"Ironically, the secular saint most closely associated with America's struggle for racial justice, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, was coming around to just this view before the assassin's bullet ended his journey to what he called 'the mountain top'.
"'We must recognise that we can't solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power,' he preached. And King called for a 'massive assault upon slums, inferior education, inadequate medical care [and] the entire culture of poverty'.
"'Long before the sociologist William Julius Wilson started talking about the "declining significance of race",' observes the historian William Chafee, 'King recognised that maldistribution of wealth and income was as central to America's problems as the colour of one's skin'."
Eric Alterman in The Guardian says he supports affirmative-action policies based on class not race.
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