In general, a middle class young black girl has an easier go of it than a poor young white boy.

Class inequality is indeed the overriding determinant of one's ultimate position in life, it always has been. Those who argue that this is myopic or reductionist are typically the type who built lucrative academic or media careers intellectualizing and pontificating on every nuance under the sun except class and class struggle. This is something the American media are especially adept at doing.

The obscene class inequality that manifests itself today should be of paramount concern. No amount of sophistry and intellectualizing can negate or wash over the harsh disadvantages the poor and struggling working class of all colors are forced to deal with from birth to the grave.

Quite simply Michaels delivers with this searing class analysis that fills up the pages of Trouble with Diversity.

Blacks as a demographic cohort experience the sting of class disadvantage and class struggle because many of them are mired in the lower economic strata due to historical racism, redlining, economic exploitation, pitiful wages, white flight, rent gouging landlords, insecure jobs, and un and underemployment. These are the primary reasons blacks find themselves in the lower rungs of the economic ladder. As Michaels offers in the book, policies that target inequality and wages would do much to lift all boats, including struggling whites as well as blacks.

Feel good diversity rhetoric, identity programs and seminars don’t really get to the root of what’s troubling the American socio-economic reality. Only a full throttle attack on the top one percent will deliver the goods. The Trouble with Diversity fully understands this and provides myriad passages proving the point. What CEO doesn’t find it easier to lose a little white male privilege in the boardroom and sing hosannas to diversity in lieu of raising worker pay to a living wage and providing decent benefits?

As the Trouble with Diversity addresses, the majority of those in poverty are white, which demonstrates the difficulty of rising above the class position one is born into. Massive poverty is a seemingly intractable problem endemic to American capitalism. This social reality indirectly addresses why diversity and identity politics are an ultimate dead end. As Michaels so accurately points out, without undercutting the crux of class power, certain activist elements will succeed only in ensuring that the top one percent is 10% black, 50% women, a certain percentage Latino, a certain percentage gay, a certain percentage lesbian, a certain percentage transsexual, a certain percentage bisexual, a certain percentage transvestite, etc.

The Trouble with Diversity is a work that’s being proven correct now more than ever. Of course Marxists and other left intellectuals have written and studied all this before Michaels, but Michaels’ book is a well written cogent synthesis for any movement building.

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.

Good read, this book challenges conventional beliefs about racism in America. Michaels makes the argument that race is arbitrary. Political ideology has blinded us from an even bigger evil, income inequality. Michaels seems to believe solving income inequality might also resolve race issues in America. Michaels does provide one solution to the problem. However it dpes not seem very feasible