Walter Benn Michaels writes that the emphasis on race on diversity-conscious American campuses has swept issues of class under the carpet:

Michael Rogin once brilliantly described the use of blackface in Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer as a device through which the immigrant Jew first becomes American by identifying himself with the African-American (putting the blackface on), and then (taking the blackface off) succeeds as an American by becoming white. “The jazz singer rises,” Rogin said, “by putting on the mask of a group that must remain immobile, unassimilable and fixed at the bottom.” There’s a certain sense in which Asian-American studies is a kind of blackface, a performance that produces the image of racialized oppression alongside the reality of economic success.

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.

In the Princeton class of 2009, 196 students (out of a total of 1,229, a little under 16 percent) came from households that Princeton characterizes as low-income households earning under $50,900 a year. But even though those numbers aren’t all that wonderful, Princeton is a real leader here: According to Anthony P. Carnevale and Stephen J. Rose, roughly 10 percent of students at the 146 colleges and universities ordinarily ranked as highly selective come from the bottom half of the socioeconomic scale.

But the trouble with Walter Benn Michaels, argues Robert S. Boynton, is that Michaels thinks that the world is an academic campus. And:

That we must choose between a society concerned with race and one concerned with economic inequality is the cornerstone of Michaels’s project. But must we? And even if we must, is it really so obvious that the evils of economic inequality always trump those of racism (or that the two can be so neatly disentangled)? It is telling that Michaels never feels the need to formulate an argument for the superiority of a class-oriented society. It is just assumed; all of his energy goes into debunking race.

Article links from Arts and Letters Daily.

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