[Peace-discuss] Diversity vs. equality

[C. G. Estabrook]

"A society in which white people were proportionately represented in the bottom 
quintile (and black people proportionately represented in the top quintile) 
would not be more equal; it would be exactly as unequal. It would not be more 
just; it would be proportionately unjust."

	What Matters
	Walter Benn Michaels	
	"Who Cares about the White Working Class?"
	edited by Kjartan Páll Sveinsson (a review)

In the US, there is (or was) an organisation called Love Makes a Family. It was 
founded in 1999 to support the right of gay couples to adopt children and it 
played a central role in supporting civil unions. A few months ago, its 
director, Ann Stanback, announced that, having ‘achieved its goals’, Love Makes 
a Family would be ceasing operations at the end of this year, and that she would 
be stepping down to spend more time with her wife, Charlotte. Our ‘core 
purpose’, she said, has been ‘accomplished’.

It’s possible of course that this declaration of mission accomplished will prove 
to be as ill-advised as some others have been in the last decade. Gay marriage 
is legal in Connecticut, where Love Makes a Family is based, but it’s certainly 
not legal everywhere in the US. No one, however, would deny that the fight for 
gay rights has made extraordinary strides in the 40 years since Stonewall. And 
progress in combating homophobia has been accompanied by comparable progress in 
combating racism and sexism. Although the occasional claim that the election of 
President Obama has ushered us into a post-racial society is obviously wrong, 
it’s fairly clear that the country that’s just elected a black president (and 
that produced so many votes for the presidential candidacy of a woman) is a lot 
less racist and sexist than it used to be.

But it would be a mistake to think that because the US is a less racist, sexist 
and homophobic society, it is a more equal society. In fact, in certain crucial 
ways it is more unequal than it was 40 years ago. No group dedicated to ending 
economic inequality would be thinking today about declaring victory and going 
home. In 1969, the top quintile of American wage-earners made 43 per cent of all 
the money earned in the US; the bottom quintile made 4.1 per cent. In 2007, the 
top quintile made 49.7 per cent; the bottom quintile 3.4. And while this 
inequality is both raced and gendered, it’s less so than you might think. White 
people, for example, make up about 70 per cent of the US population, and 62 per 
cent of those are in the bottom quintile. Progress in fighting racism hasn’t 
done them any good; it hasn’t even been designed to do them any good. More 
generally, even if we succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism 
and sexism, we would not thereby have made any progress towards economic 
equality. A society in which white people were proportionately represented in 
the bottom quintile (and black people proportionately represented in the top 
quintile) would not be more equal; it would be exactly as unequal. It would not 
be more just; it would be proportionately unjust.

An obvious question, then, is how we are to understand the fact that we’ve made 
so much progress in some areas while going backwards in others. And an almost 
equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we’ve made progress have been 
those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, 
and the one where we haven’t isn’t. We can put the point more directly by 
observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing 
intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are 
fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism. Hence the extraordinary advances 
in the battle against discrimination, and hence also its limits as a 
contribution to any left-wing politics. The increased inequalities of 
neoliberalism were not caused by racism and sexism and won’t be cured by – they 
aren’t even addressed by – anti-racism or anti-sexism.

My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is 
rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, 
insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing. American 
universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 
40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for 
the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more 
diversity. The neoliberal heart leaps up at the sound of glass ceilings 
shattering and at the sight of doctors, lawyers and professors of colour taking 
their place in the upper middle class. Whence the many corporations which pursue 
diversity almost as enthusiastically as they pursue profits, and proclaim over 
and over again not only that the two are compatible but that they have a causal 
connection – that diversity is good for business. But a diversified elite is not 
made any the less elite by its diversity and, as a response to the demand for 
equality, far from being left-wing politics, it is right-wing politics.

The recent furore over the arrest for ‘disorderly conduct’ of Henry Louis Gates 
helps make this clear. Gates, as one of his Harvard colleagues said, is ‘a 
famous, wealthy and important black man’, a point Gates himself tried to make to 
the arresting officer – the way he put it was: ‘You don’t know who you’re 
messing with.’ But, despite the helpful hint, the cop failed to recognise an 
essential truth about neoliberal America: it’s no longer enough to kowtow to 
rich white people; now you have to kowtow to rich black people too. The problem, 
as a sympathetic writer in the Guardian put it, is that ‘Gates’s race snuffed 
out his class status,’ or as Gates said to the New York Times, ‘I can’t wear my 
Harvard gown everywhere.’ In the bad old days this situation almost never came 
up – cops could confidently treat all black people, indeed, all people of 
colour, the way they traditionally treated poor white people. But now that we’ve 
made some real progress towards integrating our elites, you need to step back 
and take the time to figure out ‘who you’re messing with’. You need to make sure 
that nobody’s class status is snuffed out by his race.

In the wake of Gates’s arrest, among the hundreds of people protesting the 
injustice of racial profiling, a white cardiologist married to a black man put 
the point best when she lamented that even in the ‘diverse area’ where she lives 
(Hyde Park, Obama’s old neighbourhood) she’ll hear people nervously say, ‘Look 
at those black guys coming towards us,’ to which she replies: ‘Yes, but they’re 
wearing lacrosse shorts and Calvin Klein jeans. They’re probably the kids of the 
professor down the street.’ ‘You have to be able to discern differences between 
people,’ she went on to say. ‘It’s very frustrating.’ The differences she means, 
of course, are between rich kids and poor kids, and the frustration she feels is 
with people who don’t understand that class is supposed to trump race. But while 
it’s easy to sympathise with that frustration – rich black kids are infinitely 
less likely to mug you than poor black kids or, for that matter, poor white kids 
– it’s a lot harder to see it as the expression of a progressive politics.

Nevertheless, that seems to be the way we do see it. The neoliberal ideal is a 
world where rich people of all races and sexes can happily enjoy their wealth, 
and where the injustices produced not by discrimination but by exploitation – 
there are fewer poor people (7 per cent) than black people (9 per cent) at 
Harvard, and Harvard’s not the worst – are discreetly sent around to the back 
door. Thus everyone’s outraged that a black professor living on prosperous Ware 
St (and renting a summer vacation ‘manse’ on Martha’s Vineyard that he 
‘jokingly’ calls ‘Tara’) can be treated with disrespect; no one’s all that 
outraged by the social system that created the gap between Ware St or ‘Tara’ and 
the places where most Americans live. Everyone’s outraged by the fact that Gates 
can be treated so badly; nobody by the fact that he and the rest of the top 10 
per cent of American wage-earners have been doing so well. Actually, it’s just 
the opposite. Liberals – especially white liberals – are thrilled by Gates’s 
success, since it testifies to the legitimacy of their own: racism didn’t make 
us all this money, we earned it!

Thus the primacy of anti-discrimination not only performs the economic function 
of making markets more efficient, it also performs the therapeutic function of 
making those of us who have benefited from those markets sleep better at night. 
And, perhaps more important, it has, ‘for a long time’, as Wendy Bottero says in 
her contribution to the recent Runnymede Trust collection Who Cares about the 
White Working Class?, also performed the intellectual function of focusing 
social analysis on what she calls ‘questions of racial or sexual identity’ and 
on ‘cultural differences’ instead of on ‘the way in which capitalist economies 
create large numbers of low-wage, low-skill jobs with poor job security’. The 
message of Who Cares about the White Working Class?, however, is that class has 
re-emerged: ‘What we learn here’, according to the collection’s editor, Kjartan 
Páll Sveinsson, is that ‘life chances for today’s children are overwhelmingly 
linked to parental income, occupations and educational qualifications – in other 
words, class.’

This assertion, unremarkable as it may seem, represents a substantial advance 
over multiculturalist anti-racism, since the logic of anti-racism requires only 
the correction of disparities within classes rather than between them. If about 
1.5 per cent of your population is of Pakistani descent, then if 1.5 per cent of 
every income quintile is Pakistani, your job is done. The fact that the top 
quintile is four times better off than the bottom quintile – the advantage the 
children of rich Pakistanis would have over the children of poor ones – is not 
your problem. Which is why, in a society like Britain, whose GINI coefficient – 
the standard measure of income inequality – is the highest in the EU, the 
ambition to eliminate racial disparities rather than income inequality itself 
functions as a form of legitimation rather than as a critique. Which is also 
why, when an organisation like the Runnymede Trust, which has for years been 
devoted to promoting ‘a successful multi-ethnic Britain by addressing issues of 
racial equality and discrimination against minority communities’, starts 
addressing itself to class, it’s undergone a real change. Racial equality 
requires respect for racial difference; class equality requires the elimination 
of class difference.

In the event, however, what Who Cares about the White Working Class? actually 
provides is less an alternative to neoliberal multiculturalism than an extension 
and ingenious refinement of it. Those writing in this collection understand the 
‘re-emergence of class’ not as a function of the increasing injustice of class 
(when Thatcher took office, the GINI score was 0.25; now it’s 0.36, the highest 
the UK has ever recorded) but as a function of the increasing injustice of 
‘classism’. What outrages them, in other words, is not the fact of class 
difference but the ‘scorn’ and ‘contempt’ with which the lower class is treated.

You get a perfect sense of how this works from Beverley Skeggs’s analysis of a 
story told by one of her working-class research subjects about a trip she and 
her friends took to Kendals in Manchester: ‘You know, where the really posh food 
is, and we were laughing about all the chocolates, and how many we could eat – 
if we could afford them – and this woman she just looked at us. If looks could 
kill . . . It was like it was her place, and we didn’t belong there.’ The point 
Skeggs makes is that ‘the gaze that embodies the symbolic reading of the women 
makes them feel “out of place”, thereby generating a sense of where their 
“place” should be,’ while her more general point is that ‘the middle class’ 
should be ‘held accountable for the levels of symbolic violence they enact in 
daily encounters’ with the lower classes.

The focus of her outrage (indeed, insofar as we can tell from the story, the 
focus of the women’s own outrage) is not the fact that some people can afford 
the chocolates and others can’t, but that the ones who can are mean to the ones 
who can’t. And this represents something of an innovation in left politics. 
While everyone has always disapproved of adding insult to injury, it’s 
traditionally been the right that’s sought to treat the insult as if it were the 
injury.

It’s thus a relevant fact about Who Cares about the White Working Class? that 
Ferdinand Mount, who once advised Thatcher, is twice cited and praised here for 
condemning the middle class’s bad behaviour in displaying its open contempt for 
‘working-class cultures’. He represents an improvement over those who seek to 
blame the poor for their poverty and who regard the culture of poverty rather 
than the structure of capitalism as the problem. That is the view of what we 
might call right-wing neoliberalism and, from the standpoint of what we might 
call left-wing neoliberalism, it’s nothing but the expression of class 
prejudice. What left neoliberals want is to offer some ‘positive affirmation for 
the working classes’. They want us to go beyond race to class, but to do so by 
treating class as if it were race and to start treating the white working class 
with the same respect we would, say, the Somalis – giving ‘positive value and 
meaning to both “workingclassness” and ethnic diversity’. Where right 
neoliberals want us to condemn the culture of the poor, left neoliberals want us 
to appreciate it.

The great virtue of this debate is that on both sides inequality gets turned 
into a stigma. That is, once you start redefining the problem of class 
difference as the problem of class prejudice – once you complete the 
transformation of race, gender and class into racism, sexism and classism – you 
no longer have to worry about the redistribution of wealth. You can just fight 
over whether poor people should be treated with contempt or respect. And while, 
in human terms, respect seems the right way to go, politically it’s just as 
empty as contempt.

This is pretty obvious when it comes to class. Kjartan Páll Sveinsson declares 
that ‘the white working classes are discriminated against on a range of 
different fronts, including their accent, their style, the food they eat, the 
clothes they wear’ – and it’s no doubt true. But the elimination of such 
discrimination would not alter the nature of the system that generates ‘the 
large numbers of low-wage, low-skill jobs with poor job security’ described by 
Bottero. It would just alter the technologies used for deciding who had to take 
them. And it’s hard to see how even the most widespread social enthusiasm for 
tracksuits and gold chains could make up for the disadvantages produced by those 
jobs.

Race, on the other hand, has been a more successful technology of mystification. 
In the US, one of the great uses of racism was (and is) to induce poor white 
people to feel a crucial and entirely specious fellowship with rich white 
people; one of the great uses of anti-racism is to make poor black people feel a 
crucial and equally specious fellowship with rich black people. Furthermore, in 
the form of the celebration of ‘identity’ and ‘ethnic diversity’, it seeks to 
create a bond between poor black people and rich white ones. So the 
African-American woman who cleans my office is supposed to feel not so bad about 
the fact that I make almost ten times as much money as she does because she can 
be confident that I’m not racist or sexist and that I respect her culture. And 
she’s also supposed to feel pride because the dean of our college, who makes 
much more than ten times what she does, is African-American, like her. And since 
the chancellor of our university, who makes more than 15 times what she does, is 
not only African-American but a woman too (the fruits of both anti-racism and 
anti-sexism!), she can feel doubly good about her. But, and I acknowledge that 
this is the thinnest of anecdotal evidence, I somehow doubt she does. If the 
downside of the politics of anti-discrimination is that it now functions to 
legitimate the increasing disparities not produced by racism or sexism, the 
upside is the degree to which it makes visible the fact that the increase in 
those disparities does indeed have nothing to do with racism or sexism. A social 
analyst as clear-eyed as a University of Illinois cleaning woman would start 
from there.

Walter Benn Michaels teaches English at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His 
most recent book is The Trouble with Diversity; his next will be The Death of a 
Beautiful Woman: Form Now.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n16/mich02_.html