Red All Over

Race, Class, and "Diversity"

I just noticed this thought-provoking article from last week's New York Times magazine:

... the reason we like the problem of racism is that solving it just requires us to give up our prejudices, whereas solving the problem of economic inequality might require something more -- it might require us to give up our money. ...

This, if you're on the right, is the gratifying thing about campus radicalism. When student and faculty activists struggle for cultural diversity, they are in large part battling over what skin color the rich kids should have. Diversity, like gout, is a rich people's problem. And it is also a rich people's solution. For as long as we're committed to thinking of difference as something that should be respected, we don't have to worry about it as something that should be eliminated. As long as we think that our best universities are fair if they are appropriately diverse, we don't have to worry that most people can't go to them, while others get to do so because they've had the good luck to be born into relatively wealthy families. In other words, as long as the left continues to worry about diversity, the right won't have to worry about inequality.

I'm not quite ready to give up on race-based affirmative action -- racial disparities are still far too persistent in all areas of American life. But I think Michaels's basic point is a good and challenging one. Some of the fault lies with a privileged liberalism which prefers not see to its own institutions challenged. But, unfortunately, I think it's also fair to lay some blame at the feet of identity politics. When everything becomes about observable differences in social identity, structural inequality -- class-based and otherwise -- goes out the window.