In his latest book, Walter Benn Michaels describes how embracing “diversity” and identity politics has become a socially acceptable way of becoming more wealthy. A review of The Trouble With Diversity.

The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality
by Walter Benn Michaels
published by Metropolitan Books (October 3, 2006)
Hdbk., 256 pgs.
ISBN-10: 080507841X

Since the late 1960s, the American political Left has largely abandoned “class politics,” embracing instead a politics of “liberating oppressed minorities.” Liberation from poverty, something once believed to be at the root of ethnic hostility, was replaced by the demand for liberation from ethnic oppression, now imagined to be the cause of poverty. This focus on alleviating ethnic oppression began, oddly, during the Nixon administration.¹

Until the Reagan years programs such as affirmative action served as common ground for elected Democrat and Republican politicians. The greatest political beneficiary, in retrospect, was not America’s ethnic groups, but Richard Nixon. Nixon was able to turn the war against communism in Vietnam into a “problem of Vietnamization,” transforming America’s controversial efforts to assist a weak ally into an ethnic affair between Vietnamese.

By the early seventies, Nixon and the New Left had found common ground: Nixon could escalate the war, provided it was done with Vietnamese troops, not American. The anti-war movement died out, and South Vietnam surrendered to tyranny. Abroad, ethnicity became an excuse for avoiding our commitment to political principle. At home, as Walter Benn Michaels argues, it became an excuse to abandon our commitment to combat poverty and economic inequality.

The substitution of “race” for class benefited others as well. It served to bring unity to the nation’s campuses, and in higher education was pursued with theatrical abandon. The old “class” or “economic history” of the fifties and early sixties had smacked of Marxism and controversy. By the end of the sixties it was enthusiastically replaced by what became known as “cultural history,” or history as “the history of racial abuse of one ethnic group by another.” While most colleges didn’t put things this bluntly, the expression “celebrating diversity” would serve as a weak euphemism for what amounted to the same thing.  Lost in the hoopla was the possibility that poor whites and poor blacks might have more in common with one another, than either had with Michael Jordan (black) or Donald Trump (white) or Michael Jackson (black or white).

By the late 1980s conservatives were pointing out that this “diversity” was only “celebrated” for certain groups: while Afro-Americans tended to be “in,” Jews were generally “out.” American Indians were “in,” but Asian-Americans tended to be out. Even more bizarrely, a range of “hot ticket” liberal social issues quickly grafted themselves onto the plights of “in” minorities. For instance, while Afro-Americans have traditionally been one of the nation’s more conservative social groups, by the early eighties Jesse Jackson often mentioned the right to “reproductive rights” and “sexual identity” in the same context as racial discrimination. Native Americans found themselves championing sixties hippie values whether these were in accord with their traditions or not.

By the mid-nineties, a recognizable image of America’s “oppressed” minorities had emerged, remarkable for its homogeneity. They were tolerant, spiritual, into nature, libertine, and above all, self-righteous. That this was also the mirror image of new age yuppie leftists was lost to the minority groups’ self-appointed enthusiasts.  Conservatives smelled a rat. Twenty years later, so has the political Left.

Walter Benn Michaels’ The Trouble with Diversity offers the most insightful explanation for the sanctimonious racial politics of the political Left in the last twenty years.

Why, in a world where most of us are not racist (where, on the humanities faculties of our universities, we might more plausibly say not that racism is rare but that it is extinct), do we take so much pleasure in reading attacks on racism? Why do we like it so much that not only do we read books that attack a racism that no longer exists (Plessy was overruled a half century ago . . .) . . .?

The reason why the Left (and much of academia) has embraced diversity with such ferocity is that diversity has become the most effective way of advancing an economic agenda. By recasting social (and economic) problems in terms of race (or gender), academics in particular have created an ideology which conceals real differences caused by economic inequality. By making respect for diversity (being nice to each other) central to its politics, contemporary liberalism has forgotten or obscured the obligations of equality (giving up our money). “Diversity” today is a program “for making rich people of different skin colors and sexual orientations more ‘comfortable’ while leaving intact the thing that makes them most comfortable of all: their wealth.” If you can convince a poor black child from the ghetto that his problem is not his lack of education or job opportunities but “respect,” then you take the incentive off employers to give him a fair chance in life — provided they have their employees participate in a few “diversity” workshops.

The Trouble with Diversity begins by dismantling the concept of ethnic culture and the idea of race that underlies it. Modern biologists, Ben Michaels claims, no longer accept the idea of race as a meaningful way of describing groups of people. Ben Michaels points out that while people obviously have different skin colors and types of hair, the “genetic variation within populations belonging to what we call the same race is often greater than genetic variation between races.” For instance, a person from the Congo and a person from Mali are likely to be more genetically different from one another than either is from a person from Belgium. Ben Michaels’ point is that it makes no sense to speak of people from Mali and the Congo as belonging to one race and Belgians from another. "It’s not that there aren’t physical differences [between groups of people]; it’s just that there aren’t physical differences between races."

If the idea of race makes no sense, what are we to make of the idea of “white” or “black” culture? Ben Michaels argues that while we all inherit genetic material (such as our skin color) from our parents, there is no necessary connection between this genetic material and, say, learning a language such as Bantu or English, or reading Emerson or Douglass. “If acting black (belonging to black culture) were truly a function of being black (having a biologically black body), then people who had black bodies would inevitably act black, and we would have no need for the notion of cultural identity.”

The idea of “black culture” (or any “ethnic” culture for that matter) rests upon a contradiction. On the one hand because there is no physical fact of blackness, the idea of “black culture” is needed to hang onto the idea of “blackness.” On the other hand, because there is no physical fact of “blackness” we can’t hold onto the idea of black culture. The idea of cultural “diversity” is premised on an obvious fiction.

But if the idea of “race based” culture makes no sense, how can it have become so entrenched within American society? Ben Michaels argues provocatively that many groups have a vested interest in preserving the idea of racial culture for their own benefit.  He offers a scathing analysis of Philip Roth’s recent best selling novel, The Plot Against America, which speculates on what America would be like were anti-Semitism to have proven as virulent as anti-black racism.

Identifying himself as Jewish, Ben Michaels argues that 20th-century Jewish “multiculturalists”  have a vested interest in preserving the false equation between anti–Semitism and anti-black racism. Roth’s bestseller is not just a fantasy, Ben Michaels argues, but is opportunist. Jews, for much of the 20th century in America, were generally regarded, even by anti-black racists, as white.²  Ben Michaels then insinuates nastily that “diversity” enables its Jewish supporters to be both the beneficiaries of being imagined to be “white” and being victims of racism.

However, Ben Michaels is hardly picking on Jewish multiculturalists. His real targets are large institutions such as Universities and corporations which use race and “diversity” as an excuse to avoid dealing with the real division within America, which, Ben Michaels argues, comes from economic inequality. Today, Ben Michaels argues, universities have degenerated into “research and development laboratories for producing new ways to insist that discrimination (as opposed to exploitation) is our fundamental problem.” By insisting (loudly!) that ethnic and racial tensions are society’s main problems, they turn attention away from their principle objective, which is holding onto their wealth.

Ben Michaels uses as an example the admission procedure to Harvard University. Acceptance to Harvard University depends in large part on SAT scores. These scores, Ben Michaels argues, are largely a function of your economic class — and Harvard Students are generally from the wealthiest class of people in the country.³  As most of these families are white, Harvard has an extensive “affirmative action” admissions program which attempts to match its ethnic “diversity” with the percentage of minorities in the general population. What then is the function of Harvard’s concern for “diversity?”  “ . . . [I]t is  a powerful tool for legitimizing [Harvard students’] sense of individual merit.” By creating the illusion of “diversity” achieved by “fair competition,” Harvard creates the impression that its admission standards are about “pure intellect” and not the tens of thousands of dollars necessary for prep schools and other expensive activities which make wealthy applicants successful.

Race based affirmative action [at an institution like Harvard] . . .is a kind of bribe rich people pay themselves for ignoring economic inequality. The fact that it doesn’t help to be white to get into Harvard replaces the much more fundamental fact that it does help to be rich and that it’s virtually essential not to be poor.

But of course there are a few poor folks at Harvard? What is their function? “To reassure the (very many) rich people at Harvard that you can’t just buy your way into Harvard.”

Ben Michaels attacks “identity” politics for the same reasons he attacks the current obsession with ethnic diversity. Why are “anti-hate” rallies so popular on campuses? It’s because “they tell us that racism is the problem we need to solve and that solving it requires us just to give up our prejudices.”  Social problems thus require — not giving up our money — but an “attitude adjustment.” Economic inequality between blacks and whites? How about an “apology” (and a hug or two) for slavery? And let’s not work to end differences between classes — let’s attack “classism” — the politically correct idea that we should somehow “respect” the poor instead of ending their poverty.⁴  He concludes by declaring that, “Diversity, like gout, is a rich people’s problem. And it is also a rich people’s solution, as attractive to rich people on the Left as it is to rich people on the Right.”

Ben Michaels gives many (humorous in their ridiculousness) examples of how “diversity” and identity politics have become a socially acceptable way to become more wealthy. In a sexual discrimination suit in Manhattan, one Allison Schieffelin sued the consulting firm Morgan Stanley (for whom previously she had worked) for not being invited on “men’s only” (strip clubs) outings where male employees took clients. This, she argued, amounted to “sexual discrimination” and enabled her male counterparts to make more money than she did. Schieffelin got a settlement of 12 million and Morgan Stanley agreed to spend 2 million on “diversity workshops.” The New York Times hailed the settlement as a blow against sexism. However, Ben Michaels points out that while, “It certainly was a victory for diversity . . . it was no victory for equality” — especially when it’s understood that Schieffelin was making over 1 million a year and that Morgan Stanley’s quarterly profit was over 1 billion.

Contrasting Schieffelin’s case with that of working women at Wal-Mart, the absurdity of grouping all women together regardless of income becomes apparent. The average woman who works 40 hours per week at Wal-Mart will make a little over $20,000 per year. How can the fight for insurance benefits for Wal-Mart’s female employees and their families be meaningfully grouped with the struggles of Ms. Schieffelin for more millions?  “Feminism is what you appeal to when you want to make it sound as if the women of Wall Street and the women of Wal-Mart are both victims of sexism. Which is to say, when you want to disguise the fact that the women of Wall Street are not victims at all.”

The Trouble with Diversity ends on a bizarre note. Ben Michaels in the first part of the book uses a class or “economic” perspective to expose the excesses of ethnic romanticism. In this he’s hardly different from Thomas Sowell, who has been doing this for decades — and abused by the Left accordingly. In the second half of the book, however, Ben Michaels turns the notion of class into philosophical cookie-cutter. He argues at length that the loss, for instance, of a world language cannot be seen as a real social loss.⁵  To establish his left-wing credentials he also takes gratuitous shots at Sowell and other conservatives, who are caricatured as believing the problem of racial prejudice “doesn’t exist.” In fact, given his monolithic belief (this is not evident in the first chapters of the book) in the idea of class, Ben Michaels could hardly believe otherwise. Ben Michaels doesn’t believe civil society has any remedies for social problems, and so the idea of individual initiative plays no role in resolving social problems.

The real contribution of The Trouble with Diversity lies in exposing the elitist politics the Left has implemented in the last three decades under the rhetoric of alleviating ethnic oppression. These policies are invariably couched in “moral terms,” which often enables them to be legally implemented without recourse to the public’s (or any democratic) approval. This is the same problem analyzed by Christie Davies in The Strange Death of Moral Britain. Davies discovered that since the late sixties, elitist social (and usually libertine) values were protected (or legalized) by laws passed in opposition to public opinion in the name of “human rights.” That Americans have succeeded in making indifference to the poor a virtue, at only the cost of a few “diversity workshops.” might make a chapter in Davies’ forthcoming books.

The Trouble with Diversity is available on Amazon.com.

Endnotes

1. See Kevin Yuill, Richard Nixon and the Rise of Affirmative Action: The Pursuit of Racial Equality in an Era of Limits (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006).

2. Ben Michaels, p 54. This is no doubt a contentious claim. However Ben Michaels would probably argue that the significant issue is that Jews were certainly treated better than blacks.

3. Ben Michaels cites statistics indicating that of the 146 “selective” colleges in the country, 3 percent of students come from the lowest socioeconomic quarter while 74 percent come from the very highest.

4. “Blaming the victim (treating poor people as if they were responsible for their poverty) may be bad Ben Michaels’ says, but it’s hard to see how congratulating the victim (I love what you’ve done with your shack!) is better.”

5. This also explains his nasty attack on Jewish multiculturalists.

Book Reviews, Race & Ethnicity, Multiculturalism

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