In Benn There, Done That and several earlier posts (here, here, and here) I discussed the new book by English professor Walter Benn Michaels that criticizes (from the left) the left’s fixation with race in general, and “diversity” in particular, because they divert attention from what he thinks is really important, income inequality.
Since he says essentially the same things in this recent article, I won’t repeat all the points I’ve made earlier. But I will repeat one: Michaels’ indifference, even hostility, to the idea of individual rights. In that he is at one with those on the left he criticizes.
In this earlier post I criticized his argument that “we shouldn’t care about unfairness to individuals in the admissions process until the unfairness between groups is resolved,” and in this recent article he repeats his belief in “the importance of groups and the irrelevance of a certain individualism in American life.”
Not simply “individualism,” it is important to note, but individual rights as well. Thus, because Asian Americans as a group have higher incomes than both blacks and whites, any discrimination that may occur against individual Asian Americans is irrelevant.
[Alhough] Asian-American applicants are sometimes rejected by elite colleges in favor of kids who are even richer than they are, their numbers are still high, and their rejection is pretty inconsequential.
Michaels actually keeps repeating this point, as though he’s afraid we won’t think he really means it. Thus, speaking of an Asian-Amercan applicant:
it’s hard to feel all that bad about a student … who, turned down by the Ivy League, is forced to settle for Johns Hopkins and who ends up in medical school.
Racial discrimination, in short, is inconsequential and irrelevant unless it affects the mean household income of the racial group to which the discriminatee belongs. Michaels and those of similar persuasion, in short, don’t “feel all that bad” when racial discrimination keeps an applicant from being accepted to his or her choice of school. Aside from the fact that there is no reason for most us to care what or how Michaels “feel[s],” his indifference to an individual right to be free from racial discrimination undermines, at least in my view, whatever he may “feel” about what he does choose to regard as injustice.
Michaels criticizes those on the left who believe race is more important than class, but he is every bit as willing as those he criticizes to dispense with individual rights in favor of group rights. For example, he writes:
In the first half of the 20th century, white people didn’t get to go to better colleges because of their individual merits; at the beginning of the 21st century, rich people aren’t getting to go to better colleges because of their individual merits either. It’s true that, if I am right, race is the wrong prism through which to see American society today, but any prism is better than none. Any prism is better than the illusion that prisms are irrelevant and that everybody already has the equality of opportunity the removal of those prisms would establish.
And indeed, Michaels’ views are definitely prismatic, in the sense of this definition of “prism” from the American Heritage online dictionary:
A medium that misrepresents whatever is seen through it.
ADDENDUM
For other recent discussions of Michaels’ views, see here (the New York Times) and here (The Nation).
