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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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Synopses & Reviews A brilliant assault on our obsession with every difference except the one that really matters—the difference between rich and poor If there’s one thing Americans agree on, it’s the value of diversity. Our corporations vie for slots in the Diversity Top 50, our universities brag about minority recruiting, and every month is Somebody’s History Month. But in this provocative new book, Walter Benn Michaels argues that our enthusiastic celebration of “difference” masks our neglect of America’s vast and growing economic divide. Affirmative action in schools has not made them more open, it’s just guaranteed that the rich kids come in the appropriate colors. Diversity training in the workplace has not raised anybody’s salary (except maybe the diversity trainers’) but it has guaranteed that when your job is outsourced, your culture will be treated with respect. With lacerating prose and exhilarating wit, Michaels takes on the many manifestations of our devotion to diversity, from companies apologizing for slavery, to a college president explaining why there aren’t more women math professors, to the codes of conduct in the new “humane corporations.” Looking at the books we read, the TV shows we watch, and the lawsuits we bring, Michaels shows that diversity has become everyone’s sacred cow precisely because it offers a false vision of social justice, one that conveniently costs us nothing. The Trouble with Diversity urges us to start thinking about real justice, about equality instead of diversity. Attacking both the right and the left, it will be the most controversial political book of the year. Review: "Cultural diversity, we are told, is good for us. It represents the true contours of the country and experiencing it — through text, cuisine and cultural activities — is seen as a good thing. But Walter Benn Michaels is not buying it. In his daring new book, 'The Trouble With Diversity,' he argues that cultural diversity obscures the more radical problem of economic inequality. Diversity, and its ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) corollaries of difference, identity, race and culture, are harmful dreams that distract us from the one real haunting issue that defines us all: the growing gap between the rich and poor. Over the course of this short, fast book, Michaels gleefully tips one sacred cow of multiculturalism after another. And with all the cows in a pile, Michaels succeeds, beautifully, in rewriting W.E.B. Du Bois' prophetic statement that the problem of the 20th century will be the problem of the color line. For Michaels, the problem of the 20th and 21st centuries is the problem of the bottom line. Michaels attacks — and is, in his own terms, fairly successful at destroying — the phantasms of race and culture. Race or races, as others have claimed, cannot be said to exist. Therefore, Michaels claims, cultures cannot be said to exist either. 'The problem with culture ... is that it's utterly dependent on race. We can only say what counts as white or black or Jewish culture if we already know who the whites and blacks and Jews are.' And the reason for what Michaels sees as the mirage of culture is that 'we like the idea of cultural equality better than we like the idea of economic equality (and we like the idea of culture wars much better than we like the idea of class wars).' Fighting for or recognizing the importance of cultural equality doesn't cost anyone anything, whereas redistributing wealth would cost some people dearly. Conservatives and liberals, corporations and universities all get their due. We are told that 'almost 75 percent of Harvard students come from families with incomes over $100,000 per year, although only a little over 20 percent of American families have incomes that high. ... It's no wonder that rich white kids and their parents aren't complaining about diversity. Race-based affirmative action, from this standpoint, is a kind of collective bribe rich people pay themselves for ignoring economic inequality. The fact (and it is a 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.' As convincing as Michaels' conclusion is, his arguments sometimes leave a lot to be desired. The very slipperiness of the ideas of race and culture might suggest that these concepts are more than concepts — they are realities. Culture and race matter a lot to people who have both of them, and the argument that they either don't exist or aren't important is an argument that has often been made by people who don't belong to a so-called racial or ethnic minority. This reader would have liked Michaels to analyze what counts as culture — what kinds of prepackaged and marketable concepts of culture are promoted in corporations and on campuses — instead of jettisoning culture altogether. Michaels, unfortunately, does not seem interested in distinguishing between cultures (as lived matrices of language, community, locality and race) and the rhetoric about cultures and diversity. Throughout the book, he makes no distinction between the two. Worse than that, Michaels fails to see how cultural death is tied to economic disenfranchisement. For instance, Native American tribes were robbed of culture — religion was banned and children were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to boarding schools where their hair was cut and they were whipped for speaking their tribal languages — to fold Indians into the American work force at the bottom as laborers. And the Indians who fight to hold on to tribal languages and traditions are not subscribing to the agendas of the rich but attempting to define themselves on their own terms with the ultimate goal of recapturing cultural and economic self-sufficiency; the two often go hand in hand. And it is not a myth or a ruse that poor Native Americans are 10 times as likely to be victims of violent crime as their poor white neighbors, and that most of the violence visited on Indians is perpetrated by whites. This suggests that race still exists as an important category. Michaels is right, however, in his analysis of how culture and race have been used (cheaply, often ridiculously) as branches for the rich to hide their tracks. He convincingly argues that the emphasis on diversity in modern American life often obscures dangerous economic inequalities. And although Michaels strings up culture and race rather than teasing them out, his conclusions are valuable, crucial and impossible to disagree with: 'The trouble with diversity, then, is not just that it won't solve the problem of economic inequality; it's that it makes it hard for us even to see the problem.'" Reviewed by Graham Joyce, whose most recent book is 'The Limits of Enchantment'Joanne Harris, who is the author of 'Gentlemen & Players'David Treuer, who is the author of the novel 'The Translation of Dr Apelles' and 'Native American Fiction: A User's Manual', Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)About the Author Walter Benn Michaels is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Widely noted as one of the founders (with Stephen Greenblatt) of the New Historicism, he is the author of Our America and The Shape of the Signifier and has contributed to the New York Times Magazine and the Boston Globe. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780805078411
- Subtitle:
- How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality
- Author:
- Michaels, Walter Benn
- Publisher:
- Metropolitan Books
- Subject:
- Economic Conditions
- Subject:
- Discrimination & Racism
- Subject:
- Social classes
- Subject:
- Multiculturalism
- Subject:
- Equality
- Subject:
- Ethnic Studies - General
- Subject:
- SOC050000
- Subject:
- Equality -- United States.
- Subject:
- Group identity -- United States.
- Publication Date:
- October 2006
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 243
- Dimensions:
- 8.60x6.90x.89 in. .92 lbs.
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