Scholars disagree about the relative importance of racism and economic inequality, but there's a consensus that both are significant and worthy of study. And much work is devoted to the question of when race matters and when it does not. Michaels recognizes that most poor kids, given their lack of resources, are not adequately prepared to succeed at such colleges, that their small numbers merely reflect the underlying economic inequality in the broader society, and that it is more urgent that they graduate from a decent college than that they attend Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. His real target is identity politics. And his charge is twofold. First, advocates of racial-identity politics fail to recognize that, from the standpoint of social justice, economic inequality is now of greater concern than racism. Second, focusing on race makes well-off people, of whatever color, feel more comfortable about the existence of gross economic inequalities because attention to race masks the fact that they benefit from economic stratification. There's something to both claims. However, the author argues that Michaels's variant of the familiar race-distracts-from-class argument overstates and misdiagnoses the problem.