March 29, 2013--The Supremes

For many days now banner headlines in the New York Times and elsewhere have been reporting about oral arguments before the Supreme Court about Prop 8 in California and the Defense of Marriage Act, both intended to limit or out-and-out forbid same-sex marriage.

On Wednesday the Times' headline was--Justices Say Time May be Wrong for Ruling on Gay Marriage.

I get it. It's an important issue that concerns fairness and equality and with nine states now permitting same-sex marriage it is understandable that SCOTUS agreed to consider it. Pundits and legal analysts have been attempting to read the tea leaves and most are predicting the Court is looking for some way to kick the issue down the road and not get in the way of the states, which are one-by-one dealing with it in a federalist way.

Fine.  But to me of considerably more importance, though much less reported, are the anticipated rulings by the Court about cases that could severely limit affirmative action and the protection of voting rights. In both instances the four conservative justices and the one "swing" judge appear to be saying that neither affirmative action nor the federal protection of people's right to vote were meant to be eternal--both were legislated to solve a "temporary" set of problems and once these were "solved," affirmative action and voting rights laws should be allowed to lapse.

The evidence is clear that neither job is complete. Even a casual look at the data reveals that voter suppression is still widespread (take note of the nine Republican controlled states--where the governor and a veto-proof majority in the state legislatures are Republicans--that attempted to jigger the system to suppress minority votes in the last election cycle); and enrollments in colleges and universities are still disproportionately skewed to exclude people of color.

My reading of the tea leaves is that both sets of protection are imperiled. So how might we think about this going forward?

We need to transcend the issue of race and even gender and instead focus on class.

Through this lens it is even more evident that there are gross inequalities, with low-income people dramatically underrepresented in college and universities as well as at the ballot box. And when looking at who is poor in America it is still predominately white people. Yes, African Americans and Hispanics are still, in percentage terms, the most excluded, in absolute numbers there are many more Anglos living in poverty. This reality might help make such a class-based approach politically palitable.

A personal anecdote--when I was at NYU there was race-based admissions and scholarship practices in place to assure at least a modicum of racial diversity. So when Bill Cosby's son applied and was admitted and offered a scholarship for minority students, I wondered if this made sense. I knew there were many low-income, culturally-isolated white students living on Staten Island who were not applying in significant numbers and those few who were admitted (with no affirmative-action assistance) were not offered equivalent financial support.

Class is not a comfortable issue for most Americans. Even advocating that we talk about it and equity evokes cries of "Class warfare!" Well, if there is any class warfare currently underway in American the most affluent are winning and passing along to their children their advantages.

If we are serious about ameliorating inequality, it is long past due when we should make class the central issue that it in fact is