In The Trouble with Diversity, Walter Benn Michaels makes a provocative case against the elevation of cultural diversity, or respect and appreciation for different groups, over class concerns. This argument draws upon the classic American Exceptionalism argument that American society differs from Europe in that it lacks a class consciousness. Benn-Michaels adds an interesting twist: he argues that diversity, as we practice it on college campuses, is complicit in masking class inequality by encouraging us to focus on important, but less controversial aspects of cultural difference (food and holidays for instance) while ignoring the growing income inequality in the United States:
We love race — we love identity — because we don’t love class…..for 30 years, while the gap between the rich and the poor has grown larger, we’ve been urged to respect people’s identities — as if the problem of poverty would be solved if we just appreciated the poor.
I’ve written a bit about how our current understanding of diversity emphasizes tolerance at the expense of broader civic obligations to work across group boundaries to solve vexing civic problems like poverty and inequality. The result is we develop a keen appreciation that difference exists in society, but have no incentive to address what Cathy Cohen calls “cross-cutting” issues — those that affect groups across identity categories and are thus require cross-group mobilization.
What do you think? Where does race stand vis-a-vis class in terms of an identity that affects life chances for individuals in American society? Do we emphasize group acceptance at the expense of class-based concerns? Can we do both? Why don’t we? Should we?