Race obscures real problem

Economic inequality should be addressed, not cultural diversity

By David Treuer
Wayne Journal Gazette

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 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. percent of Harvard students come from families with We are told that “almost 75 percent of incomes over $100,000 per year, although only a little over 20 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 instead of jettisoning culture altogether.

Michaels fails to see how cultural death is tied to economic disenfranchisement. For instance, American Indian 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 workforce 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 American Indians 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 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.”