In her speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, Michelle Obama coined one of the defining phrases of the political era: \u201cWhen they go low, we go high.\u201d<\/p>\n
Going high did not work. Donald Trump won that election. While many of his supporters expressed discomfort with his go-low approach to politics, far more embraced it. Trump, despite his pedigree as a New York billionaire, would embarrass and attack and disparage the perceived elites, and many Americans loved him for it.<\/p>\n
Lesson learned. In her speech Tuesday night at the 2024 Democratic convention, Obama didn\u2019t explicitly revoke the \u201cwe go high\u201d mantra, but she made clear that a different moment called for a different approach. It wasn\u2019t that she went low, exactly, but she was unsparing in her disdain for and criticisms of her husband\u2019s successor.<\/p>\n
In one of the more memorable stretches of her speech, she equated the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, with the majority of Americans who never enjoyed Trump\u2019s wealth and privilege \u2014 and the safety net that accompanies them.<\/p>\n
Harris \u201cunderstands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward,\u201d Obama said. \u201cWe will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. If we bankrupt a business or choke in a crisis, we don\u2019t get a second, third or fourth chance. If things don\u2019t go our way, we don\u2019t have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead. No.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t get to change the rules so we always win,\u201d she continued. \u201cIf we see a mountain in front of us, we don\u2019t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top. We put our heads down. We get to work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s name wasn\u2019t used but it didn\u2019t need to be. That line about the escalator, a call back to Trump\u2019s 2015 campaign launch, made the point obvious if it wasn\u2019t already.<\/p>\n
But there are six words in that stretch that extend well beyond Trump. Obama used a phrase that succinctly and elegantly reframes the ongoing debate over inequality in the United States and how it might be addressed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe affirmative action of generational wealth.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s concise, centered on two familiar concepts. The first is \u201caffirmative action,\u201d the term used to describe programs generally focused on ensuring that non-White Americans have access to resources and institutions they might not otherwise have. And the second is \u201cgenerational wealth,\u201d the transition of economic (and social) power through families and, at times, communities.<\/p>\n
These are descriptors of elements in American society that are in tension. If you are a recipient of generational wealth, you don\u2019t need affirmative action to ensure you have access. If you are someone who would benefit from affirmative action, you generally are not someone with access to generational wealth. Of course, you might be, which is one of the outliers used to criticize affirmative action programs: They often center more on demographic traits than on economic class.<\/p>\n
The linchpin of Obama\u2019s phrase, though, is its shortest word: \u201cof.\u201d She isn\u2019t contrasting affirmative action and generational wealth as conduits to power and success, she\u2019s overlapping them. She\u2019s noting that generational wealth is a form of affirmative action, here in the person of Trump but certainly beyond that.<\/p>\n
How? Because generational wealth presents opportunities to people who might otherwise not have access to them: legacy admissions at Ivy League colleges, tutors and training, vehicles and housing that make entry-level jobs or internships more feasible. These are benefits that derive from social and economic class \u2014 a form of affirmative action. This is how reframing a subject works; it presents familiar information in a new context.<\/p>\n
The natural response, of course, is that a parent bolstering her child\u2019s success is different than a government program that includes an effort to ensure that Black Americans have equal access. But this is the point of the word \u201cgenerational.\u201d We\u2019re not simply considering a rich parent and the advantages they might offer. We\u2019re focused on patterns of wealth transitioning from parent to child over and over again. And those patterns, traced backward over surprisingly few decades, very quickly bring us back to racial divisions.<\/p>\n
There is no question that Black and White Americans did not have equal access to economic success in the 1950s or 1960s. They didn\u2019t in later decades, either, thanks both to ongoing overt discrimination (like being unable to rent an apartment) and discriminatory patterns built in to lending and jobs systems (such as making it harder to obtain a mortgage for homes in some neighborhoods). Nearly every American has a parent or grandparent who was alive in the era of explicit discrimination \u2014 two generations away. Generational wealth, then, almost necessarily means wealth rooted in an American economy where explicit discrimination existed.<\/p>\n
One of the central debates over race in recent years has centered on existence or extent of racism embedded in American social and legal systems. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, focused on systemic racism in law enforcement, increased the number of White Americans \u2014 specifically, White Democrats \u2014 who indicated that they thought discrimination was a central cause for the lower incomes and worse housing many Black Americans experience.<\/p>\n
Reflecting their broad rejection of the idea of systemic racism, the biennial General Social Survey finds that Republicans are much more likely to indicate that Black Americans have worse economic positions due to lack of motivation.<\/p>\n
They reject the idea of systemic racism in part because they view it as an unfair and unpatriotic disparagement of the United States. It\u2019s in part, too, because the narrative of America overcoming explicit racism during the Civil Rights movement suggests that the fight is over. Many point to Michelle Obama\u2019s husband: How could racism exist in an America that elected a Black man as president?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also in part because the Black Lives Matter movement and questions about racism in general are coded as Democratic issues and therefore subject to partisan response. Black Lives Matter led to the right embracing Blue Lives Matter. Discussions of systemic racism were met with many White Republicans viewing themselves as victims of anti-White racism (to Trump\u2019s political benefit). Affirmative action programs became a useful target for demonstrating that sort of anti-White bias.<\/p>\n
As Michelle Obama knows. Her line overlapping affirmative action and generational wealth wasn\u2019t offering \u201caffirmative action\u201d as a pejorative term. It was, instead, contextualizing a different way in which people are boosted by circumstances that aren\u2019t always under their control. It was a defense of affirmative action programs that noted how wealth built in an explicitly unfair economy was its own form of unearned advantage.<\/p>\n
It was pointed at Trump, yes. But it\u2019s a reframing that rewires the conversation of race and advantage in a striking way. In six words that will likely have more staying power, if not more success, than \u201cwe go high.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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