>"Like the idea of diversity itself, history functions at best as a
>distraction from present injustices and at worst as a way of
>perpetuating them. Henry Ford said a long time ago, "History is bunk,"
>the purpose of this chapter will be to show that he is right."
That seems pretty clear.
Michael Bérubé has a long blog post that gives some insight into WBM, both from reading him and talking to him. It's very long, here's a taste:
http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/visiting_native_speaker/
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It was more or less a version of {Michaels's] argument about The Great Gatsby, which you can consult by checking out the American Prospect excerpt from The Trouble with Diversity:
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"One way to look at The Great Gatsby is as a story about a poor boy who makes good, which is to say, a poor boy who becomes richthe so-called American Dream. But Gatsby is not really about someone who makes a lot of money; it is instead about someone who tries and fails to change who he is. Or, more precisely, it’s about someone who pretends to be something he’s not; it’s about Jimmy Gatz pretending to be Jay Gatsby. If, in the end, Daisy Buchanan is very different from Jimmy Gatz, it’s not because she’s rich and he isn’t but because Fitzgerald treats them as if they really do belong to different races, as if poor boys who made a lot of money were only “passing” as rich. “We’re all white here,” someone says, interrupting one of Tom Buchanan’s racist outbursts. Jimmy Gatz isn’t quite white enough
What’s important about The Great Gatsby, then, is that it takes one kind of difference (the difference between the rich and the poor) and redescribes it as another kind of difference (the difference between the white and the not-so-white). To put the point more generally, books like The Great Gatsby (and there have been a great many of them) give us a vision of our society divided into races rather than into economic classes."
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The first thing to say about this, surely, is ah, no. Let’s check Gatsby again: Jordan does indeed say “we’re all white here” (this is the sole basis for Michaels’s argument about the vision of society the book allegedly bequeaths to us), but here’s the actual content of Tom Buchanan’s racist outburst:
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"I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that’s the idea, you can count me out. . . . Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have marriage between black and white."
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And as he’s done before, Michaels uses his reading of Jordan’s “we’re all white here”the argumentum ad Gatsbiamto buttress a much larger argument. To return to the American Prospect excerpt:
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"race has turned out to be a gateway drug for all kinds of identities, cultural, religious, sexual, even medical. To take what may seem like an extreme case, advocates for the disabled now urge us to stop thinking of disability as a condition to be “cured” or “eliminated” and to start thinking of it instead on the model of race: We don’t think black people should want to stop being black; why do we assume the deaf want to hear?"
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There are two problems with this. The first is that, pace Michaels, Tom Buchanan is suggesting that it’s the other way around: class mobility is the gateway drug, and if you allow too much of it, well, then, first the family will go, and then you’ll have miscegenation. The second is that Michaels is as flip about the history of Deaf activism as he is about the history of race: Deaf people were indeed subject to two centuries of punitive “oralism,” and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were often barred from using sign language. Advocates for Deaf “culture,” who (justifiably) insist on the right to use American Sign Language and who (controversially) insist that they are not disabled in the first place, are hardly an “extreme case” of what happens when you start out smoking the race dope. They may be nothing more extreme than a bunch of people who don’t want cochlear implants.
But leaving aside the disability angle for now, if you wanted to pick on a novel that offers a vision of our society divided into races rather than into economic classes, you wouldn’t pick Gatsby of all thingsnot unless you wanted to cherry-pick it here and there, and ignore passages like “Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.” You know, if Gatsby was aware of this, why isn’t Michaels? (And did I mention that I have a reading of Gatsby in What’s Liberal?)
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