Book Review: The Trouble with Diversity (Author, Walter Benn Michaels)

The thesis of this book is remarkably simple and damning. Our overemphasis on diversity in our contemporary society ignores the inequality of class and further justifies income disparity in the name of diversity. This "sacred cow" as he calls it, becomes a false vision of social justice and that affirmative action and other diversity initiatives have only "guaranteed that the rich kids come in the appropriate colors." Michaels lays out three goals in this book:

1. Show how the current notion of cultural diversity - trumpeted as the repudiation of racism and biological essentialism - in fact grew out of and perpetuates the very concepts it congratulates itself on having escaped.

2. Show how and why the American love affair with race - especially when you can dress race up as culture - has continued and even intensified.

3. Help alter the political terrain of contemporary American intellectual life by shifting our focus from cultural diversity to economic equality.

He goes on to relate how our contemporary political culture has been warped by diversity so that "what American liberals want is for our conservatives to be racist. We want black people George Bush cares about to be "some of my best friends are black" tokens. We want a fictional George Bush who doesn't care about black people rather than the George Bush we've actually got, one who doesn't care about poor people." He calls both the left and right wing obsession with diversity "neo-liberalism" that feed one another .Those on the right calling for a monolithic "American" culture, and those on the left, calling for diverse and equal "multiculturalism". However, he is quick to point out that both sides perpetuate the culture war, but ignore class war. He describes our contemporary thought as based on the principle that "we would much rather be rid of racism than get rid of poverty. And we would much rather celebrate cultural diversity than seek to establish economic equality."

He points out that races are a social construct, as genetic science has proven them a myth. But "like angels [many] people believe in them, devoutly. But the closer you try to examine them ... the more elusive they become." He criticizes higher education, stating "American universities are propaganda machines that might as well have been designed to ensure that the class structure of American society remains unchallenged ... [the] commitment to diversity has turned liberalism into 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."

Our society has mutated to the point where "we have also started to treat economic difference as if it were cultural difference. So now we're urged to be more respectful of poor people and stop thinking of them as victims, since to threat them as victims is condescending." He points out the problem with this attitude on poverty, "[Once] you stop thinking of it as a disadvantage then, of course, you no longer need to worry about getting rid of it."

In his early chapters, Michaels discusses the inherent invalidity of race, again relating that it is nothing more than a social construct, now perpetuated by the very people who claim to be attempting to eliminate it. He states that in the time of Jim Crow, you couldn't discriminate against black people unless one could define and identify a black person. This same principle is applied in the name of diversity, as "you can't celebrate blackness unless you can define it. The recent history of the science of race however, has raised doubts about whether you can define it." He points out that there are individuals who outwardly appear white, but have been socially defined as black, such as a Louisiana woman Susie Phipps, who lived her whole life as a "white woman" only to learn that her birth certificate labeled her "colored". She neither felt black, nor identified with the black culture, yet she was arbitrarily labeled black by the social constructs in place in our society. He comes back to the subject of diversity by concluding, "The problem with culture, then, 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."

For those who fear that Michaels is claiming that racism has disappeared from America, he assures you that there are still "Americans today who think that the Israeli secret service is carrying out targeted assassinations in the United States or that Judaism is the religion of 'parasites'." However, these people are more likely to be found "hiding from the law in Idaho than making the law in Washington, D.C." In other words, Michaels argues that the perpetrators of classical institutionalized racism have been largely marginalized in our contemporary society. Michaels relates that there are "anti-hate rallies" in response to perceived bias; but that we are highly unlikely to see "pro-hate rallies" as most everyone agrees that such action would be inappropriate. He asks, "Why are we so committed to combating a position no one actually holds?"

He criticizes the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he teaches English. He states that his university de-emphasizes the economically precarious situation it finds itself in favor of emphasizing its diversity. "[You] may be jammed into a classroom so full that you can't find a place to sit. But the good news is that 45 percent of the people jammed in there with you will be Caucasian, 21 percent will be Asian, 13 percent of them will be Hispanic and 9 percent of them will be African American." UIC often ranks as one of the top ten diverse campuses in the United States. This demonstrates the misplaced priorities, as how can that 9 percent of black students, or that 13 percent of Hispanic students expect to get any value from their education when they are in an environment that is not conducive to learning?

He wonders what a more economically diverse classroom would look like if it reflected the income distributions of our society. He relates that over 90 percent of students currently at Harvard come from families with incomes higher than the national average ($54,000). Almost 75 percent come from families who more than $100K a year. However, if we instituted a policy of economic affirmative action, most of those students would be gone. Thus, he calls Race-based Affirmative Action "a kind of collective bribe rich people pay themselves for ignoring income inequality." It allows many rich students to continue to attend Harvard without having to give up more than half of their seats to poor kids from any background.

Respecting cultural diversity has also been championed by the business elite, as Michaels puts it, "respecting the Other can't help but be attractive to corporate managers, whatever their politics might be. What CEO doesn't find it easier to respect his employees' culture than to pay them a decent wage?" He discusses the attitudes between the rich and the poor, "it's not true that the problem with being poor is that people with more money don't think of you as their equal. The problem is that, with respect to money, they're right." He reiterates his thesis, "as long as we're committed to thinking of difference as something that should be respected, we don't have to worry about it as something that should be eliminated."

Ultimately, Michaels asks us to re-evaluate our position as a society towards poverty. He asks us to work towards ending economic diversity, which he calls another name for economic inequality. One example he gives is having poor and rich kids together in the same schools would help to minimize this inequality, giving poor kids the chance to get the same education usually only afforded (pun intended) to the rich. He claims that the problem with poverty is not that it costs too much to get into college (as many colleges offer merit-based scholarships or other economic incentives) but rather that it is difficult for poor kids, who attended poor, under funded schools, to even qualify for entrance to schools such as Harvard in the first place.