[Peace-discuss] Race & class

[C. G. Estabrook]

Walter Benn Michaels, "Chav chic, and respect the poor" (Le Monde diplomatique):

     ...at a time when class difference in the US is as high as it’s been in the 
last hundred years, we’re being urged not to talk about what we never talk about 
(the inequalities produced by capitalism) and to talk lots more about what we 
always talk about (the inequalities produced by racism). Why?

     Well, one answer, of course, is the absolutely central role race and racism 
have played in our history. But it’s not a very good answer. The extraordinary 
inequalities of the last 30 years were not caused by racism and the catastrophic 
consequences of the current crash will not be alleviated by anti-racism. Indeed, 
these days anti-racism is as much a part of the problem as it is the solution. 
In every neoliberal society, the response to more inequality has been a call for 
more diversity because the core commitment of neoliberalism is that the only 
inequalities we need to do anything about are the ones produced by prejudice.

Walter Benn Michaels on anti-racism and diversity from "The Trouble With Diversity":

     We would much rather get rid of racism than get rid of poverty. And we 
would much rather celebrate cultural diversity than seek to establish economic 
equality.

     Indeed, diversity has become virtually a sacred concept in American life 
today. No one's really against it; people tend instead to differ only in their 
degrees of enthusiasm for it and their ingenuity in pursuing it.

     There’s no reason why people with a certain set of genes ought to be 
reading a certain set of books and thinking of those books as part of their 
heritage, or why, when they read some other set of books, they should think of 
them as part of someone else’s heritage. There are just the things we learn and 
the things we don’t learn, the things we do and the things we don’t do.

Benn Michaels, from The Chronicle of Higher Education:

     The argument is that anti-racism today performs at least one of the same 
functions that racism used to — it gives us a vision of our society as organized 
racially instead of economically — while adding another function — it insists 
that racism is the great enemy to be overcome. But all the anti-racism in the 
world won't take any money away from the rich and won't give any of it to the poor.

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