Head of the Class

On Friday, in Xenia’s In the Press section, I posted a link to a story from The Atlantic on the future of affirmative action. The article looked not only as recent successful state initiatives to ban race-based hiring preferences, but also prognosticated on what Barack Obama’s election as U.S. president might indicate about national feeling on the issue.

This week, several bloggers have taken a look at class-based affirmative action policies. Questions under consideration included: Can class be quantified or even detected in U.S. society? Does class have an effect on hiring or college admissions? How can one take into account regional differences in income and cost of living?

Matthew Yglesias at Think Progress says that it’s not class that should be a factor, but privilege:

I don’t think this is by any means an insurmountable objection to trying for some affirmative action on the basis of a broad class metric, but I do think it’s a real stumbling block. By contrast, a straightforward attack on privilege in the form of efforts to dismantle legacy preferences and the like would have a similar effect and it’s easier to get a clear sense of what the target is. And of course if you reduce the level of inequality, you reduce the scope of inherited advantage directly.

Over at Tapped, the blog for The American Prospect, writers Dana Goldstein and Adam Serwer debate whether cultural references, accents and assumptions about class itself really do make a difference. On the other side of that discussion, The Angry Bear (with a musical interlude) and Lawyers, Gun$ and Money blogs offer some  examples of how we fake-and-make class, which muddies the waters further on how much it can play into hiring practices. Robert Farley at Lawyers, Gun$ and Money:

Adam’s point is that race and gender are more obvious signifiers than class, and consequently that race and gender are more likely to produce bias in hiring decisions, and finally that affirmative action is thus more necessary to remedy race and gender distinction than class distinction. There is much truth in this, but I think it understates the degree to which class becomes evident through social interaction. The genius of George W. Bush (such that it is) has been in mastering the indicators of class to the extent that a product of New England aristocracy looks and sounds like a lower middle class Texan. Bush is, within a very narrow set of limitations, a fantastic actor, so fantastic that I suspect he’s internalized the created persona. Then again, this may reinforce Adam’s point; George W. Bush was capable of transforming his class persona, but Barack Obama will never be able to convince anyone that he’s white.

Is class-based affirmative action needed? Is it even possible?