Pronounce that. He went to actually the University Without walls and then went to harvard law. At imminent fellow. When we went to talk with each other, there was the imminent thing with church and state in italy, france and the United States. He said, i would rather talk about affirmative action beginning with Martin Luther king and his views. Absolutely. We welcome you to mosiac. What are we going to talk about . Well, the debate about affirmative action today is so important. And the question of how colleges and universities should select their student body. It is so important and there are so and there are three different kinds of admissions. I talked about where doctor king would come out if he were examining each of these approaches to affirmative action. We have mike bruce in our crack crew who will bring it up. Our first one is, racebased admissions. This is the traditional form of affirmative action that was approved under limited circumstances back in 1978 and also approved in 2003. It is up infront of the Supreme Court again in the texas fisher case. It is also the form of a minute of affirmative action that is aimed at admitting minority students to ensure there is diversity among student bodies in terms of race, ethnicity and in terms of particular talents and points of view. In this regard, that a university or a college can take account of phrase as one of the factors in admitting students to their school. Okay, so you are going to do that. Then the second thing you are going to talk about is . Classbased affirmative action. That is the school saying that we want diversity in terms of class and income, economic background and socioeconomic status. Reaching out and giving a boost to students who apply to poor or middle class families. That is the second of the second form. There are some that say it would be better than racebased affirmative action either because it is alienating and causes less social disagreement, or because it is important because of the importance of getting poor people into these frankly affluent institutions. The third category is . The third category was implemented in texas and florida and to some extent here in california. It is geographybased. You take the top students from every high school in the state and you say they are eligible to attend the top schools because they are the top students. It is a certain amount of race based affirmative action because the schools are so segregated that for the most part, this students attend minority. If you take the top students from the state. Thats what goes on in texas and that accounts for part of the diversity in texas. When we come back, we will walk through those again for you. David oppenheimer is our guest. He is a professor at berkeley law. Lets take us back. You say the First Education is race. Thats right, schools trying have a class that is racially and economically diverse. Why . Because it has benefit beyond the classroom and in the school. It is important to have diversity among the graduates of our top universities. So that we have diversity across the military leaders and in terms of government leaders and diversity in terms of boardrooms. That racial minorities are not left out. It is important for both of those. Moderator is racebased admission still a possibility in california. For private, yes, but for public universities, no. That is because of proposition 209 passed in 1996. I think it is important to recognize that for private schools across the United States and for Public Schools and all that it you state all but a few states, it becomes important for an overall approach to promoting diversity in the classroom and also promoting diversity in the institution. Moderator that is an easy concept to grasp. You have 100 students in a private university. You can set aside 10 for africanamerican and 104 latino and so on. And 10 spaces for latino students and so on. It is not permitted for private universities. What a school can do is say, as we look at the applications, one of the things we can look at is what will the student add . Is the student and musician or athlete or someone with terrific accomplishments . Is it somebody that has overcome a great deal of disadvantage . Will the student add racial or brett at diversity. It helps in making the decision about who we will give admission to and who we will not. Moderator it has been interesting phase in my own research. Where doctor king is described as someone who believed in color blindness based on his i have a dream speech. We will talk about a time when his children were when children will be judged by their character and not the color of their skin. What did doctor king have to say about these types of affirmative action . It was not called affirmative action at the time because the word had not come into usage. But what i found, and it took a while to get there was that doctor kings action answer was that we needed all three of these things. It is not a matter of choosing one over the other. All of them are beneficial. Doctor king, back in 1962 started an operation which was ultimately taken over by after his death. Rather, while he was still alive, he ran it with Jesse Jackson, one of his chief aides. Then Jesse Jackson took over the program. One of the key things was to go into minority communities in which there were employees employers who were not employing black employees. Going to them and saying, we insist that you have a percentage of black employees that is proportional to the black community that you serve, or the community from which you draw your employees. Or, if you do that dont do that, we will boy cat you boycott you and take you out of business. This was a threat to companies who are traditionally not hire black employees. It started in atlanta and it was very successful. It created thousands of jobs for black people in atlanta. Then Jesse Jackson took it with doctor king to chicago. There were boycotts of many businesses in chicago and the result of that was again, thousands of jobs for black workers in chicago. And, boycotts of major businesses there. It was an important part of doctor kings civil right strategy writes strategy. Civil rights approach. He was believing and supporting and advocating for it. He also advocated for the other forms of affirmative action that we started off talking about today. He was also talking about affirmative action based on class and based on geography. It wasnt that he supported only racial quotas in employment, he was supporting all three types of affirmative action. Moderator why are you so interested . Well, i teach at one of the great universities of the world. I teach at a university that until proposition 209 had a large number of black students and now we have a small number of black students. I think that effects what happens in my classroom and i think it affects what happens in our society. I think it is bad for california that we are not training as many black leaders as we were. That universities like ucla had a very affirmative affirmative Action Program which we cant have any more. I think it is bad for the learning environment when i am teaching in the classroom and often teaching about race and there are so black and so few black and latino students in my classroom. Moderator we are here with David Oppenheimer. When we come back, we will ask him about himself and dealing with race, class and economic balance in the classroom. Moderator we are talking with professor David Oppenheimer about affirmative action and the three ways it is being approach. Before we returned to that, a little bit about yourself. Are you from the bay area originally . Know, i grew up here in new york i grew up in new york city and i moved here in the 1970s. I went to harvard law and i was a Research Assistant for the same person that president obama was a Research Assistant to years later. I participated in what i think of as a Foreign Exchange program. I spent my last year at berkeley. Between harvard and berkeley, it was definitely for exchange, it was a different world. I did undergraduate work in berkeley as well, but coming back as a thirdyear law student, i realized that this is where i want to settle down. Since the 1970s, i have lived here in california, mostly in the bay area. Moderator you grew up in new york city . Yes, new york city. Moderator why the interest in law . I grew at a time grew up at a time when civil rights leaders were heroes. I just couldnt imagine a greater job than being a lawyer and a civil rights lawyer. Moderator why did you go to harvard law . What did they see in you . I can imagine. For many years, i thought there must have been some other David Oppenheimer that got into penn state, yale and harvard. There is something called the imposter syndrome which is a big issue with our students. Many students feel like we made a mistake in admitting them to berkeley. They feel like impostors. This is true for students. It is particularly true for my nudist for minority students and women. It is something we have talked about and combated. I tell the students when they arrive that there are a lot of hard decisions that have to be made on the admissions committee. But the students that we admit, those are the easy decisions. The hard decisions are the students that we had to deny that we would also have liked to have been knitted. Moderator like to have admitted. Moderator so your wife she is a journalist and has retired. Moderator your by and your boys. One is a restauranteur and another is an advocate in alternative energy. Both are doing very interesting work. Moderator and neither went into law . The one that does policy work went to law school and then realized that he that what he really wanted to do was policy work. He has a Legal Education and he uses it all the time, but he is not practicing law. Moderator lets go back to affirmative action. You talked about race, lets talk about class. Sure. One of the things that doctor king proposed was a program to eradicate poverty. He worked with president johnson in establishing the war on poverty. He spoke to the commission in 1966 about the importance of eradicating poverty. He said at the time, this will benefit black people in norms sleep and it will benefit poor white people. That is appropriate. Poverty is a disease. Under the common law, there is a principle what he said was that under the common law, there is a principle in which people who have had labor stolen are entitled to restitution. That includes restitution to their families, even if they are gone. That justified a program to eliminate poverty in the United States. It was very much a combination of trying to do something important in terms of helping black americans and doing it through an approach that takes it through talent rather than race. He did not believe in that exclusively. He also believed in racial quotas and employment. But he saw that his two prongs of a threepronged attack to help to remedy the problem of racism and racial discrimination. So you are talking really about economic disparity and class . So, this is a way to shrink this sort of thing . You talked about the inequities with diversity, racism and the cost of goods. You said that where people live and where they go to school is a disadvantage. It is enormously important in terms of somebodys future. The community in which they grow up in the school that they attend, these have great impact in terms of being able to predict where that person is going to go and what kind of success that person is going to have. You know, everybody that works hard feels like, i did this because i worked hard. But, the truth is that i, for example, i think i have worked hard and i am proud of what i have accomplished, but it is also my White Privilege and my male privilege, economic privilege having grown up in an upper middle class family. All of these things are important. Moderator you are dealing you are talking about class as the second one. We talked about class and now we are going to talk about economic privilege when we come back. I will talk about doctor kings effort to rebuild cities. It was one of the three forms of affirmative action that he advocated during his lifetime. Moderator we are talking with professor David Oppenheimer on affirmative action in the three ways it is being addressed. When we come back, we will wrap it up in the fourth segment. Thanks. Moderator we are talking with David Oppenheimer. In the previous segment, he talked about his twin sons. One had gone to law school and is now in public policy. We didnt mean to short the other one who is a restauranteur in the east bay and rolling. We have covered race conscious and class conscious and the third one is it is geography conscious. In the texas plan, for example, in the public universities in texas, the top 10 of every High School Class is eligible to attend the top public universities in texas. Similarly, again swinging back to doctor king. He supported a program to rebuild americas inner cities. It was based on geography and it was very much conscious of the fact that this was largely this would largely benefit africanamericans. It was race blind in the sense that he was saying that it would benefit poor white people and hispanics and let ted knows and anyone and latinos and anyone, particularly in the 60s, who were so disadvantaged. They largely remain that way today. Despite the rebirth of some of our cities. Moderator let me interrupt you. When you say the texas plan, that means all of the counties all of the high schools. Moderator the 10 refers to the top 10 and they are granted admission. Austin is the top 7 and texas tech in some of the others is the top 10 . Moderator and so thats why it is called the texas 10. The point that i take from all of this is that we should understand that the three forms of affirmative action that we have discussed here are not mutually exclusive. There is no reason that we cant do all three. They each serves a different purpose and they each give us a somewhat different result. But, when we combine them, we are accomplishing more. Moderator there it is on the screen. Exactly. Race conscious admissions, class conscious admissions and geographicbased admissions. All three of them. When i go back and look at doctor kings speeches and i look at his testimony, it is that he would have, if he were alive today, been telling us, dont choose one over the other, choose all three. Moderator David Oppenheimer , professor of law at cal. Thank you. We will be back next week. Thank you for watching affirmative action, race conscious, class conscious and economicbased consciousness. Thank you for the graphic. After a long day of hiking in portland, you may be too tired to walk back to your hotel. Thats why we have public transportation. whispering what are you doing up . whispering mom said i could have a midnight snack. whispering well, i say its late, and you need to go to bed. whispering why . whispering because i am the boss. whispering youre not the boss, moms the boss. whispering well, technically, we are cobosses. whispering technically, moms the boss. Mmmm. Shhh. Mmmm. Yoplait. You may be too tired to walk back to your hotel. Thats why we have public transportation. Have a show idea. We wod love to hear from you. Go to facebook dot com slash bay sunday and comment to the p i recently had the chance tt down with the founder of a retreat meant to provide a holistic heali experience for wounded vete. Today ill also be talking a local musician, and a uniqun francisco theatrical group. Up first we have amir solta, one of the directors of dog redemption. Amir soltani is director of bush a musician and a unique San Francisco theatrical group. Moderator good morning, tell us about the film