The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality - Hardcover

Michaels, Walter Benn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080507841X ISBN 13: 9780805078411

Publisher: Metropolitan Books, 2006

Synopsis

A brilliant assault on our obsession with every difference except the one that really matters—the difference between rich and poor

 

If there’s one thing Americans agree on, it’s the value of diversity. Our corporations vie for slots in the Diversity Top 50, our universities brag about minority recruiting, and every month is Somebody’s History Month. But in this provocative new book, Walter Benn Michaels argues that our enthusiastic celebration of “difference” masks our neglect of America’s vast and growing economic divide. Affirmative action in schools has not made them more open, it’s just guaranteed that the rich kids come in the appropriate colors. Diversity training in the workplace has not raised anybody’s salary (except maybe the diversity trainers’) but it has guaranteed that when your job is outsourced, your culture will be treated with respect.

With lacerating prose and exhilarating wit, Michaels takes on the many manifestations of our devotion to diversity, from companies apologizing for slavery, to a college president explaining why there aren’t more women math professors, to the codes of conduct in the new “humane corporations.” Looking at the books we read, the TV shows we watch, and the lawsuits we bring, Michaels shows that diversity has become everyone’s sacred cow precisely because it offers a false vision of social justice, one that conveniently costs us nothing. The Trouble with Diversity urges us to start thinking about real justice, about equality instead of diversity. Attacking both the right and the left, it will be the most controversial political book of the year.

About this title

About the Author

Walter Benn Michaels is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Widely noted as one of the founders (with Stephen Greenblatt) of the New Historicism, he is the author of Our America and The Shape of the Signifier and has contributed to The New York Times Magazine and The Boston Globe. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Edition details

• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 080507841X
• ISBN 13: 9780805078411
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 243