I see that diversity is troublesome, and this is to be discussed. Excitingly, the second person to comment on the announcement of said discussion is Jonah Goldberg, who sniffily tells Professor Benn Michaels to scamper on off back to literary criticism, as the grownups will be exchanging bon mots about Hayek. (And hey, if Hayek is wrong, who wants to be right!) Anyway, sure is nice to see some further evidence of my thesis that the good Professor has a talent for making Internets conservatives say stupid things. Though mostly they were pretty goofy to start with.
[**UPDATE** Jonathan Goodwin says in comments:
Unless Jonah Goldberg assigns "nativist" to his email address and lives near Binghamton, that was probably not actually him.
Fair enough. I had never really considered the possibility of someone pretending to be Jonah Goldberg, much less the possibility of someone with such a fetish living near me. Gah. Gah, I say. Gah. But, everyone I suppose needs a hobby. Gah....]
The first chapter of Michaels's new book can be read here, in a very tiny typeface, so get used to squinting. Or, alternately, simply digest our jaundiced sandwich of same, layered with the usual Whiskey Fire condiments: catachresis, sullen malevolence, mustard.
We taste, we eat:
many of those who are quick to remind us that
there are no biological entities called races are even quicker to
remind us that races have not disappeared; they should just be
understood as social entities instead. And these social entities have
turned out to be remarkably tenacious, both in ways we know are bad and
in ways we have come to think of as good. The bad ways involve racism,
the inability or refusal to accept people who are different from us.
The good ways involve just the opposite: embracing difference,
celebrating what we have come to call diversity.
Sure. "Race" makes very little sense as a biological concept. And racism defined as a "refusal to accept people who are different from us" is fair enough (as is, of course, "kicking the shit out of other people for being of the wrong race" -- that's also a bad aspect of racism). As to the "good ways": well, what's the alternative to "embracing difference"? Pretending it's not there? Just because your classical racism, your grandpa's eugenics and all that crap, just because that's all discredited... does that mean that physiological difference is nothing? That a simple rejection of racial essentialism means that the intractable historical, cultural, and yes, material consequences of racism disappear in a puff of theoretical rigor once we concede that race is a social construction?
Where I get persnickety with Michaels' argument in this essay is at precisely this juncture.
Indeed, the goal of overcoming racism -- of
creating a “color-blind” society -- was now reconceived as the goal of
creating a diverse, that is, a color-conscious, society. Instead of
trying to treat people as if their race didn’t matter, we would not
only recognize but celebrate racial identity. Indeed, race has turned
out to be a gateway drug for all kinds of identities, cultural,
religious, sexual, even medical. To take what may seem like an extreme
case, advocates for the disabled now urge us to stop thinking of
disability as a condition to be “cured” or “eliminated” and to start
thinking of it instead on the model of race: We don’t think black
people should want to stop being black; why do we assume the deaf want
to hear?
The problem is not that Michaels is completely wrong, a quasi-bigot, a sellout, an academic elitist, or some other species of irredeemable damnfool. He isn't. He does have a point. But he's opposing one questionable Utopia to another. Sure, "Diversity" can be celebrated in waterhead ways by waterhead people, and yes, such a focus can indeed obscure real issues of economic injustice (and that's why the Official Happy Funtime American Government version of, say, Martin Luther King's "message" tends to omit certain key aspects of what the man actually said). And identity politics, on the Left and Right, can be pretty annoying.
But why is a "color-blind" society the opposite of "racism"? Social constructions such as race are indeed extremely powerful and cannot be ignored, not least because they are so intertwined with, as opposed to distinct from, class (which was, I think, essentialized as a category of social being long before the rise of the contemporary notion of Diversity).
The point is that these differences mean a lot to people in their real lives. Michaels seems to want to be prescriptive first, to apply a point of theoretical rigor and use it to leverage what he sees as a more equitable and beneficial social outcome, than to be descriptive, to explore what "race" and "identity" mean, to ask why people want to persist in, you know, maintaining an identity that has perhaps something to do with their own individual histories. To wit:
In an ideal universe we wouldn’t be celebrating
diversity at all -- we wouldn’t even be encouraging it -- because in an
ideal universe the question of who you wanted to sleep with would be a
matter of concern only to you and to your loved (or unloved) ones. As
would your skin color; some people might like it, some people might
not, but it would have no political significance whatsoever. Diversity
of skin color is something we should happily take for granted, the way
we do diversity of hair color. No issue of social justice hangs on
appreciating hair color diversity; no issue of social justice hangs on
appreciating racial or cultural diversity.
Maybe, but issues of social justice sure do hang on not appreciating racial or cultural diversity, or very easily can. To use a pretty crude example, try serving only bacon at your university's cafeteria (an idea I myself would certainly at least ponder as a good idea) and see what the Jewish and Muslim students think of that.
Michaels says "Our identity is the least important thing about us." Only from a certain theoretical perspective. Not from the perspective of any analysis of how individuals and groups actually perceive themselves in relation to society at large, a reality that I don't believe is really the fault of multiculturalism. And indeed, calling this reality good or bad has little to do with its status as, you know, reality. The kind of economic equality Michaels champions, and I agree with him that that would be nice to have, won't, I suspect, be attainable unless concepts of identity can be mobilized to achieve it, as opposed to dumped altogether.
(The title of my post, by the way, comes from an episode of The Tick I happened to be watching with the 6-Year-Old when I started writing this, and was chosen utterly at random. Spoooooooooon!)
