“[C]lass has re-emerged” as a measure of inequality in a post-racist, post-sexist, post-homophobic world. So notes Walter Benn Michaels in a review of a new Runnymede Trust collection, Who Cares about the White Working Class? I hope he’s correct on this point, and it seems to me I’ve seen more about class lately in scattered literatures. Benn Michaels doesn’t in fact believe we’ve arrived in a post-etc. world, pointing out that we’ve simply made strides in those areas while class inequality has worsened. The gist of his review is that the Runnymede Trust book offers “less an alternative to neoliberal multiculturalism than an extension and ingenious refinement of it.” It isn’t class inequality per se the contributors hope to redress, but the concomitant “‘scorn’ and ‘contempt’ with which the lower class is treated.”
I’m inclined to accept Benn Michaels’ reading. Even “progressives” flinch when accused of a piddling bit of salutary socialist field tilting. But he also too easily buys into simplistic notions of sexism and racism, even when he’s working to caution against them. So when he questions whether “the African-American woman who cleans my office [feels] not so bad about the fact that I make almost ten times as much money as she does because she can be confident that I’m not racist or sexist and that I respect her culture,” he may very well have gotten it right. But racism and sexism have little do with the tastes and demeanor of a successful white male academic. If we treat these systemic phenomena as the accumulated opinions of jerks, we are of course likely to see improvements when jerks express more acceptable opinions. Thus, as Benn Michaels points out, with class distinctions.
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