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

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Key Phrases: United States, Jim Crow, The Trouble (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

In this cogent jeremiad, which is certain to be controversial, Michaels diagnoses America's love of diversity as one of our greatest problems. Not only does it reinforce ideas of racial essentialism that it claims to repudiate; it obscures the crevasse between rich and poor. Michaels, a scholar of American literature, suggests that the growth of economic inequality over the past few decades is the result of a deeply ingrained and unchallenged class structure. Scrutinizing current events and religion, he argues that our fixation with the "phantasm" of race promotes identity over ideology, and he rejects the idea that meritocracy prevails in America's elite universities. A believer in the power of progressive politics, he calls for a debate in which class, rather than identity, would be at the fore.
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Review

"A rarity in the forum of American political debate--closely reasoned, genuinely impassioned call to revive a politics of economic justice." -- --The New York Observer

"Bracing... its greatest virtue is the tenacity and precision with which Michaels dissects out muddled ideas about race and inequality." -- --The Nation

"Michaels has written a bracing polemic that should quicken the debate over what diversity really means, or should mean, in academia and beyond." -- --Andrew Delbanco, The New York Review of Books

"Michaels is at his best when he is running his chainsaw through other people's cant... A captivating read and necessary provocation." -- --Los Angeles Times

"Potent and disturbing... elegant and literary, The Trouble With Diversity bites and bites deep." -- --Toronto Globe and Mail

"This is a different line, and there's a touch of genius about it." -- --The Economist.com --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks; 1st edition (July 24, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805083316
• ISBN-13: 978-0805083316
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #383,093 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Draws sharp distinctions, November 29, 2006

By	Gregory Marton - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (Hardcover)

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.

21 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I buy the argument; you should buy the book., October 31, 2006

By	Joseph M. Powers (South Bend, IN USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (Hardcover)

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.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Runs out of Steam, May 16, 2007

By	Stewart Teaze (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (Hardcover)

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.