War of the Left Worlds

In the introduction to The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, Walter Benn Michaels offhandedly refers to “the old Socialist leader Eugene Debs [who] used to be criticized for being unwilling to interest himself in any social reform that didn’t involve the attack on economic inequality” (19). Reading Michaels’s polemical new book, one senses that he would not at all mind being criticized for similar reasons.

To illustrate how loving identity ignores inequality, Michaels takes up the question of reparations — that is, whether the descendants of African Americans who lived under slavery and Jim Crow should receive compensation for their ancestors’ loss. Michaels then poses the following Debs-inspired thought experiment. “Imagine a Martian comes down to Earth and we show him our problem,” Michaels writes, and our “problem” is that while African Americans constitute about 13 percent of the American population, they currently make up 32 percent of the poorest quintile of the population. At the other end of the income spectrum, they make up only 1.7 percent of households in the top 5 percent. “The Martian uses his powers,” Michaels writes, “and we make the economic effects of slavery and Jim Crow, the disproportion of American wealth, disappear. Now, just as 13 percent of America’s population is black, 13 percent of America’s poor people are black, and 13 percent of America’s rich people are black.” But what good, exactly, Michaels asks, has this Martian done? Measured strictly by income inequality, not much. There are just as many poor and just as many rich people as before. True, their ranks now reflect the racial diversity of the American population, but if that is where our idea of social justice starts and stops, Michaels argues, we do not have very ambitious ideas about social justice.

For Michaels, Martians like the one who “solved” our racial inequity problem have invaded and body-snatched the contemporary intellectual and academic Left. This Left, Michaels charges, is passionate about achieving and valuing diversity — especially racial but also gender diversity — on campuses and in corporations, but it is scandalously far less concerned with the far greater problem of economic inequality. Worse still, by passing themselves off as the progressive Left, these Martians smother whatever hope there might be of nurturing a political Left that would take economic inequality as seriously as it deserves to be taken.

Indeed, for Michaels, the Left’s concern with gender inequality is just as misplaced as its concern with racial diversity. For example, Michaels is skeptical of the controversy that surrounded then-Harvard president Lawrence Summers’s maddening suggestion that “women might be biologically ill equipped to become scientists.” Summers’s comments resulted in his resignation and Harvard devoting $50 million dollars to increase diversity. “But,” Michaels objects, “it’s a little hard to think of this as a crucial issue in American life” (113). “Indeed,” Michaels continues, “although bestowing on the women of the upper middle class all the privileges already held by the men of the upper middle class would make a more just society, it would only do so, obviously, for the members of the upper middle class. It would do no good at all for the people most conspicuously absent in elite science departments, the people who come from the bottom (or even the half bottom) of American society” (114).

These are provocative claims, and Michaels means to provoke. But whatever objections we might harbor about these and other arguments, Michaels, at least, does not exaggerate the gross and growing problem of economic inequality in the United States. As one of his footnotes details, the top 20 percent of households earned half the income in the United States in 2004. In comparison, the bottom 20 percent earned just 3.4 percent of income. In terms of wealth, the top quintile of the population controlled a little under 85 percent of it, while the remaining 80 percent of the population controlled just...