Executive Times

 

 

 

 

 

2007 Book Reviews

 

The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality by Walter Benn Michaels

Rating:

***

 

(Recommended)

 

 

 

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Class

 

Walter Benn Michaels wants to shift political attention from diversity to class, and he says why with eloquence in his new book, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. Michaels pokes at both right and left throughout this book, which dances on every page to his one-note Samba: we promote the free aspects of diversity while we ignore the cost of real economic differences. His version of progressive politics demands attention to economic inequality. Here’s an excerpt, from the end of Chapter 2, “Our Favorite Victims,” pp. 76-79:

 

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in 1993; the National Museum of the American Indian opened on the Mall in 2004 and if Khalid Muhammad had only lived a little longer, he might have died happy since the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution has now approved plans for a National Museum of African-American History and Culture near the Washington Monument. Old-style racists like Jesse Helms were against it, but new-style antiracists like Dick Cheney and John Roberts and Bill Frist and Thad Cochran (the senator from Mississippi who doesn’t make racist remarks) are all for it. It goes without saying, however, that there won’t—and that there shouldn’t—be a National Museum of Lower-Income Americans on the Mall. It’s hard to see what good it would be to poor people to start celebrating their culture, much less their survival as a group. We don’t worry that poor people run the risk of assimilation to wealth, which is to say, we don’t seek to preserve the distinctive things—the bad educations, the inadequate health care—that make poor people who they are. We do think of at least some poor people as inheriting their poverty, but we don’t think of their poverty as their heritage; so, for example, where it makes sense to say of some people that they are “part Jewish” or “part black,” we don’t think it makes sense to say of anyone that he or she is “part poor” or “part rich.” There may be people of mixed race, but there are no people of mixed income; we don’t even have the concept of mixed income. Above all, we don’t, whether or not we are ourselves poor, think that poverty is just as good as wealth, even if—especially if—we think that poor people are just as good as rich people.

The meaning of antiracism today is thus that it gives us an ideal—the ideal of a society without prejudice—that we can all sign on to at the very moment when the inadequacy of that ideal should be entirely obvious. The gap between the rich and the poor may be growing on a daily basis, but when it comes to difference, we prefer fighting racism to fighting poverty.26 And the distinction between our conservatives and our liberals is just that our conservatives think we’ve already won that fight while our liberals think we’ve only just begun.

Another way to put this is to say that our conservatives and our liberals more or less agree about what a just society would be. That’s why mainstream commentators like David Brooks can confidently insist that even though the country seems to be “polarized,” “this isn’t an ideological moment, liberal or con­servative.”27 Of course, no moment ever seems like an ideolog­ical moment to Brooks, but he’s not alone in this and he’s not mistaken. The quarrel between people who think we don’t have enough diversity and people who think we have just the right amount is a quarrel over management techniques, not over political ideology. With respect to economic inequality, there is no quarrel; what we might call the neoliberal consen­sus prevails. The only inequalities we’re prepared to do any­thing about are the ones that interfere with the free market. Chesnutt, insisting that segregation (and especially the law against miscegenation) violated “liberty of contract,” was an early adopter. There was no injustice, he thought, in the fact that many people couldn’t afford to ride in the first-class car on the train; the injustice was to the people who could afford to ride in that car but weren’t allowed to. The injustice was intolerance of racial difference, not acceptance of economic difference.

And this scenario is what gives the fantasy of the rich people’s mall its force. The fantasy part, of course, is not that there are such things as rich people’s malls. The fantasy is the idea that the injustice in not being able to shop there is the injustice of being discriminated against. Or, to turn the point around, that rich people’s malls are fine as long as they’re diverse, as long as the black and brown rich people get to buy expensive stuff alongside the white ones. How else can we explain the flurry of disapproval surrounding Hermes’s refusal to unlock its doors for some after-hours shopping by Oprah Winfrey? “After-hours shopping is a favor,” noted the Washington Post. “There’s nothing wrong with a store saying not tonight, madame, as long as the reason doesn’t have any­thing to do with skin color.”28 In this universe, social justice means that Oprah Winfrey (like Dr. Miller) ought to be able to spend her money in the same ways the white celebrities (or white doctors) do.

“The problem of the 20th century,” W. E. B. Du Bois observed at its beginning, will be “the problem of the color line.” It looks like the twenty-first century will also be fond of that problem. The difference is that the work that used to be done by racism—the work of obscuring class difference— is now done by antiracism. The ongoing controversy over the government’s response to the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina is, as we noted in the introduction, a case in point. It’s like an inverted version of the question about the “rich Jew” Leo Frank: was he lynched because he was Jewish or because he was rich? Is the relevant thing about all those people aban­doned in New Orleans the fact that they are black or the fact that they are poor? We like blaming racism, but the truth is there weren’t too many rich black people left behind when everybody who could get out of New Orleans did so. The Republican party policies that left the poor behind were not racist, and the economic inequality in American society has grown under Democratic presidents as well as Republicans. This doesn’t mean, of course, that racism didn’t play a role in New Orleans. It just means that in a society without any racial discrimination, there would still have been poor people who couldn’t find their way out of New Orleans. Whereas in a society without poor people (even a racist society without poor people), there wouldn’t have been.

 

Most Americans consider us as a classless society. Michaels calls attention to the growing gap between rich and poor and makes readers note that distinct classes should be a growing concern. The Trouble with Diversity may be an annoying book to read, especially for those who find Michaels’ economic naiveté a distraction, but it is increasingly likely that progressive politics will grow as the economic gap widens, and this is a good time to consider the issues Michaels raises.

 

Steve Hopkins, January 25, 2007

 

 

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The recommendation rating for this book appeared

 in the February 2007 issue of Executive Times

 

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