Heres why real diversity should focus on class not race

I’ve spent my career as a center-left thinker and writer, working with people like former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to help promote school integration and Keith Ellison and the late John Lewis to strengthen organized labor. So why did I agree to join a conservative group, Students for Fair Admissions, in its lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina in cases that enabled the Supreme Court to bring an end to racial preferences in 2023?As I outline in my new book, Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges, I testified as an expert witness that racial and economic diversity benefits students, but there is a much better way to accomplish these goals than through racial preferences. Universities, I testified, should consider ending preferences for the wealthy and instead give an admissions break to economically disadvantaged students of all races, a substantial share of whom would, in fact, end up being Black and Hispanic.I’d long argued that this approach could work, but I became even more convinced once I had a chance to peek inside the files at Harvard and UNC and see how the admissions process worked.  Harvard and UNC claimed that the only way they could create racially diverse campuses was to provide racial preferences, but admissions data suggested the real issue here was class and alumni-status.Indeed, at Harvard, for instance, their focus on race rather than class resulted in a student body in which nearly 75% of Black and Hispanic students came from the richest 20% of Black and Hispanic students nationally. This outcome is the exact opposite of what the rhetoric of proponents of racial preference programs would suggest. Harvard claimed they believed in racial justice, but evidence revealed that it routinely rated Asian American students lower on their personal score which was meant to capture qualities like “integrity,” “courage,” an...