Walter Benn Michaels, an influential English professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, has a new book that skewers the current liberal enslavement to color-coded multiculturalism. Christopher Shea has some positive comments about it — and quotes some goofy criticisms — in his column today in the Boston Globe, “Colorblinded.”
Michaels argues, Shea reports, that
[t]he commitment to understanding American society as fundamentally made up of races or cultures, and the vision of social justice that follows from that — the elimination of discrimination against race — has been at best a massive distraction from the project of bringing about greater economic equality in society.
Actually, to pick a nit, the belief that that American society is fundamentally made up of races and not individuals is more invidious than Michaels claims here, since “the vision of social justice” that flows from that belief does not aim for “the elimination of discrimination against race” but affirmatively requires such discrimination, in the form of racial preferences.
UPDATE [8 Sept.]
See additional comments from Chris Shea, comments that are also releveant to this recent post.
The prof may want to decrease the concentration on race, but he does so because he thinks it detracts from the larger goal of general leveling of society by governmental means.
Indeed. But I’ll take allies wherever (or almost wherever) I can find them….
“I’ll take allies wherever (or almost wherever) I can find them.”
Bad idea. Government programs designed to bring about “greater economic equality” are much more illiberal than AA. It wasn’t AA that impoverished Cuba, after all.