It is somewhat odd. You would think that I would be an aggressive cheerleader for Walter Benn Michaels's The Trouble with Diversity.
After all, if you proposed to take six ladder-faculty slots from
Berkeley's Ethnic Studies Department and move two of them to Economics,
two of them to Sociology, and two of them to the business school to
hire people to really study the workings of the labor market, the
intergenerational transmission of inequality, and compensation patterns
within organizations--I would say that that would be a wonderful idea,
and that it would make Berkeley a better university and the world a
better world.
If you were to ask me who did more for the American minorites who
are underrepresented at elite universities, and gave me a choice
between (a) all the diversity deans in America and their staffs or (b)
the neoliberals on the Clinton economic policy team who pushed through
the 1993 expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit that boosts the
collective incomes of poor Americans by what is now some $30 billion a
year, I would have no hesitation in coming down on the side of Bill
Clinton and his team--including, in a minor spear-carrying role,
me--who changed in our own minor way not social consciousness but
social being back in 1993.
I ought to be part of this book's core constituency.
But, instead, The Trouble with Diversity raises my hackles.
Let's dip into it. I flip it open, and land on page 85:
p. 85 ff: But the greatest value of diversity is not
primarily in the contribution it makes to students' self-esteem. Its
real value, as the widespread acceptance of affirmative action shows,
is in the contribution it makes to the collective fantasy that
institutions like Harvard and UIC are... meritocracies. For if the
students at Harvard are appropriately diverse, we know that no student
is being kept from Harvard because of his or her race or culture....
How, then, do some students end up at Harvard and some at UIC? Since
the differences between them that produce this divergence are not
(indeed cannot be) cultural (remember, cultures are equal), they are
attributed instead to the merit of the individual....
This
helps explain the popularity on campus... of affirmative action: it is
a powerful tool for legitimizing their sense of their individual
merit.... Affirmative action guarantees that... the white students on
campus can understand themselves to be there on merit because they
didn't get there at the expense of any black people. The problem with
affirmative action is..,,, that it produces the illusion that we
actually have a meritocracy.... [I]magine what that Harvard classroom
would look like if we... [made] the [parental] income distribution at
Harvard... look like the income distribution of the United States, over
half the [current students]... would be gone.... Its no wonder that
rich white kids and their parents aren't complaining about diversity.
Race-based affirmative action... is a kind of collective bribe rich
people pay themselves for ignoring economic inequality. The fact (and
it is a fact) that it doesn't help to be white to get into Harvard
replaces the much more fundamental fact that it does help to be rich....
Hence
the irrelevance of Harvard's 2004 announcement that it wouldn't ask
parents who earn less than [$60,000] a year to [contribute anything to
tuition].... While this is no doubt great news to those financially
pressed students who have gone to top high schools, taken college-prep
courses, and scored well on their SATs, it is bound to seem a little
beside the point to the great majority of the poor, since what's
keeping them out of elite universities is not their inability to pay
the bill but their inability to qualify for admission in the first
place....
[...]
We like diversity and we like
programs such as affirmative action because they tell us that racism is
the problem... that solving it requires us just to give up our
prejudices. (Solving the problem of economic inequality might require
something more; it might require us to give up our money.)...
[...]
So
on the one hand, we get affirmative action in universities, which
solves a problem that no longer exists. It's their lack of family
wealth, not the color of their skin, that disproportionately keeps
blacks out of elite colleges.... The injury done to the poor... has
taken place long before anybody gets to Harvard. But this doesn't mean
that these solutions to fake problems serve no purpose. The purpose
they serve is to disguise the real problem. We need, as I've already
suggested, to believe that poor people aren't kept out of our elite
universities in order to also believe that the economic advantages
conferred by going to them are earned and so are justified. If going to
Harvard is more a reflection of your family's wealth than it is of your
merit... then, of course, the legitimating effect disappears. So the
real point... the function of the (very few) poor people at Harvard is
to reassure the (very many) rich people at Harvard that you can't just
buy your way into Harvard...
I find that I cannot help but be annoyed by this.
I am annoyed by the shoddy sloppy neo-functionalist
false-consciousness sociology. Perverse functionalist consequences that
are asserted without supporting evidence are the "real" "purpose" of
affirmative action programs. That's simply wrong in fact, and
illegitimate in argument. It's taking 1970s-style cultural Marxism and
eliminating the rational kernel while retaining only the mystical
shell. Get rid of affirmative action in America tomorrow, and I
guarantee that there will not be a great movement to tackle and repair
the educational and other inequities and barriers that are driven by
our Second Gilded Age distribution of income and wealth.
The primary purpose of affirmative action at elite universities is
to partially--partially--counteract the steep differences in wealth
distributions across races and ethnicities that our ancestors passed
down to us, and give us as a society a chance to make full use of the
talents and capabilities of the most fortunate and lucky slice of the
rising generation of African-Americans, Hispanics, et cetera--not just
of whites and Asians. The primary purpose is not to make the current
cohort of students sleep more soundly.
The argument that Michaels is making is, I think, a version of what
Albert Hirschman calls "the argument of the perverse effect" in his
little book on The Rhetoric of Reaction: the claim that one's
intellectual adversaries, are not just directing their efforts at
low-value targets, but are doing positive harm. I see this argument
every year when I teach Malthus. In Malthus's formulation, the argument
is:
You Enlightenment liberals think your attacks on
Throne and Altar are liberating humanity from the chains of
superstition and ignorance. Fools! Break those chains and you will find
humanity enslaved to its sexual appetites, population will rise until
checked by famine and epidemic, and life will become even nastier, more
brutish, and shorter than before.
Michaels's argument seems to me to have the same structure:
You twenty-first century diversity liberals think
that you are reducing inequality. Fools! The more you reduce race,
ethnic, and cultural inequality the more you legitimate and reduce
pressure on the big enchilada, economic inequality.
I do think there is a difference between Malthus and Michaels.
Malthus makes arguments and presents evidence. To counter Malthus's
arguments--and I think that for the post-1500 period they can be
countered--you have to engage him on the substance. Michaels, by
contrast, makes assertions--where is the evidence? How can you respond?
By saying, "Your father was a hamster and your mother smells of
elderberries. Now go away, before I taunt you again"?
And Harvard's "irrelevant" policy of not asking for money for
parents making under $60,000 a year? I think that there are 1,000
families today for whom that policy is not "irrelevant." It's $2
million a year.