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The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality

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This book is aimed at drawing distinctions between subjective matters of identity and objective matters of income and beliefs. Each identity is as good as any other, but being poor is worse than being rich. Michaels accuses the left of having lost its focus on objective equality, to the point of glorifying poverty.

Treating poverty as a matter of identity is, according to Michaels, a pernicious strategy for willfully ignoring the problem that increasingly many people are increasingly poor, and have less and less opportunity to move out of poverty. Moreover, by fighting battles of identity -- WalMart and Wall Street women each making some percent less than the men -- we may ignore the fact that all the WalMart workers make a hundredth of what the Wall Street workers make. He does not argue against fighting injustices of identity so much as argue for prioritizing and looking at the problems in perspective.

The book draws sharp distinctions between the kinds of arguments that make sense for identities and those that make sense for wealth and ideology. It is a call to action in addressing "equality of opportunity" for everyone (the American Dream), hand in hand with reducing economic disparity.

This is an important social commentary, clearly and engagingly written, and exposing one of the great hidden weaknesses of politics in the United States. You may or may not be convinced, but reading it will broaden your view and sharpen your perspective.

Prof. Michaels most persuasive point is that our society has neglected the laudable goal of striving for socio-economic diversity in our institutions in favor of emphasizing other classes of diversity. He relies on strong rhetorical skills to make this, and most of his points. He does not focus on the detailed statistics that would be necessary to convince many professional social scientists, but the prospective audience for this extended op-ed piece is more the general reader, who may be provoked into finding their own numbers to butress their arguments. The writing style is necessarily polemical, and it is likely that all readers will find some things with which to disagree. However, in contrast to other critics of modern implementations of diversity, the present author likely otherwise shares many views with advocates of diversity. Even those who take issue with Michaels' conclusions will find his ideas worth considering. His closest intellectual bedfellow is Thomas Franks, to whom considerable reference is made, along with a host of other timely sources (who may be dated in a few years!). I found the short book easily digestible in two hour-long evening readings.

This is an engaging, sometimes brilliant, book that is also deeply flawed. It is wonderfully well written. The author can turn a phrase and produce the occasional memorable maxim. For example, he says "Diversity, like gout, is a rich person's disease" (p108) and he says regarding the diversity obsession in elite American institutions that "the supposed left has turned into something like the human resource department of the right, concerned to make sure that women of the upper middle class have the same privileges as the men"( p114). The early chapters on the biology of race and "Our Favorite Victims" (which argues that our obsessions with race and gender have obscured our vision of economic inequality) are especially subtle and illuminating.

Still the book suffers two flaws: whenever it treats hard sociological facts the interpretation is typically glib, and the author offers few if any concrete proposals to address the problem of economic inequality. Regarding the first problem, three examples will suffice.

1 On page 98, the author provides the average SAT scores for students in 10 income categories, ranging from less than $10,000 dollars (872) to more than $100,000 dollars (1115). The average SAT goes up with each step up the income ladder. The problem he fails to note, however, is that race or ethnicity is even more important than income in accounting for variation in SAT. In 2006 Blacks averaged 863 and Asians scored 1088 on the SAT, and Asians from families earning $20,000-$30,000 outscored blacks from homes earning over $100,000 by over 60 points. Income is important but ethnicity is more important. In terms of school achievement, "it is more important to be born Asian than born rich," as Lawrence Steinberg once put it.
2 Michaels assumes that white suburban schools are better funded than black/urban schools (p87, passim), and that this accounts for differences in student performance but the evidence is quite clear that more money is spent on urban schools per student than any other type of school. Schools with 50% or more minority students spend 9% more than those with 5% or fewer minority students. My area would be typical. Atlanta City schools spend 50% more per student than suburban counties such as Cobb and Gwinnett but the latter greatly outperform Atlanta on standardized tests. The school district that spends the most in the country is Washington DC and it is arguably the worst school district in the country. There is no relationship between expenditures and student performance, something we have known since the Coleman Report of 1966. Family variables, especially family composition, explain most of the variation in student achievement.
3 The author observes that the academic left has claimed that domestic abuse occurs in every social class but that in fact poor women are 7 times more likely to be abused than wealthy women (pp.117-119). This is true but it hides what is the real variable of importance--marital status. According to the Justice Department and the National Crime Victimization Survey, single women are 4 times more likely to be abused than married women, and divorced and separated women are 10 times more likely to be abused than married women. The income findings are largely a function of the fact that married couples have much higher incomes than single/separated/divorced households.

Regarding the paucity of concrete policy prescriptions, one has to assume that Michaels wants to increase taxes on the rich and distribute the money to the poor but that is no guidance at all. He does seem to prefer that affirmative action shift from race/ethnicity/gender to social class, but as many have observed, such a shift would benefit whites and Asians disproportionately. The single concrete proposal he makes is reparations for slavery. Of course, this is rather ironic, given that the main point of the book is that obsessions with race and gender have blinded us to issues of income inequality, but the larger problem with such a proposal is contained in statements like "reparations are a technology for trying to create a world that comes as close as possible to the world we would have had if neither slavery nor Jim Crow had happened" (p128-129). You have to work very hard to be that facile. Had slavery never happened the descendents of those who in fact were enslaved would be living in West Africa and yet the 37 million people currently living in the US of African descent have a combined income much larger than the combined income of the 650 million sub-Saharan Africans. The typical person living in Western Africa lives on less than 2 dollars a day. By the author's logic, the descendents of slaves are the ones who should be paying reparations. Did I say "glib?" That is absurd.

Brad Lowell Stone

The main thesis of the book is that liberals' emphasis on diversity has undermined our attempts to address economic inequality. Not so much because we have a limited amount of attention that we can give to political issues, and if you are focusing on racial or ethnic issues, you aren't focusing on economic ones (although I think there is truth to this). More interestingly, Benn Michaels shows how a diversity focus makes it harder to think clearly about economic issues.

One example: These days, there is a lot of effort put into "not looking down on poor people." That's classism, on analogy with racism. But as Benn Michaels points out, the main problem with poverty isn't that people look down on you: it's that you don't have enough money, and everything that follows from that. Poverty won't be solved by everyone thinking the right thoughts about poor people, but by getting poor people more money, most likely by taking some of it away from those who have more.

It is much easier for people to pretend that we are all equal, in every way that is important; rather than grappling with the many important ways in which we're not equal, and to try to minimize that inequality.

Another example: focusing on eliminating racism or sexism, I can be on the side of the angels, and it won't cost me anything. Focus on economic inequality, and I may have to really give something up. Much easier to talk against "discrimination."

Michaels points out that Americans have a tough time talking about economic class. Part of this has to do with an overemphasis on diversity. We fall into a trap. Because we want to be egalitarian, value everyone equally, we wind up ignoring the ways in which poverty really does damage people, make them "less." Again, the topic is just unpleasant. Better to ignore it.

*

Here are three quotes from the book that get to the heart of matters:

* "We love race--we love identity--because we don't love class" (p.6). Embracing identity is a way of avoiding issues of economic inequality.

If the difference between us is a money problem, then we might have to do something about it. If it is a matter of our attitudes, those are probably fine already. And if we do need to work on them, we can do so without taking out our wallets.

* "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" (p.12).

I would add that we'd "rather get rid of racism," in part, because most of that work has already been done for us. We're lazy, intellectually and politically.

* "In an ideal universe we wouldn't be celebrating [or encouraging] diversity at all" (p. 14). True? I don't think so. I understand how Benn Michaels has gotten to this point. Still, I think that appreciating diversity should remain a core value of liberalism, but that we need to think harder about the full meaning of diversity.

As a positive goal, diversity caught on in the aftermath of the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s. So we tend to define diversity in terms of the groups who fought for their rights in these struggles: African-Americans; other racial and ethnic minorities; women; homosexuals. But there is more to diversity than this.

In his great essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill--the first notable philosopher to speak of diversity as an important social good--emphasized not racial, ethnic or sexual differences, but new and different ways of thinking and living. For Mill, diversity depended not on having lots of ethnic and racial groups present in a society, but on individuals being creative enough to think their own thoughts and brave enough to live their own lives.

This, I think, is ultimately a deeper and more important kind of diversity and one that progressives, with our strong belief in the value of every individual, should promote. Diversity is a real value. We just have to understand it correctly and put it in its proper place in an ecology of values.

*

In any event, this is a well-thought through, witty discussion of an important issue. I recommend it highly.

For Walter Benn Michaels, the fact that rich people have a lot more money than poor people is a hammer for which nearly every societal problem is a nail. In this book, every issue raised would be ameliorated if only radical income redistribution would be enacted. The funny thing is that in the last chapter he evaluates himself according to the principles he espouses in this book and admits he comes up way short. The fact is that no one keeps these rich progressives from radically redistributing their own income, but they don't. As one of my leftish friends said to me one time when he said he thought that we as a society were still under taxed. I pointed out to him that he could tax himself at any effective rate he wished and the U. S. Treasury would take his money. He said that he didn't want to pay more tax, but he wanted OTHERS to pay more tax. Well, there you go.

The title of this book might lead you to believe that it is principally about the issue of Diversity and probably Affirmative Action. And there is discussion of those issues. However, the discussion is about how these are really not the main problem in society because the idea of race is a false concept. The idea of race is a "phantasm" according to the author (and I agree with him - just remember that at one time what we call ethnic groups among the Europeans were considered different "races").

And I agree with Michaels that any Affirmative Action should be done by income and resources. He is right that whatever pathologies might exist in the adults of that family, the kids aren't at fault and need help to realize their potential. And I also agree with Michaels that our society needs to more fully develop and utilize the talents of our citizens. Greenspan talked about this fact years ago in addressing the income problem. He said that we needed fewer laborers and more engineers. There are a great many potential engineers that never get developed among the children of the lower economic quintile. Let's go find them and help them. I agree completely. The kids will be better off and happier people and society will be better off by having them more economically productive.

The author goes off the rails, though, because of his obsession with economics as a kind of zero sum nightmare. In the author's world, the poor are poor because the wealthy have so much. For him, it was bad enough when CEOs made 40 times what the laborer made. Now that it is hundreds of times more, Michaels seems to know that they got there by breaking the backs of the poor. This is a noxious misunderstanding of economics. However, I will go this far with the author. Like Henry Ford, I believe that that companies should look to increase the material well being of all their employees rather than simply using them up as another input.

However, it is also true that there is a market for labor and that the cost of labor is indeed a cost that goes into the marginal price of any product or service. And it is an immutable law of the marketplace that the lowest marginal price wins and the higher cost producers will have to find something else to do with their time and resources. One cannot pay a bagger at Kroger the lush $175,000 salary Michaels makes as an overpaid professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. (Don't get me wrong, if Michaels can get his employer to overpay him, good for him. We all engage in "rent seeking behavior" -- see your economics 101 text.) But discussing the foolishness of our University system and its ridiculous tenure rules is another topic for another time.

Michaels is absolutely correct when he points out that if Harvard completely did away with tuition, as some advocate, the benefits would largely accrue to those who already come from wealthy families. It would be a false egalitarianism. However, his obsessive use of Harvard as an stand-in for college education obfuscates an important point for working class families trying to give their kids a better life. One need not go to Harvard, any Ivy League school, or even an elite state university in order to improve one's life to the point of being out of the bottom quintile (or bottom two quintiles).

If one simply completes high school, marries before having children, and stays married while raising the kid while at least one of the spouses is working, there is an overwhelming probability that they will not be a permanent resident of the bottom quintile. If one attends even a community college for some kind of certification or gets a four-year degree from even a third ranked state school, one has a fine chance for a perfectly enjoyable middle class life.

I found Michael's discussion of the Velveeta class versus the Stilton class condescending and offensive. Since I come from a working class background (my father was an asbestos worker and my mother retired from assembly line work at Ford Motor Company), I know perfectly well how nice life can be in a nice home with good food on the table with clean (if not fancy) clothes, some books around the house, and a spinet piano to take some lessons on. We even ate out once in awhile. My parents could not afford to pay beyond my first year of college, but I still found a way to get an undergraduate degree (in music theory and piano) from the University of Michigan (I was 26 and married with two children at the time - working more than full time while going to school full time and graduating with distinction). In mid-life, I went back and got an MBA. During most of my working life, I was involved with computer networks and am now an entrepreneur.

The choices in life don't need to be "the elite" or "the ghetto". Most people make trade offs to strike the "right" balance of life choices. They want to work enough to have material comfort, but have enough time away from work to enjoy some of the things life offers for free. Yes, the poor need help. Milton Friedman advocated a negative income tax in 1962 in "Capitalism and Freedom" and I think it still is one of the best ideas for helping the poor participate more fully in society. It would leave in the political realm what that income needed to be, but would remove much of the social engineering and bureaucratic waste in our current social welfare schemes while allowing each person to make their own choices for his or her life.

The fact remains, that these fixed income "quintiles" are in themselves deceptive. Most people do not remain fixed on one or the other. Yet, the author (and many of his fellow progressives) treats them as a stand in for economic class. Only a very small percentage of those in the top or bottom quintile remain in them more or less permanently. Most lives are quite fluid. In some years, I have been in the top quintile (and in a few - even in the author's economic class). In others, I have been in the very bottom quintile. Yet income is only a poor indicator. Since I also possessed an education, had friends and a church who cared to help me, and a family to motivate me, I have found ways out of the hard times. But I know first hand how bleak and hard they can be and feel strongly that we do need to reach out to those who are hurting. However, we do not want to create incentives to a permanent underclass.

But as Michael's admission of hypocrisy in the conclusion shows, it isn't actual people he wants to help. It is assuaging his own precious ego that is the focus of his narcissistic politics. If what he says about himself is true, he wants to be able to write books, give lectures, and rail against "rich" people (using bad economics and foolish social theories) rather than going out to those in trouble and touching their lives in person. Just fob off the do-gooding on the bureaucratic "help" and he can feel assuaged that any left-over suffering must be caused by the evil and selfish who resist his ideas. Yeah, right.

No thanks. Give me the free enterprise system in a democratic republic and get out of the way. We can help and lift each without the guidance of those who live in great comfort while collecting fat salaries from the paychecks of hardworking taxpayers making far less than they. I advocate true competition for those jobs. If we make those costly positions actually competitive based on continuing productivity, an entirely different (and better) class of professor would show up (and probably at lower cost!).

So, this is a pretty interesting book. The author makes some good points, some interesting analysis, poor recommendations, and seems to be completely ignorant of what economics has learned in the past century or so.

The main idea is that too much focus on diversity has allowed the schools/press/government to take their focus off the more critical issue of levelling the ECONOMIC playing field, rather than the absurd and meaningless "diversity" playing filed, which plays into the elite/rich right's (and left's) hands.

I agree with the author that too much focus is put on race (the author makes the point that race really "shouldn't matter", and may not even really exist); indeed there are some interesting views made on Plessy vs. Ferguson. However, towards the end of the book, when the author branches out to say that the USA's language, and culture (and, by extrapolation, borders) "don't matter" either and shouldn't be the subject of any argument, it became clear that the author had already run out of useful subject matter in this relatively small book.

The number one thing you need to keep in mind as you read my review is this: politically, I consider myself to be an "Independent" who leans way more to the left than to the right. O.K. Full steam ahead.

This is a topic that has interested me off and on for some time, coming from a background where I've seen the hardcore "diversity" rhetoric being force-fed in college classrooms across the country. You can't so much as throw a stone across a college campus without hitting something tagged with the diversity/multicultural label. It really has gotten to the point of mild insanity. And it is to the author's credit that he was willing to write a book that surely caused him no small amount of discomfort. In today's world, badmouthing "diversity" is akin to dangling a baby over a balcony. Everyone thinks diversity is just dandy... especially "radical" liberals making lots of money and living in fat houses far away from any "real" diversity. I was reminded of one of my professors in graduate school who lived in a fat house in the Berkeley Hills, probably worth over a million dollars (or more). Another professor, talking about him in a very serious tone, called him "a hardcore communist." It struck me as absurd. If he was really a hardcore communist, how could he ever justify his lifestyle of sipping drinks on the sunny patio of his million dollar home while beggars live off of peanuts just a few blocks away!

But this is what academics will try to sell you. And, again to the author's credit, he calls out his colleagues... big time!

If you have any sort of brain that has not been completely zombified by the "diversity" rhetoric being shoved in your face 24/7, you will have to agree with the basic tenets of this book. It is not a masterpiece by any means, but at least someone finally had the guts to just say, "Hey... this is getting pretty ridiculous!"

This is the era of the catch-phrase "diversity" and one can only hope that we start focusing on important issues fairly soon. Now, before you start hating on me... keep in mind my disclaimer at the beginning of the review. I am not some Glenn Beck-loving idiot. I lean more toward the left. I voted for Obama.

But I'm not about to drink the Multicultural Kool-Aid.

The title really made some eyeballs pop out at work, but I found it an interesting read with some well thought out points.

This is a book that makes you think. It makes you want to think- about equality and class in particular. It challenges the perspectives of the reader and forces them to second guess themselves and the opinions they have previously established on related ideas and theories. 'The Trouble with Diversity' leaves you with the feeling of having learned something and wanting to learn more. It is a book that will remain in my personal library for life and that I will find myself reading again periodically. Having first read this gem last fall, I have yet to read its match.

For many years the world has worshipped at the alter of diversity. This view has literally taken over the world, not only in the west, but extending itself to places such as Israel and India, in short any country that wants to ape the West. The idea is simple. Diversity is king. To make up for supposed years of not having diversity, which means a small class of the same ethnic and religious group ran most countries in the world up to the present time(for instance Anglo-Saxon whites in the U.S, Rich Sunni Arabs in Iraq), society must discriminate in favor of those who were discriminated against. This means that all institutions from TV shows, to the workplace to the University must have an 'equal' representation of society.

But thats not what happened. The legacy of Dr. King in America was not diversity. It was racism. Instead of abolished racism and using color blind tests to recruit, which would ensure diversity inside meritocracy, people were recruited for their skin color, ensuring the legacy of racial hate. Thus in American universities there are mainly two types of people, wealthy blacks and wealthy whites. Asians and poor whites get the boot so that the college can brag about diversity. There is no mention of diversity of opinion.

Thus in the sad obsession with race, and in the name of confronting racial wrongs, the picture is worth reality, so that a picture that appears diverse, is called diverse. This book tries to show the fallacy here. Those who are truly discriminated against in business, in college and everywhere else are the poor. Thus it is not just skin color that is a deteriminant of diversity but class as well. The wealthy have something in common with eachother everywhere regardless of color or religion, and for this reason recruting wealthy Africans does not truly fulfill diversity, in fact it is the opposite. True diversity is making sure to represent society, and society is primarily middle class and poor, so its time the major institutions reflected that and not just the fake color, which is only skin deep, that they do today. A passionate call to action.

Seth J. Frantzman