Walter Benn Michaels is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His publications include The Gold Standard and the Logic of Literary Naturalism (1985), Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995), and The Shape of the Signifier: 1976 to the End of History (2004). His 2006 book The Trouble with Diversity has just appeared in a 10th anniversary edition, and his most recent book is The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Abstract:
Diversity: The OxyContin of the Professional Managerial Class

This paper will argue that diversity – whether presented as a value or an established fact – is a thoroughly ideological project, as are the various forms of ethno-nationalism that emerge more-or-less successfully (right now, more) in opposition to it. In calling both these projects ideological and suggesting, furthermore, that they perform the same ideological function, I mean that they produce a set of terms for political and ethical debate that do just what Marx thought ideology does: legitimate the terms in which the current political economic order understands itself. The centrality of racism today is exemplary. When, for example, a recent study shows that since the civil rights movement American whites have come to think that “bias against white people is more of a problem than bias against black people,” it is pretty obvious that the white people in question are relying on alternative facts. But insofar as their mistake both reflects and reinforces the idea that racism (or discrimination more generally) is the primary cause of unjust outcomes in the U.S. today, it’s a significant one. By which I mean that it’s not just an expression of their ignorance or even of their self-interest but of their acceptance of liberalism as the structure in which economic justice should be defined and of liberal equality of opportunity as its lodestone.

Small wonder, then, that blacks who really are the victims of both past and current discrimination hold the same views. But they too are mainly mistaken. As long as we live in a world organized for the exploitation of labor by capital, inequality will primarily be a function of that exploitation and, whether or not it’s made more meritocratic, will continue to be a fundamental feature of our society.

This paper will elaborate the argument sketched out above and draw from it some conclusions about the role played by liberal institutions (e.g. the university) not in the critique of ideology but in its promulgation.