It was the turn of the millennium, and the schools in North Carolina’s Wake County had a problem.
Like many other school systems in the South that started desegregation efforts in the 1970s, they had long bused students from their neighborhoods to schools around Raleigh, the state capital.
Race-based busing was unpopular. But the county remained stubbornly segregated by neighborhood, so ending the system entirely would have meant a return to unequal schools.
The solution was simple: use class instead of race. Wake County began assigning students to ensure that no school had more than 40% of students coming from a low-income neighborhood or more than 25% of students studying below grade level.
It was hailed as ‘the next kind of integration.’
The innovation led to national news coverage, with The New York Times hailing it as “the next kind of integration.” What’s more, it worked. A 2021 study by scholars from the University of North Carolina School of Education found that reassigned students had higher math scores and were less likely to be suspended. There was no evidence of negative effects, which was reinforced by the fact that few parents opted out of the assignments, even though they had the choice.
When I lived in Raleigh from 2003 to 2008, it seemed like Wake County’s system pointed a way forward, and not just for K-12 schools. The Supreme Court had already begun questioning strictly race-based affirmative action, striking down an undergraduate admissions policy at Columbia University in 2003 while narrowly upholding a separate admissions policy for its law school.
Class-based affirmative action would not only address the continuing effects of slavery and segregation, but also give a boost to other students facing economic struggles. It seemed like a solution that both liberals and conservatives could agree on, bypassing contentious arguments about race in order to focus on helping make America the land of opportunity that it always claims to be.
But in 2010, the Wake County school board overturned the income-based program amid conservative opposition. The school system now uses a hybrid model that assigns students to neighborhood schools while using special-interest magnet schools to draw them to other parts of the county. By emphasizing parental choice, the new system has ruffled fewer feathers.
At the time, I found it odd that the county’s professional conservatives — many of whom I knew personally from covering state politics — expended so much energy to fight the program. Sure, there were some parents who were unhappy, but nothing like the groundswell that would justify the amount of organizing around it. But a recent letter from America First Legal Foundation, a conservative advocacy group started in 2021 by Trump adviser Stephen Miller, finally gave me an answer.
The foundation opposes affirmative action, running ads accusing the Biden administration of “anti-white bigotry” and representing white farmers opposing a loan program for minorities. The July 17 letter requests that the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division investigate the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for anti-white discrimination.
Among the expected complaints about programs to encourage diversity, there’s one targeting a tuition policy started in 2024 thanks to a $1 billion donation from a charity started by billionaire Mike Bloomberg. Under the program, students coming from families earning less than $300,000 a year pay no tuition, and those whose families make less than $175,000 get help with room and board too. Nearly two-thirds of enrolled students meet those standards.
As far as class-based affirmative action goes, this is quite generous; it covers both lower-income and middle-class families. But the group objects because the dean once said it would enhance “socioeconomic diversity.” It’s worth reading America First Legal’s argument in full: It is well recognized that race and ethnicity are inseparable from socioeconomic status. They are ‘intimately intertwined’ and, in terms of stratification, often determine a person’s socioeconomic status. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, wealth and income gaps vary significantly between racial groups, with Black and Hispanic households possessing a fraction of the wealth held by White and Asian households. By leveraging these disparities, Johns Hopkins masks racial preferences behind income thresholds. In short, the group claims, Johns Hopkins is trying to help poor and middle-class students of all races, but since that would help Black and Hispanic students more, it’s racist. This logic is toxic. It would mean the government not only doesn’t have an obligation to fight poverty, but is actually barred from even trying by civil rights laws. The only race-neutral option, it appears, would be helping maintain the status quo — at all costs. It’s tempting to think of Miller’s group as an outlier, but it may be more of an advance guard, like the conservatives I knew who fought so hard against Wake County’s schools policy. Because if you agree with this, by extension you would also want to raise taxes on the poor and reduce them on the rich, make it harder for lower-income and middle-class students to go to college and add barriers to immigration from countries in Central and South America while creating new ways for rich Europeans to move to the U.S. And in fact, the Trump administration has done all those things. Today, America First Legal’s letter is an egregious request from a far-right advocacy group. Tomorrow, it may be government policy.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW. He has previously worked for such outlets as Time magazine and Bloomberg News. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies and is the creator of Your First Byline. 
