The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality Paperback – July 24, 2007

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.

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.

Michaels skewers the excesses of identity politics, saying that economics comes first. As a friend of mine said: “I did not need people's respect or sympathy when I was on the ropes; I needed employment and money.”

Although he often oversimplifies, his intricate logic leads to great one-liners that make valid points. Examples: “The gap between rich and poor may be growing on a daily basis, but when it comes to difference, we prefer fighting racism to fighting poverty.” (p. 77) “What the right wants is culture wars instead of class wars because as long as the wars are about identity instead of money, it doesn’t matter who wins.”(p. 109) “What CEO doesn’t find it easier to respect his employee’s culture than to pay them a decent wage?” (p.105)

Michaels takes on Race, Education, Culture, Gender, Domestic Violence, Reparations, Globalization, Religion, and more. His point is that economic inequality is far more important to most people than identity (race, gender, ethnicity, religion, etc.) . Identity has mostly served to distract us from focusing on the system of free market capitalism which has engineered the extreme inequality we now have in the US and all the social dysfunction and discord that implies (read the “The Spirit Level” by Wilkinson and Pickett).

Of course, identity does “intersect” with economic class, but not in any uniform way. I’ve long noticed that the US concept of race is based almost entirely on the African American experience, but class plays out much differently in other racial / ethnic contexts, such as European American, Asian American, and Latino American. The escalating inequality of the last 40 years has hit working class and lower middle class the hardest, regardless of identity. Meanwhile the black middle class has expanded, along with middle class jobs for women, with white men taking the biggest hit statistically.

Michaels doesn’t get into all of the statistics, but the way he distinguishes race and other issues from economic class opens the door to a far more direct attack on injustice. Just imagine if our politics and economics were to become highly egalitarian (in the economic sense) and were structured to stay that way. The issue of race, as we know it, would simply melt away over several generations precisely because it was created to maintain economic disparities which would no longer exist. In fact the extraordinary period of World War II through the mid 70s was the time of greatest economic equality and growth of the middle class in US history, so the civil rights movement and the war on poverty of the 1960s were good examples of how good economics can lead to real progress on seemingly intractable social issues. And it was the gradual abandonment of the structures that had preserved economic equality that has led to our present predicament.

One last quote (p. 189): “While the debate over whether American should be Christian is a step in the right direction, a debate over whether America should continue to worship at the altar of the free market would be better still.”

A brilliant critique of fashionable shibboleths like 'multiculturalism' and 'identity politics' as new incarnations of racism and other old prejudices. The author shows how these concepts serve to conceal and justify the most pervasive and powerful form of oppression and exploitation -- that based on economic class.