THE TROUBLE WITH DIVERSITY,
by Walter Benn Michaels; a book review.
I
just finished reading this book, copywrited in 2006. I wish I had discovered it
sooner. It is an important book,
and every American liberal should read it. And I think every conservative should read it too. Professor Michaels' position is that in
our obsessive concern to stamp out racial and cultural bigotry of all kinds, we
have turned our back on economic inequality, which may be the more urgent
problem. Whether you are poor and
black or poor and white, if you are poor you're still poor, and no amount of
cheerful interracial or intercultural acceptance gets you any money. And if the
reason that you have no money in spite of working two jobs is that the kinds of
jobs you do are systematically underpaid jobs (jobs such as farm worker, child
care worker, food service work, etc) then you are not the victim of a race war or a gender war,
you are the victim of a class war. But nowadays, we don't want to talk about
that. And while it is true that blacks, Hispanics, and other
minorities are statistically more likely to be impoverished than whites, about 50% of American families living in
poverty are white, and most have at least one full time job in the family. Totally
ridding the country of bigotry will in no way help them, since they are not
victims of bigotry; they are the victims of economic exploitation, stuck in
lousy jobs that pay an unfair wage. Getting rid of intolerance will not raise
their wages-- nor will it raise the wages of any Blacks or Hispanics stuck in
the same lousy jobs, even if
some of them may in fact have been discriminated against. Racial sensitivity programs may make you
feel better about yourself, but they don't get anybody a living wage.
Michaels
seems to be saying that we liberals may know that anti-bigotry efforts serve
mainly to turn our attention away from economic inequality and injustice, and perhaps
that's why we are so attracted to them. Perhaps we really want to be distracted
from the fight against inequality, because it's an exhausting, depressing, and
nearly unwinnable fight. To force
or cajole a major corporation to install a "cultural
sensitivity" program is not
that difficult, and everybody comes
away thinking they have gained something. The corporate moguls get to feel like
good guys, and get to advertise that they are the good guys, and the social activists pushing the campaign get
to feel as though they have
accomplished something--and it doesn't cost the company a damn thing. But if you try getting them to pay
a living wage, provide health care, or recognize a union, then you have taken
on a long, hard fight that you are probably going to
lose. They will smear you in
the press (they own the press), they will fight you in Congress (they own Congress too), and
they will fight you in court; and if all that fails, they might hire thugs to
beat you up or kill you (At least,
that's what they did in the 30s).
Why? Because you have
ventured into the one area which they hold sacred---money. They are like the Ferengis of
Star Trek. Their first "rule
of acquisition" is "Once
you get their money--you never give it back."
But
the problem of poverty isn't about being Black or Hispanic, it's about being
poor. And the cure isn't more
respect---it's more money.
But both liberals and conservatives have tacitly colluded to obscure
this fact. Liberals say,
"It's all about bigotry, and we are going to put an end to bigotry." And conservatives say, "It was
all about bigotry, and we have already put an end to bigotry." But they are both lying. There is such a thing as bigotry, but
it's mostly about money.
Michaels
points out that our elite universities have undertaken programs to ensure
racial and cultural and gender diversity,
but have taken great care to avoid any action that would produce any economic
diversity. Some of those admitted
are Black, some are Hispanic, and some are Asian, but all of those accepted
seem to come from the upper middle class or higher. This not only cuts off the bottom of the economic pyramid,
it cuts off the bottom 80%. With
tuition and fees of over $40,000 per year, no one except upper middle class families can afford to
attend even if accepted.
Don't these universities claim to have a
"resource blind" admissions
policy? Won't they provide
financial assistance for those whose resources are insufficient to pay the
tuition and fees? Michaels claims
that Harvard no longer expects families with incomes under $60,000 to pay any
part of their children's college expense. If this is true, then things have certainly changed since 20
years ago when we were trying to find an undergraduate placement for our
daughter. She had graduated from a
small rural high school with very high SAT and ACT scores. The Farm Crisis of the 80s had left us
totally devastated, yet we still we applied to a number of colleges, including
expensive private ones. They all made vague claims that family financial
condition was no obstacle to admission, and boasted that a wide variety of
financial aid schemes were available.
As they went through the motions of pretending to have a resource -blind
program, they all offered some combination of partial scholarships or loans
that looked generous, but still left a price tag way beyond our family's reach at
that moment. It was like watching
someone trying to sell a dead cat for $500. They go on cheerfully explaining that it is really a $1,500
dead cat, but just because they like you,
they'll knock off a thousand bucks. Barbara Ehrenreich mentions this game in one of her
essays written when she was trying to find a college for her own kids. She describes negotiating with a
hypothetical university which she called "Fleece U."
Michaels
mentions that there is even some discussion of Harvard eliminating tuition
altogether. He doubts that
this will happen, but claims that it would be of no avail to poor students
anyway, since if you are poor or working class, you could never have the kind
of high test scores required for admission. This situation would probably be true in
"Chicagoland" or in the
area surrounding any American metropolis.
And since Michaels sees the world from Chicago, it would seem natural for
him to assume that what applies to Chicago applies to America in general: Elite gated communities and elite
suburbs where a house costs 2 million bucks, where children attend beautiful,
elaborate schools that offer every advantage, and then later attend $30,000 per
year prep schools---all contrasted
with dysfunctional inner city ghetto schools, and overworked, impoverished parents and dysfunctional
families. In short, it is the economic segregation
in all of our cities that destines one student to success--another to failure.
But
not everyone lives in or near a large city. If you were to take a night flight over the Northern Midwest,
that vast area that New Yorkers and Californians call "fly-over
country," you would notice a
gazillion points of light below,
and each one is a small town.
And each town contains a school and the people, mostly working class
people, who use that school. And in any given town, these people
will not all have the same economic resources. Suppose that you lived in Jesup, Iowa, population
2000. If you were one of the
wealthiest men in town, (say, the banker or the owner of one of the larger and
more successful businesses) where would your daughter attend high school? The answer is Jesup High School. Now suppose that you had one
of the lowest incomes (perhaps you are a single mom working as a fry cook at
the nearby truck stop). Would your
daughter would also attend Jesup High School? Yes, because there is only one high school.
A
typical graduating class has about 50 students, and they have all spent 12
years sitting side by side in the same classrooms. And there is also only one Girl Scout Troop, one 4-H
chapter, one softball team, etc.
While Jesup may not have the best school in the state, a fair amount of
teaching and learning goes on there.
The year that my daughter graduated there with an SAT of about 1500,
there were half a dozen others in her class, mostly working class kids, who had
scores between 1150 and 1250.
And yet for her entire time at that school, Jesup school had the distinction of spending the lowest
amount per pupil of any of the 438 school systems in Iowa. So if Jesup can occasionally turn out a
few graduates with test scores comparable to what Harvard usually demands, it's likely that most small towns
across the rural Midwest can also do so.
So what happens to all these hardworking
kids with high test scores? In the unlikely event that they
can afford it, they attend a prestigious private collage. If not, they try for
a state university. And if they
can't afford that, then they end up at a community college if they can get a
Pell Grant. If not, they end up
working at a furniture factory, a slaughterhouse, or some other low-wage, dead end job, and never see the
inside of a college classroom at all. And if Harvard and other elite universities ever open their
doors tuition free, and if this opening is widely known, they will get not
merely a few smart, working class
kids, they will be swamped with them.
And I think they know that.
But
they don't want 80% of their students to come from the bottom 80% of the wage
ladder----they don't want any of their students to come from that
bracket. In fact, I suspect that
they have an unwritten understanding with affluent parents that no proletarian will ever enter
their doors, except as servants. Why? Because when people go away to college,
they sometimes meet the people they will marry. And sometimes that's the whole idea. Send your daughter to
college so that she can get an "Mrs." degree. So how are these affluent parents
going to feel if, after they have shelled out 200,000 bucks in tuition, fees, and
other expenses, their daughter comes back married to some kid whose dad drives
a bus or works in a factory? Keep
in mind, these parents have not only prevented their offspring from
experiencing poverty, they have, through careful deception, taken great pains to prevent them from
even seeing it. And they expect the colleges to continue
this deception. So I think that Michaels'
hypothetical vision of Harvard throwing open their doors and still getting only
affluent kids would not always apply. It would apply with a vengeance to any area in or near
any large American city---but at least 100 million Americans don't live in or
near large cities.
One
theme throughout Michaels' book is the idea that we have started trying to
explain all differences as cultural differences. The advantage in doing this is that we now accept all
cultures as equal. There have been
times, throughout history, that people killed each other over purely cultural
differences, but we are moving beyond that. Most people would agree that if I break my eggs at the large
end and you break them at the small end, that's no reason we should be killing
each other. In recent years, we have had good results in convincing people to
not only tolerate other people's cultural differences, but to accept them and
celebrate them. As an example, The Unitarian Church was originally just another
Christian denomination, but today, we celebrate Jewish as well as Christian
holidays. And we teach our
children enough basic comparative religion so that they are familiar with some
of the beliefs and practices of other religions. We try to teach them to respect the beliefs and practices of
others, even if we do not share them.
Many
American Progressives, being
impressed with the success they have had in persuading each other to accept
cultural differences, have now begun
trying to see all differences as cultural. So we don't have black and white races anymore, we just have
Black Culture and White Culture.
Well, if this works, and if it seems to be a way to trick people into
getting along---great! I'm for
anything that works, and so is Michaels.
But Michaels claims that the young Black, Whites, and Asians he has in
his classes all dress about the same, listen to the same music, eat the same
food, and all speak English---so where is all that cultural difference? Michaels
feels that it's mostly hogwash. But
getting people to see their differences as culture may serve a purpose, because
we now accept that no culture is inherently better or worse than any other.
But
now we are even trying to deal with economic differences as though they were
cultural. So being poor isn't
really any worse than being rich, it's just different. And being rich isn't really any better,
it's just different. So if we
could all just accept, embrace, and even celebrate our differences, then we
could all get along. But if
I am poor, I don't want you to
celebrate my poverty--I want to end it.
And if you think that being poor is just as good as being rich, then try
trading places for a while. By
defining economic inequality as a
cultural difference, that lets us say that the problem is not that some people
are poor, the problem is that poor people are treated disrespectfully. So if we could all just respect each
other--then no one has to do anything about inequality.
Yet once you recognize the growing economic
inequality in our society for the outrageous injustice that it is, then you
have to explain why you are not doing anything about it. And many progressives simply don't have
the stomach to fight anymore.
So they buy off their conscience cheaply by pretending that the economic
inequality we see is simply a cultural difference.
Michaels
says that another area where defining every difference as cultural may not work
is in the debate on abortion. He
observes that in the case of a 3rd trimester abortion, one need not have any
religious belief whatsoever to come to a conclusion that what is being aborted
is a human being. And if the
conclusion is not religious, then it can't be cultural. So it is not likely that we will ever
accept and tolerate each other's difference of opinion here, which we might if
it were really just a difference in culture.
Well,
in the case of a late term abortion, I would agree and so did the Supreme
Court. With no deference to
religion at all, the court ruled that in the 3rd trimester, states could
regulate abortion any way they chose, to include banning it outright, except
where the life of the mother was at risk. They ruled that in the 3rd trimester, a fetus is
obviously a human being---and in the first trimester it is obviously not.
But
3rd trimester abortions are quite rare.
Most abortions are 1st trimester, and yet vast and angry legions are
mustered against the clinics who offer them. No logic or science can lead you to conclude that a tiny
speck of tissue is a human being.
That comes only from religion.
To believe that aborting a tiny speck of tissue is the same as murdering
a baby, you have to have a number of beliefs, all of which are purely
religious. If you ask the
protester in front of an abortion clinic why he thinks a speck of tissue is a
baby, he will tell you that it has an immortal soul, which was infused at
conception, and the soul is what make us all human. But does everyone believe we have
souls? Atheists certainly don't, and there are several religious sects that do
not require any belief in either a soul or an afterlife. Even among those sects that agree that
we have souls, not all agree that this soul is infused at conception; some think it happens much later, at
the quickening. So to believe that
1st trimester abortion is murder, you not only need a religious belief---but a
very specific kind of religious belief. So the difference in beliefs between a
doctor who runs a 1st trimester abortion clinic and the angry hoard that routinely pickets him are purely
cultural differences. But that
doesn't mean they won't try to kill him.
I
have a few differences with Mr. Michaels,
which I have noted above, but his main thesis is correct: The problem is economic inequality, and
we are not doing anything about it.
And our efforts to achieve more diversity may simply obscure the fact
that we are not doing anything about it.
