The September American Prospect features a terrific excerpt from Walter Benn Michaels new book The Trouble With Diversity which I've been meaning to talk about, but really haven't achieved sufficient clarity in my own thoughts to address. Michaels argues that:
So now we're urged to be more respectful of poor people and to stop thinking of them as victims, since to treat them as victims is condescending -- it denies them their “agency.” And if we can stop thinking of the poor as people who have too little money and start thinking of them instead as people who have too little respect, then it's our attitude toward the poor, not their poverty, that becomes the problem to be solved, and we can focus our efforts of reform not on getting rid of classes but on getting rid of what we like to call classism. The trick, in other words, is to stop thinking of poverty as a disadvantage, and once you stop thinking of it as a disadvantage then, of course, you no longer need to worry about getting rid of it.
In other words, the multicultural ethos has overwhelmed class consciousness, and in the same way good liberals want to appreciate, say, black culture, and (some of them) fear criticizing such elements as hip-hop, they're similarly unwilling to forthrightly say that the condition of being poor is bad and the government should reorient itself towards eradicating it, as they worry doing so will signal condescension or judgment of working class culture.
I've got some points of agreement with this -- particularly a digression he makes onto Kanye West's famous and much-lauded comment that "George Bush doesn't care about black people," when it really seemed that he didn't care about poor people -- and some problems with it. But I was fascinated to run into this Time article on the new get-rich-quick strains of Christianity, which includes poll results showing that 45 percent think poverty can be a blessing from God (49 percent disagree) and 48 percent think we should follow Jesus's example in "not being rich" (44 percent disagree). I'm a little skeptical of the wording in the questions (particularly the "can" be a gift from God -- lots of things "can" be something but aren't), but their results are nevertheless suggestive of the sort of mindset Michaels is condemning.
