Walter Benn Michaels, "Plots Against America: Neoliberalism and Antiracism [1]." American Literary History. Summer 2006. 288-302.

Michaels continues his project, begun in The Shape of the Signifier [2], not of pointing out the incoherency of identity-based antiracism (that was Our America [3]) but of observing the "political attractiveness" of "our commitment to the primacy of the subject position" (300), a commitment very much in the service of (neo)liberal capitalism. The texts which open up his critique are Philip Roth's Plot Against America [4] and Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition [5], both of which are antiracist statements, but the difference between which is that the former (for Michaels) exaggerates American anti-Semitism at a time when antiracism is the (public) norm, whereas the latter "was, in its time, not only a brave gesture, but a critical and commercial failure" (295-96).

But in the 21st Century, especially, what has become clear is that our methods for addressing racial inequality are in fact obstacles for addressing economic inequality. This was my basic argument in the (rejected) proposal [6] I submitted to SCMLA:

Chesnutt’s critique of racism also privileges the middle class: when Dr. William Miller is joined by “a party of farm laborers” on a train headed south from Philadelphia, he thinks, “apart from the mere matter of racial sympathy, these people were just as offensive to him as to the whites in the other end of the train.” He can accept “a classification of passengers” if made “upon some more logical…basis” than an “arbitrary…color line.” In fact, neither racial nor class division is arbitrary; both are effects of the same problem: an ideology that serves ruling class interests.

Indeed, Michaels focuses on just this moment in analyzing The Marrow of Tradition. And his point is that the (neo)liberal solutions for racism (appreciating difference) aren't the same as the solutions for economic inequality (in which what is necessary is to eliminate difference).

Instead, the respect for (and at its worst, fetishization of) difference as such has in fact served the capitalist goal of reducing racism because it brings more traders into the marketplace. From a neoliberal point of view, it makes no sense to discriminate based on race, and by "makes no sense" I mean it's bad for business. But not only that, respecting differences of identity serves capitalist interests by keeping class inequality invisible--by teaching respect for inequality, by promoting a view of lower-class behaviors as idiosyncratic (and acceptable, as long as "they" do them away from "us"), by (thus) treating class as a category of identity like race or gender, and by encouraging us to think of the poor as people who, though different, are no less worthy of exchanging with.

Incisively, Doug has asked what distinguishes my interests from Michaels's. My response has to be that I'd like to see where we can push this--I mean beyond just being a gadfly to liberals. So initially, it's a pedagogical question: how do you begin to teach literature in such a way that middle-class (on the whole) kids become interested not in respecting class difference but in eliminating it? Doing so doesn't have the benefit of market support. Put rhetorically, there's a logical appeal to eliminating racism--and it fits with the logic of the market; but what kind of appeal do you have to make to convince an audience to accept a logic that countermands the prevailing logic of the university itself (which offers, after all, nothing more nor less than the American dream!)?