This is a very interesting book, written by a man of the Left (Professor Walter Benn Michaels) arguing that the current focus on "identity" and "diversity" has stripped the Left of its willingness and ability to fight economic inequality. He certainly has a point; the book brought to mind recollections of my days at Yale Law School, where many students spent immense amounts of time and energy on trying to encourage "diversity" policies at the law school, all of which would benefit the already privileged, while pretty much ignoring the rampant poverty surrounding them every day in New Haven. I also more generally noted a distinct lack of interest more generally in the sorts of "bread and butter" issues that would have occupied liberal students' forebears in prior generations. Regardless of whether one thinks that diversity policies are a good idea or a bad idea, it would be hard to argue that they haven't distracted the American left, especially at the elite level, from the socialist (or merely redistributionist) project.
The Trouble With Diversity:
I think that David is probably right, but that this "distraction" is actually a good thing!
i know one yale law clinic orchestrated one of the largest class action lawsuits against a hospital in history based on (this is my recollection) yale-new haven's (hospital) insurance processing protocols for low-income claimants. it was a pretty well-reported incident, because it was yale suing yale.
yale has also made a conscious decision NOT to withdraw from the surrounding community by closing off the university, despite having readily available justifications for doing so.
perhaps the argument can be made that the yalies' focus on the school's internal diversity is in disproportion to that issue's importance, but that's quite a stretch from "ignoring rampant poverty." new haven is the subject of case-study after case-study in urban decay, from the failed urban redevelopment efforts of the '50s and '60s to the infamous church-street housing projects. and even before that, new haven was economically devastated when the invention of the automobile allowed more affluent families to move to various suburbs along the merritt and route 95.
the point being, the poverty in that city is overwhelming. and while the internal diversity-seeking agenda of many yalies may be offputting, taking yalies to task for not pumping enough energy into the community is not the way to go about addressing it.
by the way, i agree with the thesis of the book. i do think more superficial activity displaces effort that might be better spent doing other things. what i respectfully disagree with is the specific analogy.
I love you man, but is there anything you wouldn't blame on diversity? Is it possible that our focus on diversity is keeping us from finding the promised WMDs?
GJax
Where in Bakke or any of its progeny is there any hint that economic affirmative action -- by which is generally meant giving extra points to someone from an economically deprived family, or from a poor school district, irrespective of race -- is Constitutionally problematic?
Socialism therefore essentially means ownership of the people since with no means of production, the people cannot live. That is where socialism falls down because the people do not fit easily into all those nice little pigeonholes that the socialists try to put up there. that leads to conflicts and extreme differences in how the people are treated and eventually to things like gulags and concentration camps for all dissidents. Then you have the little problems of trying to do the state planning at a national level when the environmental differences and transportation differences and climatic differences are not properly applied so that you end up with spoilage and droughts and trying to plant crops where they do not grow well. All in all a real disaster for everybody.
Even when you try to apply socialistic tendencies to democracies they don't work out so well. All you have to do is look at the unemployment figures in Europe to see the results of that one.
"All in all a real disaster for everybody."
Absolutely no disagreement with that statement, or with anything else you said.
And because socialism is such a miserable system, and such a tragedy for the people trapped in it, it annoys the heck out of me when people like DB casually throw the "socialist" label around. Calling people who favor more government support for the poor "socialist" is simply wrong, it is emotional propaganda, and it should have no place on an academic blog.
The logic of the diversity position works if you think promoting a few members of a minority group into the elite somehow helps the group as a whole, either by establishing role models or through some more direct assistance mechanism. The case is less compelling if your social goal is levelling towards the middle -- trying to alleviate poverty at the bottom of society while simultaneously trying to reduce the excesses at the top. (I'm not just complaining about consumption excesses, either. The concentration of political and economic power in this country bothers me more than McMansions in New Jersey.)
The left does try to alleviate poverty in some ways, even if their grand theory about doing so has taken a beating in recent decades. It's their challenge to the top that seems to have vanished, not surprisingly now that so many are living there. And so we get diversity politics, which leads to a multicolored elite and an equally multicolored, but thoroughly alienated, lower middle class.
I believe that race and class are inextricably linked.