[Peace-discuss] Diversity manages inequality (also in France)

[C. G. Estabrook]

...If we quarrel endlessly about identity, pretending that being against 
affirmative action is a rightwing stance (discrimination against whites) and 
being for affirmative action is a leftwing one (compensation for years of 
discrimination against blacks), we can keep on calling each other racists and 
acting as though we actually have a left wing, whereas in fact we only have 
several shades of right.

If we compare the obligations related to diversity (everyone must be nice to 
everyone) with those required by equality (some people must give up their 
wealth), it is easy to understand how commitment to diversity has transformed 
the policies of the American left into a programme that aims to make rich people 
with different skin colours or sexual orientations feel “comfortable” without 
touching the one thing that makes them feel most “comfortable” – money.

That has not always been the case. Bobby Seale, the co-founder of the Black 
Panther movement in 1966, warned his comrades: “Those who want to obscure the 
struggle with ethnic differences are the ones who are aiding and maintaining the 
exploitation of the masses of the people: poor whites, poor blacks, browns, red 
Indians, poor Chinese and Japanese... We do not fight exploitative capitalism 
with black capitalism. We fight capitalism with basic socialism”. Now, with the 
rise of Obama, we still don’t fight capitalism with black capitalism, we try to 
save capitalism with black capitalism.

Not content with pretending that our real problem is cultural difference rather 
than economic difference, we have even begun to treat economic difference as 
though it were a form of cultural difference. What is expected of the upper 
middle class today is that we show ourselves to be more respectful of the poor, 
and that we stop acting as if things like our superior educations really make us 
superior.

And once we succeed in convincing ourselves that the poor are people who need 
our respect more than they need our money, our own attitude towards them becomes 
the problem to be solved, and not their poverty. We can now devote our reforms 
not to removing class but to eliminating what we Americans call “classism”. The 
trick is to analyse inequality as a consequence of our prejudices rather than of 
our social system, and thus replace the pain of giving up some of our money with 
the comparative pleasure of giving up (along with our classism) our racism, 
sexism, and homophobia.

And this strategy is open to the French as well...

--Walter Benn Michaels, "Respecting diversity isn’t enough: Deference to other 
people’s cultures costs less than paying them a living wage," Le Monde 
diplomatique, March 2009

Full article at <http://mondediplo.com/2009/03/11diversity>.