I just happened to hear a monologue on NPR by Robert Reich, with such a great idea that I felt compelled to do my part in promoting it.
http://www.robertreich.blogspot.com/
The podcast can likely be found on his site......I don't think it's up yet.
Reich's idea is, with income inequality at I believe an 80 year high, and with social mobility now (as it has been increasingly for the last oh, at least 20 years)highly diminished due among I'm sure other factors, "rungs in the ladder" being removed with the disappearance of high wage manufacturing jobs. Also, persons at the low end suffer with a lack of social connections, where arguably the most and best opportunities come from. I can personally attest (and flesh out the diary) to the power of this one, working my way through a pretty good degree program at a big name university's extension campus in a blue collar working class area........and graduating to find an empty resume, consisting of my reasonably high GPA, degree, and the menial work I'd done to keep the bills paid (and no internships, activities--these generally are luxuries of the children of the upper middle class).......you know of course that the know it all genius's ("expert" because they read a fucking newspaper article or saw a little blurb on the news) in your life telling you "You just need to NETWORK your way to the job." With whom? The local guys who work down at the factory? Their wives? Yea, one of them might as a bizarre coincidence have a cousin who could hire you for an appropriate job, but chances are remote, and it is just SO charming to go begging of marginal acquaintances to help you...........OK, rant over, I digress about a pet peeve-sorry.........let me add one more thing also........I am FULLY aware that the difficulties I experienced as trying as they were are only a SHADE of that which is faced by someone who isn't a male Caucasian, with an Anglo-Saxon name (this is a source of discrimination by way of identifying ethnicity and social class----I believe that Freakonomics author and NY Times columnist-Steve Levitt writes about it), and middle class affectations (this is HUGE, but no one talks about it). I, ended up OK by the way by virtue of a combination of a quirky talent and a generous, progressive company.....wouldn't ask anyone else to bet on those odds.
Anyways, Dr. Reich's idea is basing Affirmative Action not around race, but instead over income. This makes sense for a couple of reasons......most notably that it takes just about ALL of the ammo away from your scumbag ideologues who use animosity towards the "hand up" given to person's disadvantaged by racial prejudice to drive a wedge between the races, keeping them from uniting against the aristocracy, one of the greatest impediments to social progress. Also, it is efficient .......Racial affirmative action has been some degree of a success, and now we have an African American middle and even upper middle class.............there is as I believe Barak Obama more or less acknowledged actually some legitimacy to the concern that under racial Affirmative Action, a "hand up" could theoretically be given to the child of an African American Harvard Lawyer instead of a poor Appalachian child. Additionally:
(a) income-based affirmative action produces nearly as much racial diversity (emphasis mine-V V)as race-based affirmative action, (b) it promotes economic diversity as well, and (c) it actually produces higher graduation rates than either a pure merit-based system (test scores and high school GPAs) or a traditional affirmative action program. What's more, it's an approach that most of the public finds inherently fair.
From Zachary Drake's blog
....the final point of course being what stuck with me about idealogical "ammunition"
The link, I put in, which I hope works has a link to a full report on this subject.
http://www.tcf.org/...
V V