This paper critiques diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) for its focus on access to elite institutions. This focus serves the class interests of the diverse professional-managerial class while neglecting the material needs of most blacks. In doing so, DEI reinforces an integrationist vision of the civil rights movement, hypocritically presenting itself as aligned with the movement’s radical social democratic vision.
As the momentum of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement fades, we are seeing a conservative reaction aimed at dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, anti-critical race theory legislation, and other restrictive laws in response to the public outcry spurred by BLM. The conservative reaction emerged in response to increased support for DEI initiatives, often from wealthy white liberals. This support is evident in corporate America and elite higher education institutions where DEI programs are seen as necessary to fulfill the “lost promise” of the civil rights movement. However, the debate around DEI is overlooking a more profound issue: the material conditions affecting the majority of blacks.
Since the 2009 financial crisis, conditions for working-class and poor blacks have remained dire, while middle- and upperclass blacks have stabilized or recovered.1 According to a Pew report, roughly two-thirds of blacks say they do not have enough income to lead the lives they desire. When broken down by class, 82 percent of lower-income earners and 64 percent of the middle class feel this way. The inability to live a meaningful life is directly tied to unmet basic needs, such as health care, stable jobs, quality education, and a crime-free environment. As a Pew Research Center report shows, the majority of blacks are most concerned with health care (66 percent), crime (58 percent), the economy and jobs (57 percent), and K-12 education (54 percent).2
Additionally, as of 2020, only 26 percent of black adults aged twenty-five or older have obtained a bachelor’s or advanced degree. Meanwhile, 32 percent have completed some college without obtaining a degree, and 42 percent have, at most, graduated from high school or earned an equivalent such as a Ged. This means 74 percent of black adults do not hold a bachelor’s degree.3 Given these realities, why does the public conversation around DEI focus so heavily on expanding access to elite institutions? When we consider the material and educational needs of most blacks, why is the public framing of racial justice centered on DEI initiatives within these elite spaces? DEI’s disconnection from the economic and educational concerns of most blacks makes it appear hypocritical.
This paper argues that DEI initiatives in elite higher education misframe racial justice by focusing on increasing the representation of blacks within the professional-managerial class (PMc).
The misframing stems from the integrationist interpretation of the civil rights movement, which equates inclusion in capitalism with racial justice. In doing so, this vision embodies the “education as redistribution” myth – the mistaken belief that expanding access to elite educational institutions is the primary way to redistribute wealth and achieve racial justice. The problem with this myth and, by extension, with DEI initiatives is that they overlook and often reproduce the structural conditions that perpetuate the inequalities they aim to address. Moreover, the misframing of racial justice reduces the struggle for justice to an intra-class competition between the PMc and the diverse professional- managerial class (dPMc) over who can access elite institutions and the economic opportunities gained from doing so. Consequently, it neglects the material and educational interests of most blacks, who do not and cannot attend these elite institutions.
Moreover, I argue that DEI initiatives and the dPMc hypocritically claim to embody the radical vision of the civil rights movement when they have in fact adopted a liberal integrationist perspective that frames racial justice as equal opportunity within elite institutions and the capitalist class structure. This approach is far from the civil rights movement’s radical goals; in reality, it is a reactionary stance that ultimately reinforces the racial and class inequalities it claims to challenge. The radical vision of the civil rights movement was rooted in a social democratic vision, calling for universal access to essential goods and the redistribution of wealth. This vision emphasized reallocating resources from elite higher education to non-elite institutions serving most black and working-class people. By focusing instead on representation within elite institutions, DEI initiatives primarily serve the aspirational interests of the dPMc, leaving the underlying structures of inequality intact and undermining the life chances of most black and working-class people whom they claim to support.
In developing this argument, this paper is organized into three parts. First, it situates DEI initiatives within a social-historical context, explaining how three ideological visions – conservative, liberal integrationist, and social democratic – shape the debate over DEI. The liberal integrationist vision gained dominance following the civil rights movement’s legal victories and the weakening of the labor movement. These shifts reinforced a framing of racial justice focused on expanding access to elite institutions and achieving equal opportunity within capitalism, which laid the foundation for what I call the “education as redistribution” myth: the mistaken belief that expanding access to elite education can redistribute wealth and fulfill the aims of racial justice. Second, it analyzes the intra-class conflict between the PMc and the dPMc, focusing on how this conflict is centered around who gets to control access to elite spaces. The PMc emphasizes meritocratic standards in this competition, while the dPMc advocates for diversity to address the history of racial domination. However, both perspectives accept the underlying premise of the education as redistribution myth, which perpetuates class domination. Finally, the paper critiques both the PMc and dPMc for advancing narrow visions rooted in their respective positions. Both ultimately reinforce the education as redistribution myth, which assumes that education can equalize opportunity. As a result, they hypocritically promote approaches that fail to address the material and educational needs of most blacks.
Social-Historical Context of DEI Initiatives
DEI’s misframing of racial justice is rooted in the social-historical factors that shaped competing visions of racial justice during the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement was an ideological movement with diverse goals and aims. At its height, it succeeded in dismantling legal discrimination through landmark achievements like Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. But these legal victories were only a small part of the broader struggle over the question of what racial justice is. Within the movement, different ideological strains offered distinct visions of what racial justice entails. For our purposes, I will focus on three of these visions: the liberal integrationist, the conservative, and the social democratic.4
The liberal integrationist vision became the dominant framing of the civil rights movement and aimed to integrate blacks into liberal capitalism. It focused on ensuring that blacks had equal access to the same social, economic, and educational opportunities as whites. This vision centered on providing blacks with an equal opportunity to compete within capitalism for elite positions while maintaining that the government had an obligation to rectify past injustices through race-conscious, targeted policies. In contrast, the conservative vision agreed that legal discrimination was unjust and should be abolished but argued that the government had no duty to address past injustices. For conservatives, ending legal discrimination was sufficient to achieve racial justice.5 Finally, the social democratic vision emphasized a broader approach to racial justice. Advocates of this vision argued that racial justice could not be separated from economic injustice. From this perspective, ending racial discrimination was necessary but insufficient for achieving justice because it would not address the compounded forms of domination that blacks faced – domination based on both race and class. Thus, to advance racial justice, adherents of this approach advocated for “civil rights unionism,” a link between union movements and civil rights movements to pursue a dual strategy of challenging racial discrimination alongside class exploitation and domination.6
Understanding these three visions is essential because the contemporary debate over DEI largely mirrors the one between the conservative and liberal visions of the civil rights movement, to the detriment of the social democratic vision. The social democratic vision has been neglected for several reasons, and it is essential to briefly explain them in order to understand how racial justice is misframed in the DEI debate.
The Decline of the Social Democratic Vision
Several interconnected factors led to the decline of the social democratic vision. First, the social democratic vision was pivotal in shaping exemplars within the civil rights movement. Figures like Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King Jr advocated for an approach to civil rights that intertwined racial and economic justice. For example, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was about civil rights and economic demands like jobs, fair wages, and broader economic equality, which aligned with the social democratic vision.7 However, for the social democratic vision to have gained more prominence, a strong labor movement would have needed to develop within the South – one capable of creating the form of civil rights unionism this perspective demanded. However, this vision faced significant challenges. Anti-union policies, such as the Taft-Hartley Act, weakened labor’s ability to mobilize, especially in the South, where a labor movement was necessary to advance civil rights unionism.8
Without a strong labor movement in the South, labor-oriented civil rights leaders like Randolph were compelled to build coalitions with middle-class black organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (sclc).9 These organizations, however, embraced a liberal integrationist vision that focused on legal rights and social integration, sidelining labor rights and economic redistribution – the core features of the social democratic vision. Moreover, these middle-class organizations, like the naacP, were funded by Northern white philanthropists who directed their resources toward legal strategies that would end segregation rather than the labor-oriented goals of the civil rights movement.10
The DEIndustrialization that occurred in the 1970s further weakened the prospects for a labor-based movement. Unionized manufacturing jobs – where many black workers had been making significant gains – began disappearing as industries moved operations elsewhere.11 Job loss and ongoing attacks on unions impeded the labor movement’s ability to advance a social democratic agenda. The weakening of the labor movement meant that the organizational structures needed to push for broader economic justice were severely diminished, leaving the social democratic wing of the civil rights movement without the institutional capacity to advance its vision.12
The Hegemony of the Liberal Democratic Vision
The liberal integrationist vision had held significant influence before the decline of the social democratic vision, but it had not yet come to dominate the broader conversation about racial justice.13 Its rise to hegemony came with the legal victories of the civil rights movement and the simultaneous decline of the labor movement. Landmark achievements like Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were pivotal, but they were framed through the lens of integrating blacks into liberal capitalism. As a result, the language of racial justice shifted toward equalizing opportunities within the capitalist system rather than addressing the broader economic issues affecting most blacks, such as access to jobs, income, and health care. Without a strong labor movement to support it, the social democratic vision – which aimed to challenge racial domination and advance universal social and economic rights – struggled to build a solid civil rights union movement to oppose the liberal integrationist vision.14
The decline of the labor movement, combined with the legal victories of the civil rights movement, created space for the rise of the dPMc. This new and influential faction of the PMc gained power within elite institutions, prestigious colleges, and the Democratic Party, shaping the discourse around racial justice. The dPMc, composed of upwardly mobile black professionals, framed racial justice primarily in terms of gaining access to elite spaces and institutions.15 They forcefully advocated for policies like affirmative action (and, by extension, DEI), viewing them as key to ensuring that blacks and other marginalized groups could secure positions within prestigious colleges and professional sectors. While these policies opened doors for the dPMc, they largely bypassed the black working class and closed the door on framing racial justice through a social democratic lens. Consequently, the call for racial justice increasingly centered on the aspirations of more privileged sections of the black community, leaving behind the concerns of the majority of blacks.16
With the social democratic perspective sidelined, there was no alternative to the common belief, accepted by both the liberal integrationist and conservative visions, that education was the key to achieving racial justice. Both liberal and conservative perspectives accepted the education as redistribution myth: the false assumption that access to elite education is the primary means of ensuring blacks have an equal opportunity to compete within liberal capitalism.17 While education can play a role in upward mobility for individuals, it cannot structurally redistribute wealth or significantly alter the economic conditions of most blacks or working-class people. By equating racial justice with access to elite institutions, this myth ignores the structural inequalities that continue to disadvantage most black people, particularly those who do not or cannot attend elite schools. How did this myth become equated with racial justice?
The Education as Redistribution Myth
The education as redistribution myth gained broader acceptance in the 1960s and ’70s as union movements lost their capacity to push for broader economic justice. The decline of labor unions, coupled with the rise of the knowledge economy and DEIndustrialization, resulted in fewer stable, middle-class jobs for working-class people and an increase in white-collar positions.18 Consequently, higher education became seen as the primary route to securing economic stability and middle-class status. This myth was further institutionalized through affirmative action court rulings, such as Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) and Grutter v. Bollinger (2003).19 While these cases debated the specifics of race- conscious admissions, they implicitly assumed that expanding access to elite institutions was central to achieving racial justice. Even the conservative justices dissenting against affirmative action accepted the underlying myth that economic opportunity should be distributed through access to elite universities.
In response to court rulings against race-based admission preferences, elite universities began creating DEI initiatives as a new approach to the liberal integrationist pursuit of racial justice. For example, Ellen Berrey’s The Enigma of Diversity highlights how the University of Michigan adapted to the Supreme Court’s decision in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) by redefining diversity as a proxy for disadvantage.20 This redefinition allowed Michigan to establish programs and initiatives to diversify its student body and faculty while complying with the court’s ruling. These efforts included outreach to high schools, scholarships for first-generation college students, and faculty hiring practices emphasizing broad conceptions of diversity. By shifting from explicit race-based policies to broader efforts to include “disadvantaged groups,” universities like Michigan navigated legal constraints while continuing to claim a commitment to racial justice. Yet even with this shift, the liberal integrationist view remains fundamentally flawed: it misframes racial justice as a redistribution of opportunity through education.
DEI and the Intra-Class Conflict
Within this context, the debate over DEI became an intra-class conflict between the PMc, which often upheld the conservative concern with merit, and the dPMc, which favored increasing diversity as a remedy for historical injustices. Both groups focused on who could gain access to prestigious institutions and their associated economic opportunities rather than challenging the broader economic structures that disadvantaged most black people. As a result, the debate turned into a competition over who gets to hoard which opportunities and why.
At its core, this conflict is about defining the criteria for who gains access to elite institutions and the opportunities they afford.21 The PMc advocates for meritocratic standards, arguing that colorblind measures like test scores, grades, and academic performance should determine who has access to these institutions. In contrast, the dPMc argues that diversity should be factored into admissions to counter the history of racial domination. But this seemingly moral debate between merit and diversity obscures a structural issue: neither side challenges the education as redistribution myth, which assumes that economic goods should be allocated through the capitalist labor market, whose access is determined by educational credentials. Even if we set aside this assumption about allocation of goods, the myth fails to justify the dPMc’s obsessive focus on elite college admissions for black and minority students, especially when most blacks have far more urgent educational needs at non-elite institutions.22
By organizing the discussion around who can access elite educational institutions, the parties avoid addressing the structural problem – the connection between educational attainment and access to essential goods – intensifying this intra-class conflict. The high stakes attached to elite educational attainment mean that the debate over who should be admitted to these institutions is about more than fairness; it’s about securing class dominance. The PMc and dPMc are fighting to shape the ruling class. The PMc seeks to preserve merit-based admissions because it believes this system fairly allocates finite opportunities. The dPMc, however, critiques merit for reproducing racial inequalities and advocates for diversity to compensate for the history of racial domination (and discrimination faced by other groups).
But why is racial justice being framed around access to elite institutions in the first place? This framing excludes the majority of blacks, particularly those from working-class backgrounds, who do not attend these elite schools. This was precisely the concern of the social democratic wing of the civil rights movement, which argued that racial justice requires breaking or weakening the link between education and access to essential goods.23 By focusing on elite representation and opportunity hoarding, both the PMc and dPMc end up neglecting the needs of most black people.
The Hypocrisy of it All
This failure to address these deeper structural issues exposes the hypocrisy of both the PMc and dPMc in the DEI debate, albeit in different ways. The PMc’s hypocrisy lies not in its advocacy of meritocratic standards but in its failure to address the needs and well-being of most black and brown people. In theory, merit standards are reasonable for determining how to allocate finite goods.24 However, amid gross economic inequalities, wealthier families will always have an unfair advantage in ensuring their children develop certain talents.25 Even with merit standards upheld, education will never be a means of redistributing wealth. The PMc often recognizes that class is essential in determining who can access elite institutions; however, its solutions either ignore this issue or reinforce class domination.
A prime example of this hypocrisy is Coleman Hughes’s The End of Race Politics, wherein he critiques race-based approaches like affirmative action and DEI for overlooking the role class (and culture) play in reproducing disparities.26 Hughes argues that merit- based, colorblind policies are preferable, but he fails to address what it would mean to tackle class from a colorblind perspective. Without confronting class domination, merit standards will continue to privilege wealthier families. Hughes even proposes solutions like charter schools, which perpetuate the very problem of class domination that he criticizes race policies for neglecting.27While the PMc advocates for colorblind principles, it fails to extend this logic to class. Addressing economic inequalities in a colorblind way would mean providing universal social and economic goods to everyone, regardless of race. The PMc’s failure to connect its colorblind principles to the need for universal social and economic goods reveals its hypocrisy: it criticizes DEI approaches for conflating race with class and undermining the importance of colorblindness, yet it offers no meaningful solutions that address the class problem it claims DEI neglects.
The dPMc, on the other hand, appears hypocritical in three ways. First, it seems hypocritical when its conception of racial justice is compared to a philosophically sound understanding of justice. Justice – racial or otherwise – demands breaking or weakening the link between educational attainment and access to essential goods.28 While claiming to advance racial justice, the dPMc frames it narrowly as gaining access to elite colleges, overlooking that universal access to basic goods like employment, housing, and health care is a far more urgent need for most black people – and promoting racial justice solely within the confines of the education as redistribution myth. Yet justice cannot be served by redistributing access to education; it demands a redistribution of wealth and essential goods regardless of educational status.
The second way the dPMc appears hypocritical is when judged by even a minimal standard of justice. Suppose we set aside the broader ideal of justice, which demands universal access to basic goods, and adopt the following modest view: educational resources should be directed primarily to the institutions serving most black students.29 As noted above, 74 percent of blacks do not hold a bachelor’s degree, and many of those who do pursue higher education attend two-year universities, community colleges, or vocational schools. From this minimal understanding of racial justice, DEI should focus on improving the institutions where most black students are enrolled. This would involve redistributing resources from elite colleges to underfunded institutions and making higher education at non-elite schools either free or significantly more affordable.30 Additionally, DEI initiatives should work toward eliminating hyperexploitative for-profit colleges, which disproportionately harm working-class blacks by trapping them in massive student loan debt.31 The dPMc does not prioritize these goals even though they would dramatically impact the lives of most blacks.
Finally, DEI and the dPMc appear hypocritical on an ideological level. While claiming to represent the transformative wing of the civil rights movement, DEI initiatives embrace a liberal integrationist vision that amounts to what Avishai Margalit calls a “rotten compromise” – an agreement that may achieve specific immediate goals but ultimately accommodates forms of domination, thereby allowing an unjust system to persist.32 By misframing racial justice through the lens of the education as redistribution myth, DEI embodies a rotten compromise that accepts capitalism as just and prioritizes educational access to elite institutions over addressing the underlying economic inequalities affecting most black people.33 What makes this particularly hypocritical is that DEI claims to represent the radical and transformative vision of the civil rights movement when, in reality, it accepts the very conditions that perpetuate the racial and economic injustices its proponents claim to care about.34
The radical wing of the civil rights movement was rooted in the social democratic vision, which recognized that universal programs addressing basic needs were necessary to uplift most blacks and working-class people in general. Today most black people still express that their primary needs are basic goods like health care, housing, and income. Yet DEI initiatives focus on representation within elite institutions. This disconnect highlights how DEI is failing to carry forward the civil rights movement’s social democratic vision, which argued that racial justice was inseparable from economic justice. Racial justice depends on providing universal access to basic goods, regardless of educational attainment, class status, or race. This is also what it means to provide colorblind class solutions.
To put this more succinctly, the ideological hypocrisy of DEI is this: DEI initiatives claim to advance a radical vision of racial justice, but in reality they perpetuate a narrow, compromised vision that caters to the aspirations of black elites. By focusing on expanding access to elite institutions, they sustain the conditions of class and racial inequality they claim to address. And by ignoring the material conditions that keep working-class blacks economically vulnerable, DEI initiatives leave blacks at a disadvantage when competing for elite educational positions in the first place.
Any meaningful conception of justice – racial or otherwise – must distinguish between what is desirable and what is achievable.34 While providing universal goods may seem politically unachievable in the current climate, that does not make the goal undesirable. The central issue is that justice requires breaking or weakening the link between educational attainment and access to basic goods. Racial justice demands ensuring that everyone has access to these goods. Calling for universal social and economic rights is not simply a matter of addressing class inequalities but essential to achieving racial justice. Racial justice means treating everyone with equal dignity and respect regardless of race. This also means that everyone should be provided with a set of universal social and economic goods needed to have a fair opportunity to realize their potential. By ignoring this fundamental aspect of racial justice, DEI initiatives reduce it to an intraclass struggle for representation in elite spaces.
The problem arises when the practical challenges of achieving this goal are conflated with its desirability. This is precisely the issue with the liberal integrationist approach embraced by DEI proponents: it takes a “rotten compromise” and turns it into the horizon of racial justice.35 As a result, we are told that incremental reforms within capitalism – such as equal representation within elite institutions – constitute justice. This framing presents a false choice: anyone who challenges the narrow focus on elite access is accused of either racism or class reductionism. In reality, addressing class dynamics is crucial for advancing the interests of the majority of black people, whom DEI proponents claim to care about. For this reason, my argument in this paper is not a class reductionist position; instead it is a challenge to the narrow and hypocritical conception of racial justice that the dPMc accepts and that DEI initiatives perpetuate.
Conclusion
In the debate over DEI, the glaring absence is of the social democratic vision that sees racial justice as inseparable from economic justice. Without this broader vision, the DEI debate remains mired in hypocrisy: both the PMc and dPMc accept the “education as redistribution” myth, which positions elite education as the primary pathway to economic opportunity. As a result, the two groups are locked in a class conflict akin to musical chairs, competing for limited seats within elite spaces. This narrow focus on access to elite institutions overlooks the material conditions and structural barriers that affect the majority of blacks – whether at non-elite schools or within society at large. DEI approaches and the dPMc falsely assume racial justice can be achieved through access when justice requires redistributing resources – whether by directing them from elite to non-elite institutions or through universal policies that benefit all.
Through this misframing, the PMc and dPMc avoid two crucial questions. First, how do we provide adequate resources to the educational institutions that serve most black people – such as community colleges and vocational schools – so they can better support their students? Second, how do we ensure universal access to essential social goods so that the chances of achieving a good life are not contingent upon educational attainment? As an elite project focused on diversifying the PMc rather than challenging racial and class domination, current DEI initiatives fail to address these deeper questions.
To confront the primary inequities DEI claims to address, we must reclaim the social democratic vision of the civil rights movement. This vision saw racial justice as inextricably linked to economic justice. By redistributing resources to the institutions that serve most black students and guaranteeing universal access to basic goods, we can move beyond the narrow, hypocritical focus on “black faces in high places” and begin to challenge the structural problems of class domination and exploitation that hold back the majority of working-class blacks and the working class as a whole.
Quentin Wheeler-Bell, Catalyst
Footnotes
1 Cedric Johnson, After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle (New York: Verso, 2023).
2 Mark Hugo Lopez and Mohamad Moslimani, “Key Facts About the Nation’s 47.9 Million Black Americans,” Pew Research Center, January 18, 2024.
3 Mohamad Moslimani et al., “Facts About the U.S. Black Population,” Pew Research Center, January 18, 2024.
4 Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
5 Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? (New York: William Morrow, 1984).
6 Robert R. Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
7 William P. Jones, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013).
8 Michael Goldfield, The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
9 Cornelius L. Bynum, A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010).
10 Risa L. Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
11 Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
12 Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America : Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
13 Howard Winant, The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
14 Goluboff, Lost Promise of Civil Rights.
15 Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
16 Jones, March on Washington.
17 Jon Shelton, The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023).
18 Shelton, Education Myth.
19 Melvin I. Urofsky, The Affirmative Action Puzzle: A Comprehensive and Honest Exploration of One of the Most Controversial Legal and Social Issues in US History (New York: Skyhorse, 2022).
20 Ellen Berrey, The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
21 Mitchell L. Stevens, Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
22 Laura T. Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen, Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).
23 Daniel S. Moak, From the New Deal to the War on Schools: Race, Inequality, and the Rise of the Punitive Education State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022).
24 Adrian Wooldridge, Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World (New York: Skyhorse, 2021).
25 Stephen Ball, Class Strategies and the Education Market: The Middle Classes and Social Advantage (New York: Routledge, 2002).
26 Coleman Hughes, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America (New York: Thesis, 2024).
27 Christopher A. Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski, The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
28 Tom Malleson, Against Inequality: The Practical and Ethical Case for Abolishing the Superrich (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).
29 Hamilton and Nielsen, Broke.
30 Christopher Martin, The Right to Higher Education: A Political Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
31 Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (New York: The New Press, 2018).
32 Avishai Margalit, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
33 Quentin Wheeler-Bell, “Broken Glass: The Social Evil of Urban Poverty and a
34 Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (New York: Verso, 2010).
35 Quentin Wheeler-Bell, “We Aren’t All Integrationists: A Radical Critique of Racial School Integration,” Philosophical Inquiry in Education 30, no. 3 (2023).
