It's certainly one idea to use class. The advantages are that it pre-empts a couple of the major criticisms of affirmative action policy as it now stands. If you make it a class-based system, it becomes less obviously coded with race and therefore less stigmatizing. It also might ensure that these policies get to the people who need it the most; i.e., poor minorities. But if class is interpreted in traditional ways (using parental income or education level), you're going to perpetuate the system as it is now. You must factor in wealth or assets in order to address the real roots of disparity. It is in the area of wealth where the greatest disparities exist by race. Today, a typical white family has eight times the wealth of the typical black family - that statistic is not explainable by income or other factors. So if we were to use class instead of race, I would suggest that it be done based primarily on wealth, and secondarily on income and education level. Then you might have a racially progressive policy that's ostensibly colorblind. But if you do it any other way, you're just going to reinforce the existing inequality.

The complicating thing about this is that race and class are intermixed in a way that they can't actually be separated. Race in a way gets used to qualify class. As the documentary shows very well, the post-war circumstances that created a suburban middle class was also implicitly racial: it was predominantly white at the expense of blacks. Because we focus on its racial effect, we forget that post-war housing programs were class-based policies aimed at increasing opportunities for social mobility and economic stability. That it produced a new form of white privilege wasn't part of the consideration. You could argue it was assumed or it wasn't significant enough for policymakers to address. Either way, class policy also produced new and probably unintended dimensions to race. So if we try to set up policies to address class, it wouldn't necessarily address race as it could potentially evolve, or even the social consequences of racism that already exist. It's problematic to de-couple the two.

I think also that affluent racial minorities face an enormous amount of discrimination in their educational and professional lives: they're passed over for promotions, they get different treatment from educators, their contributions are often not given equal weight. While I agree that there's a lot to be said for an affirmative action agenda that is partially class derived, affluence and status alone don't necessarily make a person of color's experience a smoother one, even in the middle-class, white-collar professional world. It does not address the issue of fair treatment in society more generally. As many people have noted, and as jazz musician Branford Marsalis captured really nicely on one of his albums, affluence and status don't mean that a black man can get a taxi-cab in Manhattan.

You know, attacks on affirmative action that play the "class card" are really quite ironic. People who have been at the forefront of crafting affirmative action policies have in fact often pursued race and class policies. For example, the affirmative action program at UC Davis medical school which was stricken by the Supreme Court in the historic 1978 Bakke case was a race and class program. Through a series of conservative legal decisions and political maneuvering, these race/class forms of affirmative action were defeated. And let's not kid ourselves - the elite in this country have never been about equalizing opportunities based on class. In the 1973 Rodriguez case out of Texas, for example, the Supreme Court found that wildly disparate school financing districts did not contradict the principle of equal protection. As a legal system and as a society, we have not really been about class equalization and it is disingenous to try to create a zero-sum game between class politics and affirmative action. The truth is that class-based programs will result in an overall net gain for whites and a net loss for the groups of color currently benefiting from affirmative action. Any class-based policies we advocate must, therefore, not displace existing race-based ones. Otherwise we will do no better than post-Civil War Southern plantation society which bought poor whites' loyalty at the expense of freed slaves.