>I don't see how a "liberal" would write a sentence like this (from his
>piece in the July/August NLR): "Because it is exploitation, not
>discrimination, that is the primary producer of inequality today."
Michaels does write a spirited defense of equality of opportunity in the strong sense, an argument deployed in order to undermine claims to reparation. Michaels believes that if we only honored our commitment to equality of opportunity it would "make the histories of accumulation irrelevant."
NB: Notice how hard he wants to perfect the commitment to equality of opportunity with phrases like "if it were taken seriously," "again, if it were taken seriously," "But if we do take seriously," and "opportunity as equal as we can make it". These are weasels phrases designed to forestall criticism. And if anyone does criticize his support of Equal Opp, he can just say, "but look, I'm talking about if we *really* took it seriously...."
We begin again with the grand either/or:
"There are two ways in which we can understand our responsibility to children like Sarah. One is to say that in a just society we owe her the property she ought to have had. (shag: he's talking abotu reparations) The other is to say that in a just society we owe her an opportunity as equal as we can make it to the opportunities of all the other children. And if equality of opportunity is our idea of justice, the history of how you came to be born poor may be of interest to you and your loved ones and the other members of your family, but it has nothing to do with the relevant fact about you: the fact that you are not yourself responsible for your poverty. And our responsibility to you has nothing to do with that history either. Indeed, the idea of equality of opportunity, if it were taken seriously, would make all the histories of victimization and subsequent demands for compensation irrelevant, just as -- again, if it were taken seriously -- it would make the histories of accumulation irrelevant.
(shag: how an "idea" makes the histories of accumulation irrelevant is beyond me. anyone?)
Rich children are no more responsible for their advantages than poor ones are for their disadvantages. We've already had occasion to question the current obsession with history, and here's another one: it's powerfully tied to the idea of people getting what they deserve when what they deserve is identified with inherited property rather than equal opportunity.
But if we do take seriously not just the commitment to private property that reparations relies on but also our commitment to equality of opportunity, a commitment that virtually every American is eager to endorse, things change. The whole point of the commitment to equal opportunity is to make sure not only that people have a right to property but that they have a fair chance to earn that property. Only if everybody has a chance to get rich can they people who don't get rich, the people who stay poor, be said to deserve their poverty. And only if everybody has a chance to get rich can the people who do succeed be said to deserve their wealth.
It's often said -- both in defense and in criticism -- that equality of opportunity is the weakest form of egalitarianism. The strongest form would be equality of outcome. And it's obviously true that a world in which everyone was required to finish the race at the same time would be a very different from a world in which everyone was required to start it at the same time. To justify equality of outcome, we have to think that there should be no reward for hard work or ability.
(shag: really now? is it that simple -- equality of outcome means no one is rewarded for hard work or ability? For andie it is :) .... but andie wouldn't ever write such a thing without indicating a cognizance that others don't think it's that simple.)
Whereas in fact what most of us think is that there should be some such reward. Indeed, we defend equality of opportunity precisely because we believe that if people don't begin with equal opportunities to succeed, hard work and ability won't be rewarded. If, for example, my wealth enable my daughter to be tracked from birth into an elite college while your daughter is tracked from birth into a community college or no college at all, my wealth (and my education and all the other things we generally use to measure socioeconomic status) is doing at least part of the job that my daughter's hard work and ability ought to be doing. So our commitment to equal opportunity requires us to refuse equality of economic outcome because that doesn't reward hard work and ability), and it also requires us to refuse generational transfers of economic inequality -- for the very same reason (it doesn't reward hard work and ability).
When the point is put that way, we can also see that the commitment to equality of opportunity is not really a weak form of the commitment to equality of outcome; rather, it's a commitment to something altogether different, to the importance of hard work and ability. And we can also see that, genuinely implemented, it's not so weak. For example, a society that really was as committed to equality of opportunity as we say we are would not allow the quality of local schools to be dependent on local real estates taxes. If the schools are better where the rich people live, the unearned advantage their children have starts at pre-K. ...
But to think of this as an ethical decision for individual parents is to miss the point of the problem, which, if all school districts were funded equally (and if here were no private schools), would begin to look very different. If no school were better or worse than any other, it wouldn't matter which one your children went to. So if we really are committed to equality of opportunity, the relevant choice we make as parents is not between schools but between ways of funding them. If we are committed to equality of opportunity, we should be funding all school districts equally and abolishing private schools, thus removing the temptation for rich parents to buy their children an unfair advantage. But we don't do this, and we can't even imagine it on a ballot. (132-134 The Trouble with Diversity, Walter Benn Michaels)
LAter on, at the conclusion of the chapter he writes, "The real contradiction is between our support for equal opporutnity and our support for all the things that make our opporutnities unequal. So it won't work just to convince people that they're acting against their own economic interests. The point must be to convince them that they're acting injustly." (140)
huh. The real problem with the world is that people injustly! I suppose that's no big deal as long as they don't include a parenthetical statement to indicate that they are *especially concerned with **others** acting injustly!"