[Peace-discuss] The Trouble with Diversity

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The following is from "The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love 
Identity and Ignore Inequality," by Walter Benn Michaels.  --CGE]

Introduction
 
"The rich are different from you and me” is a famous remark supposedly made 
by F. Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway, although what made it famous—or 
at least made Hemingway famously repeat it—was not the remark itself but 
Hemingway’s reply: “Yes, they have more money.” In other words, the point of 
the story, as Hemingway told it, was that the rich really aren’t very different 
from you and me. Fitzgerald’s mistake, he thought, was that he mythologized or 
sentimentalized the rich, treating them as if they were a different kind of person 
instead of the same kind of person with more money. It was as if, according to 
Fitzgerald, what made rich people different was not what they had—their money
—but what they were, “a special glamorous race.”
 
            To Hemingway, this difference—between what people owned and what 
they were—seemed obvious, and it was also obvious that the important thing 
was what they were. No one cares much about Robert Cohn’s money in The Sun 
Also Rises, but everybody feels the force of the fact that he’s a “race-conscious” 
“little kike.” And whether or not it’s true that Fitzgerald sentimentalized the rich 
and made them more glamorous than they really were, it’s certainly true that he, 
like Hemingway, believed that the fundamental differences—the ones that really 
mattered—ran deeper than the question of how much money you had. That’s 
why in The Great Gatsby, the fact that Gatsby has made a great deal of money 
isn’t quite enough to win Daisy Buchanan back. Rich as he has become, he’s still 
“Mr. Nobody from Nowhere,” not Jay Gatsby but Jimmy Gatz. The change of 
name is what matters. One way to look at The Great Gatsby is as a story about a 
poor boy who makes good, which is to say, a poor boy who becomes rich—the 
so-called American dream. But Gatsby is not really about someone who makes 
a lot of money; it is instead about someone who tries and fails to change who 
he is. Or, more precisely, it’s about someone who pretends to be something 
he’s not; it’s about Jimmy Gatz pretending to be Jay Gatsby. If, in the end, Daisy 
Buchanan is very different from Jimmy Gatz, it’s not because she’s rich and he 
isn’t (by the end, he is) but because Fitzgerald treats them as if they really do 
belong to different races, as if poor boys who made a lot of money were only 
“passing” as rich. “We’re all white here,” someone says, interrupting one of Tom 
Buchanan’s racist outbursts. Jimmy Gatz isn’t quite white enough.
 
            What’s important about The Great Gatsby, then, is that it takes one kind 
of difference (the difference between the rich and the poor) and redescribes it as 
another kind of difference (the difference between the white and the not-so-
white). To put the point more generally, books like The Great Gatsby (and there 
have been a great many of them) give us a vision of our society divided into 
races rather than into economic classes. And this vision has proven to be 
extraordinarily attractive. Indeed, it’s been so attractive that the vision has 
survived even though what we used to think were the races have not. In the 
1920s, racial science was in its heyday; now very few scientists believe that 
there are any such things as races. But many of those who are quick to remind 
us that there are no biological entities called races are even quicker to remind us 
that races have not disappeared; they should just be understood as social 
entities instead. And these social entities have turned out to be remarkably 
tenacious, both in ways we know are bad and in ways we have come to think of 
as good. The bad ways involve racism, the inability or refusal to accept people 
who are different from us. The good ways involve just the opposite: embracing 
difference, celebrating what we have come to call diversity.
 
            Indeed, in the United States, the commitment to appreciating diversity 
emerged out of the struggle against racism, and the word diversity itself began 
to have the importance it does for us today in 1978 when, in Bakke v. Board of 
Regents, the Supreme Court ruled that taking into consideration the race of an 
applicant to the University of California (in this case, it was the medical school at 
UC Davis) was an acceptable practice if it served “the interest of diversity.” The 
point the Court was making here was significant. It was not asserting that 
preference in admissions could be given, say, to black people because they had 
previously been discriminated against. It was saying instead that universities 
had a legitimate interest in taking race into account in exactly the same way 
they had a legitimate interest in taking into account what part of the country an 
applicant came from or what his or her nonacademic interests were. They had, 
in other words, a legitimate interest in having a “diverse student body,” and 
racial diversity, like geographic diversity, could thus be an acceptable goal for an 
admissions policy.
 
            Two things happened here. First, even though the concept of diversity 
was not originally connected with race (universities had long sought diverse 
student bodies without worrying about race at all), the two now came to be 
firmly associated. When universities publish their diversity statistics today, 
they’re not talking about how many kids come from Oregon. My university—the 
University of Illinois at Chicago—is ranked as one of the most diverse in the 
country, but well over half the students in it come from Chicago. What the 
rankings measure is the number of African Americans and Asian Americans and 
Latinos we have, not the number of Chicagoans.
 
            And, second, even though the concept of diversity was introduced as a 
kind of end run around the historical problem of racism (the whole point was 
that you could argue for the desirability of a diverse student body without 
appealing to the history of discrimination against blacks and so without getting 
accused by people like Alan Bakke of reverse discrimination against whites), the 
commitment to diversity became deeply associated with the struggle against 
racism. Indeed, the goal of overcoming racism, which had sometimes been 
identified as the goal of creating a “color-blind” society, was now reconceived 
as the goal of creating a diverse, that is, a color-conscious, society. Instead of 
trying to treat people as if their race didn’t matter, we would not only recognize 
but celebrate racial identity. Indeed, race has turned out to be a gateway drug 
for all kinds of identities, cultural, religious, sexual, even medical. To take what 
may seem like an extreme case, advocates for the disabled now urge us to stop 
thinking of disability as a condition to be “cured” or “eliminated” and to start 
thinking of it instead on the model of race: we don’t think black people should 
want to stop being black; why do we assume the deaf want to hear?
 
            The general principle here is that our commitment to diversity has 
redefined the opposition to discrimination as the appreciation (rather than the 
elimination) of difference. So with respect to race, the idea is not just that 
racism is a bad thing (which of course it is) but that race itself is a good thing. 
Indeed, we have become so committed to the attractions of race that (as I’ve 
already suggested above and as we’ll see at greater length in chapter 1) our 
enthusiasm for racial identity has been utterly undiminished by scientific 
skepticism about whether there is any such thing. Once the students in my 
American literature classes have taken a course in human genetics, they just 
stop talking about black and white and Asian races and start talking about black 
and European and Asian cultures instead. We love race, and we love the 
identities to which it has given birth.
 
            The fundamental point of this book is to explain why this is true. The 
argument, in its simplest form, will be that we love race—we love identity—
because we don’t love class. We love thinking that the differences that divide us 
are not the differences between those of us who have money and those who 
don’t but are instead the differences between those of us who are black and 
those who are white or Asian or Latino or whatever. A world where some of us 
don’t have enough money is a world where the differences between us present 
a problem: the need to get rid of inequality or to justify it. A world where some 
of us are black and some of us are white—or biracial or Native American or 
transgendered—is a world where the differences between us present a solution: 
appreciating our diversity. So we like to talk about the differences we can 
appreciate, and we don’t like to talk about the ones we can’t. Indeed, we don’t 
even like to acknowledge that they exist. As survey after survey has shown, 
Americans are very reluctant to identify themselves as belonging to the lower 
class and even more reluctant to identify themselves as belonging to the upper 
class. The class we like is the middle class.
 
            But the fact that we all like to think of ourselves as belonging to the same 
class doesn’t, of course, mean that we actually do belong to the same class. In 
reality, we obviously and increasingly don’t...