Last night I continued reading Walter Benn Michaels’s The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, which I am reading at a snail’s pace.
In Chapter 1, Michaels shows that the idea of race as a scientific categorization was long ago proven false, and then we replaced this with the idea of race as a social construct. The problem, according to Michaels, is that we are firmly attached to race and have begun to think of race in terms of culture. But of course, there is no black culture or white culture, and there is no “heritage” — that is, a cultural heritage of things like books one reads just because of one’s race.
I largely agree with this point, but Michaels seems so far to be ignoring a few things. He quotes Sartre that “the Jew is one whom others consider a Jew,” and W.E.B. Du Bois: “the black man is a person who must ride Jim Crow in Georgia” (47). But since we no longer have Jim Crow, Michaels argues, Du Bois’s definition no longer works. Michaels wishes to dismiss race completely, but it seems that he hasn’t fully considered institutional racism at all, nor the obvious definition of black as “one whom others considers black.” So while I agree with Michaels that it’s problematic how we describe race as culture, it doesn’t seem that it’s as easy as he proposes to get rid of race categorization, as irrational as it is.
I think it’s important here for me to define institutional racism as I’m using it. I prefer Philip Hallie’s definition, and I’ll just quote myself from a paper I wrote a few years ago here:
In “From Cruelty to Goodness,†Philip Hallie describes a model of institutional cruelty and describes the four criteria of institutional cruelty. First, there must be substantial cruelty, meaning the maiming of dignity and crushing of one’s self-respect. Hallie is clear to define cruelty in this way because previous definitions of cruelty are either superficial (i.e., “bloodshedâ€) or because they do not take humiliation into account (i.e., “giving painâ€). In order for cruelty to be institutional, it must be part of social institutions, such as religion, family, government, economy, or education, being built into their structures. The third component of institutional cruelty is that it is invisible to those who do not want to see it, especially to those with privilege. It exists on the edge of awareness, and a person can see it if one wants. The last criterion of institutional cruelty is that a power difference must exist, and this difference must be institutionalized. For example, white men control government and laws and thus have institutional power over women and people of color.
