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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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The
Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality
by Walter Benn Michaels |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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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 “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 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 URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Trouble with Diversity.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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