In a sweeping 54–14 vote, blue-state Democrats have bravely intervened to ensure that the vulgar, uncurated realities of economic disadvantage do not ruin the pristine aesthetic of racial preferences.
One is immediately reminded, observing the California State Assembly's dogged, almost heroic refusal to acknowledge the yawning chasm of modern economic disparity, of the rigid, taxonomic sorting mechanisms present in Dante's Paradiso; there is a profound, if tragically misguided, commitment to categorizing human souls by the most superficial of atmospheric conditions rather than the grinding, material realities of their earthly ascents. By advancing a state constitutional amendment to reinstate race-based preferences in K-12 education and higher-education scholarships, a vintage policy motif the Supreme Court decisively struck down three years prior, the state's Democratic supermajority has elected to preserve the nostalgic patina of civil-rights-era optics, meticulously shielding the sons and daughters of Atherton tech executives from the aesthetic horror of having to compete with the genuinely poor.
It is a legislative maneuver that mirrors the formalist exhaustion of obscure 1970s Belgian structuralist cinema, specifically Chantal Akerman's lesser-known, obsessively repetitive short Saute Ma Ville, wherein the protagonist systematically destroys her own environment in a misguided attempt to clean it; the Democrats, similarly, are setting fire to their own political capital to sweep away the specter of class, preferring a pristine, symbolic victory over the vulgarity of material redistribution. To acknowledge that the achievement gap between the rich and the poor now vastly eclipses the gap between racial groups would require a fundamentally unchic pivot toward economic populism, a stylistic faux pas the party is simply unwilling to commit.
We simply cannot allow the crude, untidy metric of household income to disrupt the delicate, Pantone-based tapestry we are trying to weave on our college campuses.
To embrace class-based affirmative action, a policy that would awkwardly sweep up the rural, the disenfranchised, and the economically decimated of all backgrounds into a single, cohesive framework of upward mobility, would be to introduce a level of chaotic, unmanaged reality akin to the slime-drenched, anarchic climax of a 1997 episode of Nickelodeon's Figure It Out; it is simply too messy, too unpredictable, and far too lacking in the precise, boutique-activism that the modern metropolitan palate demands. Instead, the state Senate now weighs a measure that boldly asks the electorate to ignore the vast, crushing architecture of late capitalism, insisting, with a faint but undeniable disdain for the working poor, that true societal progress is merely a matter of ensuring the collegiate yacht club is appropriately color-coordinated.