Colorblinded
Walter Benn Michaels wants the left to stop obsessing over diversity and start worrying about economic inequality
 The cast of the new season of “Survivor,” which will group contestants by their race. (CBS / MCT) |
THIS SEASON ON ``SURVIVOR," a white team, a black team, an Asian-American team, and a Latino team will compete to stay on the proverbial island. Reactions to the recent announcement have ranged from complaints about poor taste to vociferous outrage. ``It's insulting," wrote
Walter Benn Michaels, a literature professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago has found the uproar a bit rich. After all, as he writes in his new book, ``The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Forget Inequality," America has ``a love affair with race."
``Survivor" may be upping the ante a tad by pitting the races against one another in goofy competitions on national television, but we categorize along racial lines all the time-in reports on SAT scores, in census data, in courses on African-American literature, in trend stories on ``black" fashion.
``There's an impressive amount of bad faith in not wanting our society's commitment to race played back to it on the `Survivor' TV show," Michaels says in an interview.
The people who complain that we talk too much about race in America are often conservatives (like Justice Antonin Scalia, who has written that the Constitution recognizes one race: ``American"). Michaels, though, is an avowed liberal. His book's goal is to reenergize the left by persuading it to change its tactics: stop celebrating diversity and attacking racism-an enemy he says has been in retreat for decades-and start confronting economic inequality, which he calls the true bane of society.
``The commitment to understanding American society as fundamentally made up of races or cultures, and the vision of social justice that follows from that-the elimination of discrimination against race-has been at best a massive distraction from the project of bringing about greater economic equality in society," Michaels says.
Evidence the left has been fighting the wrong battles? Michaels notes that as diversity-speak and affirmative action have triumphed in colleges and corporations, the American poverty rate has crept up since the early 1970s (to about 13 percent), working class hourly wages have declined, and the top 5 percent of earners has pulled away from all other Americans.
Michaels has been mounting intellectual attacks on popular academic approaches to race and difference for years, in such books as ``Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism" (1997). With his new book, published by a trade press (Metropolitan Books) and excerpted this month in the liberal magazine The American Prospect, he's now bringing his contrarian views to a wider audience.
Not surprisingly, many scholars say that Michaels sees a zero-sum game where there isn't one. ``I welcome the Walter Michaels who wants to draw greater attention to economic inequality," says Christopher Newfield, a professor of English at the University of Santa Barbara, who has clashed in print with Michaels in the past. ``But I don't think the way to do that is to not talk about diversity."
Michael Bérubé, a professor of English at Penn State and the author of the new book ``What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and `Bias' in Higher Education" (Norton), suggests that Michaels's argument isn't new: Liberal journals in late the 1980s and early 1990s, he recalls, were full of debates over whether to tackle racial injustice or economic inequality first.
``My argument has always been that you can do both at the same time," Bérubé says.
Michaels counters that it may be theoretically possible, but it hasn't happened. Colleges, for instance, point to their enrollment of Latinos and African-Americans and claim they are open to all-but Michaels believes that's an invidious fiction. The demographics of universities as different as Harvard and the public University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign show, in his view, how diversity has become a fig leaf for inequality. At Harvard, some 75 percent of students come from families earning more than $100,000 a year. Even at Illinois, 40 percent of students come from families in the over-$100,000 bracket. The median American income, meanwhile, is around $45,000.
``Race-based affirmative action, from this standpoint," Michaels writes, ``is a kind of collective bribe rich people pay themselves for ignoring economic inequality."
. . .
Michaels doesn't just think the left overemphasizes race: He also believes that speaking of ``black culture" or ``Asian-American culture" at all is scientifically and philosophically indefensible.
Echoing many modern biologists, Michaels argues that race is not something visible at the genetic level. (To be sure, not all scientists agree with this claim.) He believes the racial categories we use are simply mistakes we've inherited from a more-ignorant past.
Most humanities professors would accept that much, but they still argue that it is possible, and desirable, to speak of socially constructed categories like ``black" and ``Asian-American." But Michaels argues that redefining race as culture just repeats the old mistake. (Even the most brilliant white bluesman or jazz pianist is not considered a contributor to black culture.) So why not make it an intellectual and political goal to end all talk of race?
The Brown University economist Glenn Loury is one of many people who find this argument a bit ``too simple."
``Are the people who organize their lives around being black-there is a lot of black culture-just a bunch of `60s has-beens who ought to be swept into the dustbin of history for the sake of someone's political project?" he asks. ``Are the people lamenting the loss of black culture in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans just whiners?"
But Michaels believes that there are better descriptors than ``black" for the culture or cultures that were lost in New Orleans. In a world without racism, black and white poor people would still have drowned when the levees broke; in a world without poverty, everyone might have gotten out alive.
Instead of spending time doing things like lobbying banks to apologize for holding slaves as collateral in the 1800s, Michaels argues that the left should be fighting for universal day care, universal early-childhood education, and equitable funding between urban and suburban schools. (In his ideal world, there would be no private schools or even private universities.)
As for his fellow professors, they should recognize how spectacularly unthreatened the right is by their work on cultural difference. In Michaels's telling, multiculturalism went ``from proclaiming itself a subversive politics to taking up its position as a corporate management tool . . . in about 10 minutes."
Unfortunately for Michaels, the number of people who endorse both his fervent race-blindness and his anti-inequality agenda appears to be vanishingly small. It can't be heartening for him, for example, that some of the warmest words I heard about his new book came from Dinesh D'Souza, the conservative pundit and author of ``The End of Racism" (1995), which argues it doesn't exist anymore in America. Says D'Souza of Michaels: ``He's on the right track"
Christopher Shea's column appears biweekly in Ideas. E-mail critical.faculties@verizon.net.
