Kenan Malik comments at The Observer:
If debates about poverty have become warped by a longstanding view that attributes blame to the individual, debates about inequality have become distorted by a more contemporary trend: the increasing tendency to look at equality in terms of “diversity”. “When you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity,” observes the American academic Walter Benn Michaels. “But a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity.”
Michaels’s observation comes in a new collection of essays that he and fellow academic and activist Adolph Reed, Jr, have written over the past 20 years challenging the shift from equality to diversity and the evacuation of class from the analysis of inequality. The new collection is provocatively entitled No Politics But Class Politics; Reed and Michaels do not deny the significance of racism or discrimination against women but they do insist on the centrality of class in any discussion of social inequalities....
Equality and diversity are not, however, synonymous. Even as societies and institutions have become more diverse, many have also become more unequal. What has been created, Reed sardonically observes, is a “moral economy” in which “a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be [regarded as] just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people”.
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