Summary
Summing up his view of the contemporary American dilemma, he writes, "We love race-we love identity-because we don't love class." But the problem isn't "classism," or prejudice against poor or working class individuals, a concept modeled on racial identity. The problem is inequality, or lack of money. The solution, then, is economic equality, not diversity. We shouldn't celebrate a difference that should be instead overcome.
[Walter Benn Michaels] often argues as if commitment to racial diversity were the only obstacle to overcoming equality. When pressed, he says, "I completely agree it's not the only thing that distracts people from inequality. [Nonetheless] it's a very central factor, because there's nothing deeper in the American self than the set of stories that are based around race: 'We're two nations-black and white.' It's foundational scripture.""The goal is not to insist that class identification matters and racial identification doesn't matter," he said. "The crucial question I'm interested in is what's right and just, and that doesn't matter whether you belong to the upper middle class or working class but what you think is just and right. My commitment has never been to thinking about class. It's been on the importance of minimizing economic inequality and the irrelevance of race to that question."See the full content of this document
Extract
Is Diversity Enough?
Is Diversity Enough?
Walter Benn Michaels asks us to consider the harm done when we worry about identity and forget about inequality.THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS at Chicago, a struggling but ambitious public university in the heart of the city, celebrates its ethnically diverse student body as a great achievement. But Walter Benn Michaels, chairman of the university's English department, is unimpressed. The commitment of universities, corporations and other institutions to such diversity is "at best a distraction and at worst an essentially reactionary position," he argues in his new book, The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality.Right-wing academics and pundits have built careers taking potshots at affirmative action...See the full content of this document
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