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December 14, 2006
"Why Identity Politics Distracts Us From Economic Inequalities"
[E]lite universities have come to think of African-American-studies programs on the model of state-of-the-art fitness facilities: No one goes to a college just because it has a great climbing wall, but, all other things being equal, the great climbing wall might clinch the deal. And if the climbing wall comparison seems to trivialize the commitment to diversity, insofar as that commitment involves one Ivy League university's trying to lure some students of color away from other Ivy League universities, it already seems pretty trivial. In fact, from the standpoint of social justice, the question of whether kids who might otherwise have gone to Yale decide instead to go to Princeton couldn't be more trivial.
. . .
But there's a more-important sense in which even African-American studies is a kind of blackface, a performance not only of blackness but of race itself. Asian-Americans are overrepresented in elite colleges like Princeton; African-American students are underrepresented. But no one's as underrepresented in those colleges as poor people. And no one's looking to get their numbers up to where, if you wanted to eliminate the underrepresentation, they would have to be. A Princeton that managed to lure enough black students away from the other Ivies to constitute 12 percent of its entering class (just as African-Americans constitute approximately 12 percent of the American population) would be a more diverse Princeton. A Princeton where 50 percent of the entering class consisted of students who came from households earning under $46,326 (the median income in the United States) would be an entirely different institution.
"Why Identity Politics Distracts Us From Economic Inequalities," by Walter Benn Michaels, The Chronicle Review, December 15, 2006
Posted at December 14, 2006 08:27 AM | Categories: America
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