Walter Benn Michaels

Well written and useful.

Detailed review:

Introduction:
The central thesis is that "diversity" is a word that has come to mean difference that we can and must all celebrate.

The author says the "The Great Gatsby" can be viewed as a reflection on race. Jimmy Gatz, who is maybe Jewish, becomes wealthy Jay Gatsby, but he still doesn't count. I had always thought that it was that he was nouveau riche and that he had gotten a lot of his money by smuggling all sorts of things, and people used to like the rich more if the origins of their money were not so recent. Well, I've never read the book, nor have I watched to the end of either movie.

But, the author argues that people in the US seem to like the idea of race, more than the idea of differences in wealth which he calls class. Even now that educated people believe that there is not really a biological basis for race it is just rebranded as something having to do with culture.

In 1978 SCOTUS ruled that it was legal for the University of California to take "race" into account in admissions policy, because it increased the diversity of the student body which was good for the university as a whole. At that point, diversity, which had meant many things, like geographical diversity, came to mean less and less anything but racial diversity.

This new idea of diversity lead to "identity": people started to claim all sorts of identities, racial and otherwise. We are told we should celebrate these differences, and conveniently ignore amazing differences in wealth.

The book's points:
1. Cultural diversity is just racial classification in disguise
2. Everything Americans seems to think about culture is wrong
3. Please will you notice how poor some people are and how very rich others are and take some time to think about how to fix this problem?!!!

In the best case, cultural diversity celebrating would go away, because we would just accept differences among people, so long as they weren't harmful to others. And we should. But once discrimination goes away, no further gain is derived from putting lots of energy into celebrating. It serves no purpose of social justice, although it might be fun.

Conservatives want everybody to adhere to a truly American culture. Liberals want to celebrate everybody's cultural difference. Everybody wants to ignore those unsettling income differences. There has been a re-balancing. Huey Long seriously proposed wealth limiting legislation. No Democrat or Republican would every dream of suggesting that sort of thing now. The closest we get is universal health care. We have made lots of progress in terms of civil rights and regressed in terms of economic justice. The commitment to diversity has made liberalism into a program to make wealthy people feel comfortable about being gay or having a different skin color from some other people and at the same time staying wealthy. We should let go of those uses of history which involve blaming one group for the harm their ancestors did to ours.

There is a confusion about "diversity of thought". "On Liberty' is a great argument for "diversity of thought" but it always preserves the idea that some thoughts are more correct than others. If "diversity of thought" is just like "diversity of culture" and all cultures are equally good, then all thoughts are equally good, and disagreement of one person with another is intolerance. The author wants to point out that thoughts being more or less correct or useful really matters, regardless of who you are. The left is the accomplice of the right; it ignores economic inequalities entirely.

If we turn poverty into another kind of diversity, we can celebrate it. And if we believe that it's a consequence of our prejudices rather than our social system then all we have to do is fix ourselves and we're all done!

Chapter 1: The Problem with Race
Points out that when "culture" is substituted for "race", because "race" just has no biological foundation, there is no solid foundation for the concept. Who would really want a surrogate for "race" anyway? I've always been bothered by the use of the word "culture", because it tends these days to mean fun or interesting things that you would be expected to know more about if it is "your culture" and less if it is in someone else's. But historians tend to think of culture as a somewhat broader thing, with fewer fun things in it. Tries to contrast "black" with "gay"; claims "gay" has a fundamental definition that we can actually use, so-called same-sex attraction. But I think he would know that for some people it's a bit more complicated than that. The problem is the correlation of culture and other. So some person might be gay more because there is a culture associated with "straight" and to be straight and female is to be some man's property in that culture, i.e., not-fun culture. So he is ignoring the important correlations that can arise between things that are distinct. In essence, he is being essentialist. "culture" should probably not be thought of as immutable, any more than we now think of species as immutable. But if cultures can change, that can only be caused by members of the culture participating in that culture to a greater or lesser extent. We might as well think of the elements of a culture as being similar to the gene pool for a species.

There is a new definition of another identity, which is people who have ancestors who were slaves in this country. That is a real definition, with a real basis in real history, which makes it somewhat useful. So you could readily say, we can determine this set and we can show a strong correlation between members of this set and certain behaviors or preferences.
But, what proportion of this ancestry would have to have been slaves to make you belong to this group? What about => 1/2?… (plus d'informations)