Mind the income gap

[Jemmons]

Walter Benn Michaels


The battles against racism and sexism have never been to produce a more equal society; or to mitigate, much less eliminate, the difference between the elite and the rest; they were meant to diversify and hence legitimate the elite.

This is why policies such as affirmative action in university admissions serve such a crucial symbolic purpose for liberals. They reassure them that no one has been excluded from places like Harvard and Yale for reasons of prejudice or discrimination (the legitimating part) while leaving untouched the primary mechanism of exclusion: wealth (the increasing-the-gap between the rich and everyone else part). You are, as Richard Kahlenberg put it, "25 times as likely to run into a rich student as a poor student" at 146 elite colleges, not because poor students are discriminated against but because they are poor. They have not had the kind of education that makes it plausible for them even to apply to elite colleges, much less attend them.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/11/uselections2008.useconomicgrowth

[fasttense]

1. That was very depressing, but I suppose the truth hurts.n/t