Welcome one and all to the Mona Charrin Show. I am delighted to be joined this week by Richard Callenberg. He is of the Progressive Policy Institute and author of many books. Most recently, Class Matters. Now, this is one of those really, really long subtitles,

but I understand why you chose this long subtitle. It does kind of tell the story. So here it is.

Ready? The fight to get beyond race preferences, reduce inequality, and build real diversity at America's

colleges.

Richard Callenberg, thanks so much for joining me.

Oh, great to be with you, Mona.

So let's start with a little background about you.

You have been involved in these debates, public policy debates, about affirmative action.

For many years, you were, though,

you talk in the book a lot about your early inspirations. So you're a man of the Democratic Party, of the left, you know, moderate left, I would say. And you were very influenced by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

So why don't you tell that story? And tell us, you know, where you were born, what kind of a family

you come from. Give us your background. Okay, great. So I was born in Washington, D.C. to a liberal, socially conscious, upper middle class white family.

And my father was a liberal Presbyterian minister.

My mother was a school board member, so civic-minded.

And I went off to... My mother was a school board member, so civic-minded.

And I went off to college at Harvard and was around a lot of people who were upper-middle class, no matter what their race was. They were almost all liberal.

But I came of age during Ronald Reagan's presidency.

And so that kind of made me think a little bit,

made me start to rethink my politics

and go back to a better time, in my view,

when liberals were pushing for kind of a broad

working class coalition, multiracial working class coalition.

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