Diverse reasons to question diversity

WALTER Benn Michaels has written one of the least equivocal books in recent memory. “Almost everything we say about culture,” he begins in his introduction, “seems to me mistaken, and this book tries to show why.” He lists a few of these mistaken ideas: “That the significant differences between us are cultural, that such differences should be respected, that there’s a value in making sure that different cultures survive.”

And that’s just laying the groundwork for his real intent. Michaels is an English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is well known in academe as a tenured gadfly assailing the pieties of his profession. He would like to reverse the direction in which American wealth has been flowing for the last 30 or so years (that is to say inexorably upward, out of the hands of most of us and into the hands of the very rich).

And in “The Trouble With Diversity,” his first foray into political polemic, he seeks to expose the con perpetrated on the American public that has united both parties around a neoliberal economic policy enriching the few at the expense of the many. You might be surprised to learn the culprit he names. “If you’re worried about the growing economic inequality in American life,” he explains in his introduction, “no battle is less worth fighting than the ones we fight for diversity.”

Michaels has no patience for the multiculturalists who want to celebrate many identities. He has no more patience for the critics of multiculturalism -- Samuel Huntington and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., among them -- who want to defend an American identity. (Let’s face it, he’s an impatient guy.) He rejects the idea of identity itself. What is race? It is well known, he writes, that there’s more genetic variation within racial groups than between them.

What is culture? Michaels argues that our respectful talk about cultures is just a way of preserving racialist thinking. He asserts that belief in cultures is based on circular logic (how do we know what practices belong to certain identities if there are no intrinsic identities for them to belong to?) but we cling to it out of an ulterior motive.

Celebrating diversity and promoting affirmative action, Michaels writes, has turned the political left “into the accomplice rather than the opponent of the right.” Here’s how: Racists used to tell Americans that the differences that mattered among people had to do with the color of their skin rather than the size of their bank account. This diversionary strategy helped the ruling elite keep its money unmolested.

Michaels’ characteristic move is to argue that multiculturalists now tell us an inverted version of the same story, with more or less the same effect. Anti-racism today, according to Michaels, does the work that racism used to do. Instead of hating people who are racially different from us, we now celebrate the differences of those who are culturally different from us. This makes politics into “nothing but etiquette” in which we battle over “what color skin the rich kids should have.” We should not be surprised, Michaels argues, that it took “about ten minutes” for multiculturalism to go from “proclaiming itself a subversive politics to taking up its position as a corporate management tool.”

Michaels is on to something here. He is at his best when he is running his chain saw through other people’s cant. He mostly sticks to this strength. His method is to insist that we be as principled as principle demands. He shows how affirmative action props up the flimsy fiction that our universities are meritocratic. He avers that if we really cared about equal opportunity, we would abolish private schools and fund all public schools equally. He notes, familiarly, the absurdity of turning disability into an identity category. He tackles the ways that the “diversity” model has eroded serious thinking about politics, culture, belief and ideas.

Culture, Michaels says, provides us with a model of “diversity without inequality” that helps us to pretend that real inequality doesn’t exist. So we begin to think of the “poor” as another identity group who should be respected instead of as disadvantaged people whose condition should be abolished. Once we apply this model to the realm of ideas itself, we begin to think it’s more important to respect other people’s ideas than to prove or debunk them.

But the trouble with “The Trouble With Diversity” -- what makes its stimulating argument seem at times like a long non sequitur -- is one of its guiding assumptions: Is the primary reason we’re obsessed with identity really our desire to change the subject from class?

A simpler explanation than the vaguely conspiratorial one that Michaels advances is that people want to know who they are and want to belong to something that is larger than themselves. Any clarifying discussion of the uses and abuses of identity must begin with this acknowledgment.

Michaels reminds us that if we believe, as multiculturalists do, that all cultures are equally valuable, there’s no reason for anyone to fight to preserve or advance his or her own. Clever move, but it’s merely a debater’s point -- as many of Michaels’ prickly little salvos turn out to be, on closer examination -- and it avoids the question posed by cultural diversity: How do we reconcile differing cultures within a framework of tolerance and justice? Michaels is content to conjure away this vexed question with his truth tables.

Class and race interact in ways more complicated than Michaels wants to admit. The New Deal coalition that once made the country a more equal place than it is today was held together by racism (the solid Democratic South was also the segregationist South) and split apart by racism (the solid Democratic South became the bedrock of Republican reaction).

This is not a paradox; history doesn’t work with the tidy logic that Michaels would prefer. Maybe this helps explain how he can write a passage as appalling as this one, which refers to his intentions in Chapter 4: “The question it asks is why we should care about the past, and the answer it gives is that we shouldn’t.... Henry Ford said a long time ago, ‘History is bunk’; the purpose of this chapter will be to show that he was right.”

It’s a tribute to Michaels’ writerly virtues that a book marred by such rhetorical excesses remains a captivating read and a necessary provocation. Even when he is being wrongheaded, or just plain wrong, about our increasingly unequal country, Michaels confronts us with an essential challenge.

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Wesley Yang is a critic whose work has appeared in several publications, including Salon.com and the New York Observer.