Steve Savicki
12-13-2006, 09:01 AM
You decide:
http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/reed/132752,CST-BOOKS-reed12.article
Walter Benn Michaels blames the country's poverty on rich white folks and diversity programs that ignore class. Michaels is an intriguing iconoclast -- a wealthy, Jewish, UIC professor who wants more poor kids in college but wants to make more money teaching them.
He also wants to eliminate private schools and give every school the same tax money, every kid the same education. He wants to change race-based affirmative action to class-based so that college classrooms are as economically diverse as the real world. The English professor proudly proclaims he's a liberal lefty. Some might even call him a communist.
But the arguments Michaels presents in his new book, The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, aren't as preposterous as they may seem. Michaels makes a strong case that if this country is going to reduce poverty, then more chances have to be made for poor, working-class and middle-class students of all races.
"We're getting to the point where there are more black people than poor people in elite universities (even though there are still precious few black people)," writes Michaels. The problem, he points out, is that "we would much rather get rid of racism than get rid of poverty."
Michaels contends that by focusing on race and promoting diversity programs at universities, rich people can maintain their class status. That's because many selective universities enroll so few minority students: This year blacks make up 2 percent of the student population at the University of California in Los Angeles and 6 percent at the University of Michigan. The majority of students at selective colleges come from families of extreme wealth.
At Harvard, for example, 75 percent of students come from families with incomes over $100,000. If Harvard's affirmative action program became class-based, designed to reflect the class distribution of the United States, half of the current student body would be eliminated. Most of those removed would be rich and white, writes Michaels.
"It's no wonder that rich white kids and their parents aren't complaining about diversity. Race-based affirmative action, from this standpoint, is a kind of collective bribe rich people pay themselves for ignoring economic inequality," he contends.
Closer to home, Michaels points out that 40 percent of the University of Michigan and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign students come from families making over $100,000, although only a little over 20 percent of American families have incomes that high. Only days ago, Michigan voters approved a proposition to amend the state constitution, banning public institutions from considering race or sex in public education, employment or contracting.
"We have a horrible history when it comes to race in this country," Jennifer Gratz told the New York Times late last month. Gratz was the white applicant who was wait-listed 11 years ago at the University of Michigan and sued, challenging the school's affirmative action policy. "But that doesn't make it right to give preference to the son of a black doctor at the expense of a poor student whose parents didn't go to college."
The whole basis of university racial preference programs is that they serve "the interest of diversity," argues Michaels as he cites the 1978 Supreme Court case Bakke v. Board of Regents. That of course begs the question: How "diverse" is a student body when the overwhelming majority comes from well-to-do, white families? He calls universities "rich people's malls."
It's not that poor people are being kept out of elite universities because they can't pay, Michaels acknowledges, it's because they don't qualify for admission in the first place. Competition for admittance at the best colleges begins in kindergarten. Wealthy and upper-middle class parents groom their children for such acceptance by placing them in private schools -- even exclusive preschools -- or moving to expensive neighborhoods where higher taxes assure a better education. So, a white kid born in a trailer park and a black kid raised in inner-city housing projects are at virtually the same disadvantage. "The entire U.S. school system, from pre-K up, is structured from the very start to enable the rich to outcompete the poor, which is to say, the race is fixed," he says.
Perhaps the most stunning revelation in Trouble With Diversity is in its portrayal of the poor. Despite stereotypes that suggest poor people are often black or Latino and victims of discrimination, the reality is that 46 percent of those living in poverty -- almost 17 million people -- are white. "Those people are not the victims of discrimination either past or present," Michaels writes. "The trouble with diversity, then is not just that it won't solve the problem of economic inequality; it's that it makes it hard for us even to see the problem."
Before you label Michaels a racist who is only interested in promoting the interests of downtrodden white people, consider that he is a proponent of reparations to African-Americans and, though he is Jewish, he spends a lot of ink arguing that more attention should be given to the "black Holocaust" rather than the Jewish Holocaust in terms of crucial events in American history.
The book is strongest when Michaels sticks to statistics and issues of poverty. When it veers into arguments against religious and cultural differences, the reader is lost. No matter how many scientists Michaels quotes trying to convince us that there is no such thing as race and that we all have the same DNA whether we're from the bush of Africa or the icy reaches of Norway, we don't buy it. Tell that to the cabdriver next time you want to get picked up on the South Side. We all know from our lived experiences that culturally we are different. Call it race, call it nationality, call it ethnicity. We know it in our skin.
Perhaps the eeriest study cited by Michaels is one that concludes that the single best predictor of someone's net worth is not their race or their current salary, but their parents' income. It's time we ask ourselves if we have been deluded into believing there is such a concept as the "American Dream," or are we simply reverting back to a feudal caste system?
<i>I think it can be seen as a/the new racism or at least the two are combined.</i>
http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/reed/132752,CST-BOOKS-reed12.article
Walter Benn Michaels blames the country's poverty on rich white folks and diversity programs that ignore class. Michaels is an intriguing iconoclast -- a wealthy, Jewish, UIC professor who wants more poor kids in college but wants to make more money teaching them.
He also wants to eliminate private schools and give every school the same tax money, every kid the same education. He wants to change race-based affirmative action to class-based so that college classrooms are as economically diverse as the real world. The English professor proudly proclaims he's a liberal lefty. Some might even call him a communist.
But the arguments Michaels presents in his new book, The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, aren't as preposterous as they may seem. Michaels makes a strong case that if this country is going to reduce poverty, then more chances have to be made for poor, working-class and middle-class students of all races.
"We're getting to the point where there are more black people than poor people in elite universities (even though there are still precious few black people)," writes Michaels. The problem, he points out, is that "we would much rather get rid of racism than get rid of poverty."
Michaels contends that by focusing on race and promoting diversity programs at universities, rich people can maintain their class status. That's because many selective universities enroll so few minority students: This year blacks make up 2 percent of the student population at the University of California in Los Angeles and 6 percent at the University of Michigan. The majority of students at selective colleges come from families of extreme wealth.
At Harvard, for example, 75 percent of students come from families with incomes over $100,000. If Harvard's affirmative action program became class-based, designed to reflect the class distribution of the United States, half of the current student body would be eliminated. Most of those removed would be rich and white, writes Michaels.
"It's no wonder that rich white kids and their parents aren't complaining about diversity. Race-based affirmative action, from this standpoint, is a kind of collective bribe rich people pay themselves for ignoring economic inequality," he contends.
Closer to home, Michaels points out that 40 percent of the University of Michigan and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign students come from families making over $100,000, although only a little over 20 percent of American families have incomes that high. Only days ago, Michigan voters approved a proposition to amend the state constitution, banning public institutions from considering race or sex in public education, employment or contracting.
"We have a horrible history when it comes to race in this country," Jennifer Gratz told the New York Times late last month. Gratz was the white applicant who was wait-listed 11 years ago at the University of Michigan and sued, challenging the school's affirmative action policy. "But that doesn't make it right to give preference to the son of a black doctor at the expense of a poor student whose parents didn't go to college."
The whole basis of university racial preference programs is that they serve "the interest of diversity," argues Michaels as he cites the 1978 Supreme Court case Bakke v. Board of Regents. That of course begs the question: How "diverse" is a student body when the overwhelming majority comes from well-to-do, white families? He calls universities "rich people's malls."
It's not that poor people are being kept out of elite universities because they can't pay, Michaels acknowledges, it's because they don't qualify for admission in the first place. Competition for admittance at the best colleges begins in kindergarten. Wealthy and upper-middle class parents groom their children for such acceptance by placing them in private schools -- even exclusive preschools -- or moving to expensive neighborhoods where higher taxes assure a better education. So, a white kid born in a trailer park and a black kid raised in inner-city housing projects are at virtually the same disadvantage. "The entire U.S. school system, from pre-K up, is structured from the very start to enable the rich to outcompete the poor, which is to say, the race is fixed," he says.
Perhaps the most stunning revelation in Trouble With Diversity is in its portrayal of the poor. Despite stereotypes that suggest poor people are often black or Latino and victims of discrimination, the reality is that 46 percent of those living in poverty -- almost 17 million people -- are white. "Those people are not the victims of discrimination either past or present," Michaels writes. "The trouble with diversity, then is not just that it won't solve the problem of economic inequality; it's that it makes it hard for us even to see the problem."
Before you label Michaels a racist who is only interested in promoting the interests of downtrodden white people, consider that he is a proponent of reparations to African-Americans and, though he is Jewish, he spends a lot of ink arguing that more attention should be given to the "black Holocaust" rather than the Jewish Holocaust in terms of crucial events in American history.
The book is strongest when Michaels sticks to statistics and issues of poverty. When it veers into arguments against religious and cultural differences, the reader is lost. No matter how many scientists Michaels quotes trying to convince us that there is no such thing as race and that we all have the same DNA whether we're from the bush of Africa or the icy reaches of Norway, we don't buy it. Tell that to the cabdriver next time you want to get picked up on the South Side. We all know from our lived experiences that culturally we are different. Call it race, call it nationality, call it ethnicity. We know it in our skin.
Perhaps the eeriest study cited by Michaels is one that concludes that the single best predictor of someone's net worth is not their race or their current salary, but their parents' income. It's time we ask ourselves if we have been deluded into believing there is such a concept as the "American Dream," or are we simply reverting back to a feudal caste system?
<i>I think it can be seen as a/the new racism or at least the two are combined.</i>