enjoy public acknowledgment of their abandonment.

When I was in elementary school, my grandmother told me that I would go to college for free because I was Native American. I’m not Native. Rather, my father is from a light-skinned Black family, and for a long time, families like these presented sharp cheekbones and aquiline noses as evidence of Native roots. In nearly every case, it was plain white ancestry, but Black folks had been denied the supposed dignity of whiteness for so long that even those who had it did not want it. My dad told the Native fiction to my mom, and she told my grandmother, who was white working poor, and her fictions met with my father’s. Like many in her class, she believed that the government was in the business of giving gifts to everyone but poor whites. In her view, the world worked like this: Asian Americans received loans to start businesses. Hospitals gave free medical care to Hispanic children. Native Americans enjoyed juiced-up welfare and free college. Black Americans received preferential hiring and a free education. Because she believed me to be both Black and Native, college appeared to be a given.

My grandmother’s understanding of how college entry worked for Black Americans was shaped by decades of white-poor hearsay about affirmative action. She had no Black friends; ethnic gossip and popular culture were all she had to go on, and these gave her a wildly inaccurate view of what was to be my college experience. But I have found that even wealthier and more sophisticated Americans have absorbed similar fictions.

According to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, out of 153,000 Black test-takers in 2005, only about 1,200 scored a 700 or above on either section of the SAT. I was among that handful. Unlike the stories my grandmother told me, a red carpet wasn’t rolled out in front of me. The guidance counselor at my New Jersey public high school said nothing about my test scores and was similarly apathetic when I said I was not going to apply to college at all. When I came back a week later to recant after my father threatened to throw me on the streets if I didn’t apply, my counselor—rather than hand me a blank check from the office of affirmative action—handed me a thin packet about the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

Being a former foster youth with a missing mother and a father only just released from prison, I was legally eligible for quite a bit of aid via the FAFSA. But without legal documentation of my situation, which no adult around me had kept, acquiring that aid would require me to obtain signed statements from members of the community testifying to my fractured living conditions. As a transient youth suddenly crashing with a father I had known for barely two years and residing in an entirely new town, there was no community to vouch for me. Unable to meet the federal requirements, I slogged through an associate’s, a bachelor’s, and eventually a master’s degree, accruing substantial loans despite eligibility for grants that could have paid for my entire undergraduate education.

Since 2018, I have used what I learned (albeit too late) to help my foster sister navigate college and the FAFSA, which must be renewed every year (including resubmitting community testimony on official letterhead). On more than one occasion, she has been selected for “additional verification,” one of several variations of bureaucratic rigmarole that can result in the delay of aid long enough to force lower-income students to miss a semester if they cannot afford to pay tuition out of pocket. Even when you’re prepared for this, as she and I were, the delay is demoralizing.

Every poor kid with aspirations of college faces a slightly different constellation of obstacles, but those differences abate beneath a homogenous disappointment. The National Center for Education Statistics found that, in 2012, just 14 percent of low-income high-school students  obtained a bachelor’s or higher degree within eight years of high-school graduation. Rates of college attendance specifically among Black youth and kids below the federal poverty line—the lowest of low-income—are lower still. Given that the rate for foster or homeless youth is a meager 2 to 11 percent, it’s safe to assume that the one for Black fosters is effectively zero. Meanwhile, compiling data scattered across publications, I’ve calculated that 85 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded to Black students go to Black folks raised in the middle and upper classes. For daily life, the result is this: In any office—in any room—where a bachelor’s degree is a prerequisite, the odds that the person next to you has come from poverty, especially Black poverty, are staggeringly low.

Affirmative-action policies are not directly responsible for the impediments that poor Black students face in higher education. Nevertheless, those policies have existed for nearly five decades and have demonstrably not been an obstacle to the formation of a status quo in which so few poor Black Americans obtain a bachelor’s degree. Although that might be viewed as a policy failure, the oral arguments in the Supreme Court cases make this much clear: Affirmative action is not intended to combat the barriers faced by the poor, Black or otherwise. It is meant to achieve racial diversity. Where it finds the bodies does not matter.

In the case of Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, all parties involved—the justices, the petitioners, and the respondents—agree that the intention of affirmative action is to produce the “educational benefits of diversity.” As described by Seth Waxman, the respondent on behalf of Harvard, “a university student body comprising a multiplicity of backgrounds, experiences, and interests vitally benefits our nation. Stereotypes are broken down, prejudice is reduced, and critical thinking and problem-solving skills are improved.” The contention of Students for Fair Admissions is that Harvard could use other metrics, particularly socioeconomic status, to achieve educationally significant diversity without the need for racial considerations.

In response to the SFFA plan, Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested that weighting factors such as class in admissions amounts to “subterfuges” for reaching some sort of “diversity in race.” She probed the lawyers in oral arguments by saying that she did not “understand why considering race as one factor but not the sole factor is any different than using any of those other metrics.” The view that Sotomayor lays out here asserts that considering income and wealth, or considering them in conjunction with race, is just a tedious path to the same outcome achieved by considering race alone. But of course, an admissions scheme that considers class would not just be a subterfuge. Even if it yielded a student body with the same degree of racial diversity, the students themselves would be very different.

Many Americans retain a certain dissonance about class, believing simultaneously that it does and does not matter. Would a classroom with one Black student who was raised by parents who met while studying business at Yale benefit from the added diversity of a Black student who was raised in the Cuney Homes projects that produced George Floyd? You would be hard-pressed to find someone who answers “no,” and it is doubtful that Sotomayor would either. But the only way to promote the admission of these two hypothetical Black students is with policies that recognize both class and race. Unfortunately, conversations about diversity too often focus solely on the gaps between Black and white Americans, excluding entirely the issue of class divides among Black Americans.

In 2018, William Julius Wilson—a survivor of Jim Crow and a pioneer in the study of urban poverty—reported that Black Americans had the highest degree of residential income segregation of any racial group: Our top and bottom classes were then the least likely to live alongside each other. That same year, Pew Research Center released a study on income inequality within races. From 1970 to 2016, the top 10 percent of Black workers earned nearly 10 times what the bottom 10 percent of black workers did. For nearly 50 years, Black Americans experienced more income disparity than any other racial group in the country. The report received widespread coverage, including in The Atlantic, but mainly for its findings regarding Asian Americans, who had (temporarily) displaced Black Americans as the least equal group.

I can only cheer on, and envy, the speed at which knowledge of class disparities among Asian Americans has permeated popular culture. I hope it continues, because the Asian parity that Harvard has achieved is certainly not the result of admitting impoverished Burmese Americans. In the time since the 2018 Pew study was released, we have seen not just class-focused journalism, but Always Be My Maybe, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Beef. Each pop-cultural work  demonstrates not just that class exists for Asians, but that it drastically alters their lives, their opportunities, and their interactions in ways that—shockingly—mirror how class affects white Americans.

That no similar awareness is burgeoning on behalf of disparities afflicting Black Americans is absurd. The fact that the white upper class had a median wealth more than 20 times that of the white poor helped fuel Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a socialist revival among white youth that continues today. In 2015, the Black upper class had a median wealth 1,382 times greater than the Black poor, along with an incarceration rate nearly 10 times lower than what I inherited. Yet still, some of the best-educated minds in the country claim to not understand how taking this into consideration might yield a qualitatively different student body than what comes from treating Black Americans as a class-free blob.

Powerful as they may be, elite institutions require support from the ground. The social prestige that achieving racial diversity offers and the ability it has to smooth over the appearance of other inequities are too alluring for a university like Harvard to pass up. But, rich as it is, Harvard does not have the capital necessary to employ all of the country’s poor, fix their neighborhoods, and fund their public schools, or the willingness to wait an entire generation for those social changes to generate a cohort of low-income children who are nevertheless academically excellent. It will always be cheaper and more expedient to simply recruit wealthy kids instead. If what comes after affirmative action penalizes the Black middle and upper classes, that is nothing to celebrate. But if we want to erect something that benefits all Black Americans, we cannot expect that to happen without policies that treat class as meaningful.