Diversity is under siege in Donald Trump’s America. The nation’s first black president is being replaced by a white nationalist. Trump’s proposed cabinet has only one African American member, a neurosurgeon awkwardly shoehorned into the Housing and Urban Development slot. Education Secretary John King, who has championed efforts to increase socioeconomic and racial diversity in schooling is giving way to Betsy DeVos, who has backed private school vouchers, which have increased segregation in country after country where they’ve been tried. Jeff Sessions, a man rejected for a judgeship in the 1980s on account of racially insensitive remarks he made, is slated to replace Loretta Lynch, the nation’s first black female attorney general.

WE GON’ BE ALRIGHT: NOTES ON RACE AND RESEGREGATION by Jeff Chang Picador, 208 pp., $16.00

And that is just the beginning. Donald Trump will likely have the ability to nominate at least two Supreme Court justices, which will affect a whole host of policies, including affirmative action. In June, the Supreme Court narrowly saved racial diversity programs in higher education and just this fall it looked like Hillary Clinton would be in a position to establish the first liberal majority in a half century. That Court would have likely supported racial diversity programs, among many other progressive priorities. Now the equation has suddenly been reversed and explicit programs to count race in decision-making are likely to be in jeopardy.

For progressives, the pressing question is: How can diversity be re-imagined in the Trump era to give it political and legal resonance in the coming years? One answer may be to enlarge our concept of diversity—to include not just race and gender, but socioeconomic status as well.

Jeff Chang’s perceptive book, We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation, is at once strongly supportive of efforts to promote diversity in education and employment and a critic of the ahistorical nature of the policy. Chang prefers the original justification for affirmative action programs as a remedy for years of brutal discrimination. But he is willing to live with diversity as the legal basis of affirmative action as outlined in 1978, when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell Jr. suggested that the educational benefits of diversity justified the use of race in admissions in the case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Powell said racial diversity added to the educational experience of all students, just as geographic diversity and economic diversity do.

But over time, the concept of diversity took on a more specific meaning. Today, when people talk about diversity—in colleges and in the workforce—they usually are referring to race and gender rather than economic class. Sometimes, Chang notes, the term diversity is used awkwardly, as a synonym for people of color, as when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences passed a plan “doubling the membership of women and diverse members.” Working-class whites from rural Pennsylvania would surely diversify the membership of the Academy but that is not what’s meant by “diverse members.”