The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality
by Walter Benn Michaels
New First Edition Hardcover
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.
The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequalit
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.
ISBN: 080507841X
EAN: 9780805078411
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Binding: Hardcover
Copyright Date: 2006
Pub Date: October 30, 2006BISAC Categories:
Books - Social Science | Social Classes & Economic Disparity
Books - Social Science | Discrimination
Books - Social Science | Cultural & Ethnic Studies | General
Books - Political Science | Political Economy-Social classes -United States
-Equality -Multiculturalism
-Race awareness -Group identity
-Social justice -Social conditions
-21st century- Ethnic Orientation | Multicultural