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The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action was met with predictable outcry from those claiming it will tear asunder universities' capacity to encourage diverse student bodies. It also elicited self-satisfaction from conservatives, some of whom (even here at the University of Minnesota) have argued that we have too much diversity already.
The court's ruling is hardly a model of legal clarity; nor are its immediate implications for college admissions straightforward. Yet in the 50 years since the Supreme Court's Bakke decision initiated the high court's involvement in racial educational preference, there has been a consistent failure to grasp the distinction between disadvantage and entitlement based on income vs. discrimination based on race.
Seven years ago on these pages, in the wake of Philando Castile's killing, I wrote that those at the bottom of the income ladder in America, whether Black or white, share a forlorn hope. Whatever their desire to move up the ladder, they are unlikely to move very far in their lifetimes. They are largely trapped at the bottom.
Research by Stanford University economics Prof. Raj Chetty, using tax data, found that areas in the U.S. with greater income inequality also produce less upward mobility for children from low-income families. This is the so-called "Gatsby Curve." In Charlotte, N.C., for example, a child whose household ranked in the lowest fifth in income 10 years ago had less than a 5% chance of reaching the top fifth.
But the shared forlorn prospects of poor Americans, white or Black, suggests something crucial to the political dynamics of affirmative action. While nearly a fifth of Black Americans remain poor, more than 2.5 times as many of the poor are white.
In 2021, 19.5% of Black people living in the U.S. were living below the poverty line, compared with 8.2% of white people. This meant that 8.7 million Black Americans were living below the poverty line (19.5% of 44.43 million Black individuals) compared with 20.6 million white Americans (8.2% of 251.82 million white individuals).