Published Fall/Winter 2007
 
The Trouble with Trouble
(on Walter Benn Michaels' The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality [New York: Holt, 2006])
by David R. Shumway | ns 69
Ever since Walter Benn Michaels stopped trying to show us how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American naturalists, their explicit statements to the contrary, really loved capitalism, he has been trying to show us why Americans have since then loved identity too much. First Michaels addressed the issue in American literature in Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Then came a discussion of identity in recent theory in The Shape of the Signifier. The Trouble with Identity is meant to be a popular book, a polemic aimed at the public sphere. The book's basic argument is that identity is the pernicious offspring of racism and that society should abandon the goal of "diversity" and focus exclusively on income inequality, which Michaels sometimes calls "class." It is hard to argue against the idea that Americans need to take inequality of wealth as a serious social problem. That we should—or could—simply get rid of identity is another matter.
Michaels' point that politicians have ignored poverty and economic inequality is unimpeachable, but his explanation for this state of affairs is highly suspect. Poverty and distributive justice haven't been central political issues since 1972, when Nixon and McGovern both proposed versions of the negative income tax for the poor. If we go back further in American history, we discover that such issues have rarely been at the center of mainstream political debate, making the years between 1929 and 1972 unusual for the relative prominence they were given. Of course, the Left has traditionally been defined by its support for economic equality, but the Left in this sense has usually not been part of the mainstream. Michaels seems to equate the Left with the Democratic Party when he cites support for Bill Clinton or John Kerry as evidence of its current lack of interest in economic equality. And, according to Michaels, the reason that the Left has lost interest is that it has been seduced by identity politics into seeking diversity instead.
The first point to make about this explanation is that it wasn't diversity that drove the issue of poverty out of the mainstream. When the rightward turn happened in the 1970s, identity politics were still mostly on the margins. One could argue that the fragile coalition that supported anti-poverty programs in the 1960s was brought down by any number of forces, including a white backlash against civil rights for African Americans, economic pressure on the middle class making it seem that antipoverty programs threatened their interests, or, perhaps most likely, the bourgeoisie, faced with a crisis of declining profits, decided that it could no longer afford the concessions that it had made beginning in the 1930s and therefore sought to redistribute wealth upward.1 Probably all three of these factors played a role, with the ruling class actively encouraging the first two tendencies in order to disguise their own interests. The Left was not fooled, but it was small and largely ignored. Those on the Left didn't stop arguing for measures that would promote economic equality; rather, mainstream politicians in both parties wanted to promote inequality.
The idea that the Left chose diversity over equality is simply wrong. However, the Left and, as Michaels himself reveals, corporations and others not remotely connected to the Left began increasingly to recognize diversity as a value. Michaels is partly correct to trace the importance diversity has today to the 1978 Supreme Court decision in University of California Regents v. Bakke, which held that taking into account the race of an applicant to a medical school was acceptable if it served "the interests of diversity." But the Court did not invent the idea of racial or ethnic diversity as a value. It was already being championed on campuses and elsewhere, not, as Michaels implies and Stanley Fish has argued, as a dishonest way to promote the interests of particular identity groups, but because people increasingly believed that institutions and individuals would benefit from heterogeneous social environments (Fish, "One"). This was a radical idea since the traditional assumption has been that nations or neighborhoods or workplaces function better if everyone is the same, an assumption on which, as we will see, Michaels' argument is ultimately based. As Michaels puts it, "diversity has redefined the opposition to discrimination as the appreciation (rather than the elimination) of difference" (5). In this conception, diversity is understood as a benefit to everyone.
But diversity is about more than appreciation. It has also been seen as a means to promote social justice by opening up all social roles to all people regardless of their race, gender, or sexual orientation, and by conferring recognition on those society had previously ignored. As Nancy Fraser has argued, a conception of social justice is too limited if it only concerns distribution; representation and recognition are also aspects of justice. Diversity has been a value used to promote both of these by insisting that our institutions must be representative of significant social divisions and that society extend recognition to those divisions by acknowledging their differences as legitimate. It is important to understand that in this view, these forms of justice do not line up neatly with separate political projects or movements. For example, when feminists demand equal pay for equal work, the issue is one of distribution. When they demand an end to the "glass ceiling," the issue is one of representation. When they demand that women authors or artists be read or exhibited, the issue is one of recognition. Women as a group will have achieved full social equality only when they have gained equal distribution, representation, and recognition.
In Michaels' view, however, justice is only a matter of distribution, and promoting diversity can therefore only distract us from real injustice. But I don't think Michaels' opposition to diversity originates from concerns about justice, which show up only in the third of the three goals he had in writing Trouble. Rather, the origin of his opposition lies in his discovery of what he believes to be a theoretical error. He says his first goal "is to show how our current notion of cultural diversity—trumpeted as the repudiation of racism and biological essentialism—in fact grew out of and perpetuates the very concepts it congratulates itself on having escaped." His second goal is really just an amplification of the first one, to show that diversity has intensified "America's love affair with race" (7). Since race has been discredited as biological entity, Michaels believes that we should simply dispense with it, and he blames diversity for preventing us from doing that. We should recognize this move as a classic instance of blaming the victim. Michaels discounts the idea that racism remains a significant fact of American life, and thus he can claim that there is no need to fight it. He seems to equate racism only with criminal acts such as lynching or with legal restrictions such as Jim Crow segregation. What he ignores is the fundamental role racism plays in the very inequality he claims he is concerned about. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman puts it:
The legacy of slavery, America's original sin, is the reason we're the only advanced economy that doesn't guarantee health care to our citizens. White backlash against the civil rights movement is the reason American is the only advanced country where a major political party wants to roll back the welfare state....Newt Gingrich was able to take over Congress entirely because of the great Southern flip, the switch of Southern whites from overwhelming support for Democrats to overwhelming support for Republicans. (11-12)
It's not clear whether his theory leads Michaels to ignore this history, or his foreshortened history has led him to a bad theory. That his history is foreshortened is apparent from Our America, where he argues that pluralism emerges in American culture in the 1920s at the same moment and out of the same intellectual paradigm that produced nativism. Pluralism of the 1920s appeared in the context of immigration as an alternative to the assimilationist model. The play "The Melting Pot" was one instance, as was Randolph Bourne's controversial essay, "Trans-National America." Nativism in the 1920s is reflected by a new system of racially-based immigration quotas, which Michaels mistakenly calls the first racial immigration restrictions. In Our America, he reads works of American literary modernists (e.g., Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Cather) in the context of nativist polemics such as The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy and Re-Forging America by Lothrop Stoddard and the racist fiction of Southern apologists Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon. His interpretation relies on the slenderest bits of textual evidence, on the basis of which he produces a history in which racism seems to come into existence only in the twentieth century together with pluralism, both reflecting a new preoccupation with identity.
Michaels gets two things wrong. He places the emergence of nativism and racism much too late, and he places the emergence of a preoccupation with the problem of identity too early. One difficulty is that literary evidence—even if it were copious and convincing—cannot alone support the history Michaels claims to offer. That history flies in the face of the work of historians of race who find systematic, "scientific" racism as early as Linnaeus' natural history in the eighteenth century. In nineteenth-century America, such theories had become common sense, and they were used in many contexts besides the obvious one of justifying oppression. Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 "frontier thesis," for example, was offered in opposition to the reigning explanation of American democracy, called the "germ theory," a racist tracing of democracy to ancient Anglo-Saxon village life passed down through inheritance to Americans. Nativism goes back at least to the opposition to Catholic immigration beginning in the 1830s, and to the Know Nothing Party, whose nativist platform won them considerable success in the 1850s. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was actually the first significant restriction on free immigration in US history, was justified by appeals both to white supremacy and by the claim that Chinese workers would work for wages native workers would not accept.
In one sense of the term, identity is as ancient as racism and nationalism, which emerge in relation to each other in the eighteenth century. The problem of American identity was famously articulated, precisely in the terms Michaels finds objectionable ("in pluralism, what we do can only be justified by reference to who we are" [Our America 15]), by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in Letters from an American Farmer, published in 1782. There the author famously asks, "What then is the American, this new man?" (39). Crèvecoeur's account also suggests that Americans were already guilty of committing another of Michaels' cardinal sins, "disarticulating difference from disagreement," since their identity as Americans was achieved in part by their tolerance of various religions. Here a pluralism of religion is trumped by a unitary nationalism. National identity continued to be a persistent question for Americans throughout the nineteenth century, but only with regard to the character of that identity. Few doubted its existence, and large scale immigration later in the century drove demands for expanded public education to "make Americans" of the children of these newcomers. In fact, even in the 1920s, cultural pluralism largely failed to have a political impact, and the assumption of unitary national identity remained largely unchallenged. Identity in the sense that Michaels is using it didn't become a problem until pluralism began to be politically significant with the Civil Rights movement and a distinctive, quasi-political youth culture in the 1950s. That's true in part because identity became a psychological issue at just this moment under the influence of Freud and especially Erik Erikson, who made an "identity crisis" a predictable event of late adolescence.
The full-fledged development of "identity politics" occurred only in the wake of the 1960s and the revival of both Black Nationalism and feminism. The label "identity politics" came out of Marxism, where it was used to disparage political theories and movements that focused on social categories other than class. This Marxism, however, failed to take sufficient account of Marx's own ideas of class. Marx himself was no opponent of identity politics. The Communist Manifesto doesn't end with the slogan "poor people of the world, unite" or "all those who don't own the means of production, unite," but "Working men of all countries, unite" (271). In appealing to "working men," Marx assumed an identity that his audience already took for granted, and the Manifesto seeks to advance that identity over against the national identities workingmen also hold.
Reviewers of The Trouble with Diversity have mistaken Michaels for a Marxist because they assume only a Marxist could be so interested in class. But class for Marx is a matter, on the one hand, of the relations of production, rather than wealth or income, and on the other hand, of self-conscious affiliation. The bourgeoisie are different, not because they have more money, but because they own the means of production and can therefore extract surplus value from the proletariat. The bourgeoisie is not merely an economic category. It consists not of all of the rich or even of all capitalists, but rather of those who rule as a "class-for-itself," that is, a class with a sense of political identity. The proletariat is in turn defined by having to sell their labor (not by being poor), but also by what Marx saw as their growing sense of solidarity built on class identity. Marxist politics has, at least until sometime in recent years, consistently appealed to workers on the basis of class identity. The culture of the working class was promoted, and even invented, by efforts such as the proletarian literature movement in the US in the 1930s. But Michaels does not rely on Marx's analysis of capitalism, and still less does he advocate Marx's solution to its problems. Indeed, Michaels offers no real solutions at all, and he seems to assume that one could solve the problem of inequality just by asking everyone to agree to have the same amount of money.
In the United States we lack a national history of fixed classes, making class identity less powerful here than in Europe. Our constitution prohibits established classes, and our ideology has long denied the very existence of class in America. Ignoring this history, Michaels can't understand what's significant about F. Scott Fitzgerald's recognition of class distinctions. Trouble opens with the citation of Fitzgerald's assertion that the rich are different from the rest of us, with Michaels arguing that this claim mistakenly turns class into race; for him, Ernest Hemingway's famous rejoinder—yes, they have more money—is all that need be said. Class for Michaels equals money, and therefore any other qualities that might be associated with it merely mystify it. Thus he misunderstands Fitzgerald's best know creation, Jay Gatsby, saying that Gatsby's problem is that he "isn't quite white enough" and that novels "like The Great Gatsby (and there have been a great many of them) give us a vision of our society divided into races rather than economic classes" (2-3). Here is what Fitzgerald actually said about the rich:2
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. ("The Rich Boy" 152)
Clearly, this passage shows that Fitzgerald does not consider the rich to be a distinct race, but people whose class position makes them different. No American writer regarded class as more important than did Fitzgerald, who even described himself as "essentially Marxian" (Crack Up 178). Fitzgerald clearly does depict the rich as having a separate culture and so did Marx and Engels: "Just as to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture" (258). In order to turn The Great Gatsby into a book about race, Michaels has to ask us to believe that a racist diatribe of Tom Buchanan, the book's villain, not only represents the author's point of view, but that these few words count for more than the novel's repeated concern with class. The point is that for Fitzgerald, class is not simply a matter of how much money you have. It is rather a significant affiliation, what we call today an aspect of individual identity, and it is especially important because it entails hierarchical distinction.
But Michaels has to misread Fitzgerald because he is committed to the position that culture is merely race in disguise: "The problem with culture is that it is utterly dependent on race" (43). A closer look at Michaels' reasoning will show that this claim entails his inability to think race as anything other than an essence: "on the one hand, the pluralist claim that our practices are justified only because they are better requires us to be able to say who we are independent of those practices and so requires us to produce our racial identity. But, on the other hand, the cultural claim denies the relevance of race and so leave us unable to appeal to facts about who we are as justifications for what we do" (Our America 139). In order to justify who we are, we must appeal to "facts" which apparently can only come from biological differences. Since as Michaels repeatedly reminds us, there is no genetic evidence for races, his argument seems unassailable. That is, until one realizes that cultures are no less factual than are genes. As Michaels should know, having read his Stanley Fish, being a "social construction" does not make something any less real or any easier to change (Doing What Comes Naturally). Race remains a fact of American social life, and neither wishing nor theorizing will make it go away. Culture and identity are also facts, and they are not reducible to race, even if they are sometimes used as if they were.
According to Michaels, culture is also bad because it allows us to forget about our disagreements: "Culture...has become a primary technology for disarticulating difference from disagreement" (Shape 16). Michaels seems to think that all difference ought to be a matter for disagreement, the reason that no one could honestly value diversity. One wonders at what level this desire for conflict might cease. Does Michaels think, for example, that one should try to persuade one's dining companions to order the same meal in a restaurant since to do otherwise is to accept difference without disagreement? The point is not, of course, that we can't and don't disagree about tastes in food or wine, but that we don't usually regard such differences as worthy of conflict. Similarly, one nation may dislike the food, dress, games, stories, etc., of another, but will not typically feel the need to go to war to force the offending group to change its tastes. Yet seemingly trivial differences are often sources of conflict because they are understood as representing what are believed to be fundamental ones. Democratic political candidates from California and the Northeast have long been attacked for their supposed or actual tastes for white wine or wind surfing, while Republicans from the South proclaim their apparently heartfelt love of barbeque and brush clearing. Conflicts over seemingly small differences may be more likely to arise when different cultures share the same or proximate spaces. Consider the character of Radio and the conflict his boom box produces in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. Cultural pluralism insists that it is better to accept such differences, to tolerate them, rather than to demand that everyone share the same tastes or behave in the same way. Ironically, the apparent utopia of Michaels' system is a world of absolute uniformity where everyone has been persuaded (or forced) to agree—presumably with him. In other words, a place where there was perfect identity, where who we are would not be a problem because we would all be the same.
None of this is meant to claim that there aren't bad versions of identity politics or that the goal of diversity is never misused. In discussions of the current presidential race, I've heard it asserted that Hilary Rodham Clinton is not a real woman, and that Barack Obama is not a real African American. Both assertions apparently are based in some essentialist view of what it is be female or black, and they are pernicious. But such essentialism is not required for one to take race or gender into account. There are people who will vote for one of these candidates because she is a woman or he is African American on the assumption that electing the first female or the first African American President of the United States would be an important precedent and a step toward equality. Such people would likely not vote for Kay Bailey Hutchison or Clarence Thomas despite the fact that their election would achieve the same end, because gender or race is for them only one consideration among many. There are certainly other people who would not vote for Clinton or Obama because they believe that only white men are capable of being President. Michaels would have us believe that these positions are theoretically identical, privileging gender or racial identity over beliefs. But they are not identical. One kind of vote is strategic and involves the calculation that the candidate's positions on the issues are generally in agreement with the voter's. The other is essentialist and precludes evaluating the candidate by any other criterion. Michaels' reductionism prohibits this kind of distinction. Moreover, surely one reason that John Edwards, the candidate who has made income inequality his major theme, has not to this point done as well in the polls is the lack of class identity in America among those who are not rich.3
Michaels seems to imagine politics as something like a Platonic debating club. Instead of conflicting interests or factions, there should only be differing beliefs that are then argued out according to their truth, apparently to eternal essences. One could see why this utopian vision would appeal to a professor, just as one can understand why Plato thought philosophers should be kings. But politics in democratic societies has always been structured by conflicts among competing interests. If one wants to encourage economic equality, one needs to figure out how to convince a majority of voters that such an outcome is in their interests. Strong class identity would seem to be a necessary precondition. If Michaels were really concerned with social justice, he wouldn't be attacking identity, he'd be helping to build one.
Notes
1. For accounts of this history from a Marxist perspective, see Harvey, and from a liberal perspective, see Krugman. The histories they tell are remarkably similar even though their explanations differ.
2. Michaels only quotes Ernest Hemingway's version of a conversation he claims to have had with Fitzgerald.
3. I'm aware that the issue of identity is complex in Edwards' case. While his origins are working class, the wealth and status he has achieved as a lawyer, Senator, and Vice-Presidential candidate remove him from that class. Of course, there has never been a working-class President, and the chances of one being elected would seem to be much smaller than for a woman or African American.
Works Cited
de Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John. Letters from an American Farmer. New York: Dutton, 1957.
Fish, Stanley. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Literary and Legal Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1989.
---. "One Man's Opinion." New York Times 30 June 2003.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Crack Up. Ed. Edmund Wilson. New York: New Directions, 1945.
---. "The Rich Boy." Babylon Revisited and Other Stories. New York: Macmillan, 1960. 152-187.
Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth. Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical Exchange. Trans. Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke. London: Verso, 2003.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford UP, 2005.
Krugman, Paul. The Conscience of a Liberal. New York: Norton, 2007.
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. "The Communist Manifesto." Karl Marx: Selected Writing. 2nd ed. Ed. David McLelland. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 245-271.
Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.
---. The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004.
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