Diversity can distract us fromeconomic inequality | Giles Fraser | Loose canon
According to the socialist academic Walter Benn Michaels, the reason that rich western liberals talk so much about racism and sexism is so they don't have to talk so much about economic inequality. He published The Trouble with Diversity exactly a decade ago, but it feels like a tract for our times, perfectly suited as a provocation to thought as we approach the summing up of liberalism's great annus horribilis.
Rich western liberals, Michaels argues, don't want to challenge the economic structures that produce inequality because that might seriously impact on their own standing and wealth. Instead they insist on the elite being as diverse as the poor, as a way to justify the very existence of the elite. So, as long as the top class at Harvard shows a proportionate distribution of social diversity, one can happily ignore the fact that all the students come from money. Moreover, it's not just that this focus on diversity distracts from the deeper issue of economic inequality. It's worse, because the very diversity of the elite is asserted as justification for the non-discriminatory nature of capitalism. Diversity has become the moral alibi of neoliberal economics.
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