a blog by Peter Leonard
Notes transcribed in real-time, please pardon any errors or misunderstandings.
UIC's Walter Benn Michaels was Friday's keynote speaker at the Malmö Book Life conference. A literary theorist who has recently turned towards questions of diversity and representation in the contemporary American cultural sphere, Benn Michaels used his talk here as both a description of current events in the States, as well as a "predictive" address towards the Europeans in the room. He's interested primarily in the concept of the Model Minority in the USA, which according to him were Jewish Americans in the 1930s-50s, and Asian-Americans from the 1980s to today. He takes as his starting pint Chang Lee's 1995 novel Native Speaker, about a Korean-American. Drawing from the various adjectives and epithets that describe the main character in the book, Benn Michaels fixates on two particular phrases: "Yellow Peril" and "Rich Kid." The difference between these two descriptions is that the former is impossible without the "prophylactic of quotation," yet also powerful as an internal marker of identity within that ethnic group (cf. the re-appropriation of 'queer,' 'chicano,' etc.) while the latter is harmless and impotent. Precisely why the economic lacks the bite of the ethnic is what Benn Michaels seeks to explore. His conclusion is that Americans like to think of people as belonging to cultures more than we like to think of them belonging to a class.
That ethnic terms have such potency, while economic ones are irrelevant, goes hand-in-hand with the thesis that NeoLiberalism is accommodating, indeed welcoming, of identity politics precisely because that discourse does not challenge fundamental economic inequality. That the rise of respect for 'identity' on American college campuses has been accompanied by increased economic inequality is, in Benn Michaels' view, representative of a fundamental logic: there is no tension between ethnic pride and capitalism, and in fact he argues that the increased inequality of markets produces ethnic identity. This is different than producing racism: the ideal market economy, he notes, moves steadfastly away from ethnic discrimination, as part of a relentless effort to make labor markets more efficient.
Benn Michaels claims that the myth of the Model Minority is inextricably bound to the binary of Black and White, a dichotomy which has served throughout US history as a mechanism for making even the most unlikely of candidates 'white.' Slavs, Jews and Asians have been slowly brought into the fold of this racial category, their ethnic differences slowly effaced. Benn Michaels points to a little-noted aspect of Plessy v. Ferguson, where a Supreme Court justice remarked that Chinese, despite their ineligibility for citizenship, were certainly entitled to drink out of 'Whites Only' water fountains.
Further evidence of the transformative effect of the Model Minority myth, and of the black/white dichotomy underlying it, is found in Michael Rogin's book Blackface, White Noise, the hidden history of Jewish Americans portraying African-Americans is taken up. Through the act of portraying a black man, a Jewish actor is transformed by both quantitative and qualitative means into the mainstream: he both achieves economic success as well as gains a gentile girlfriend through his fame.
As a result of the nativist-inspired Immigration Act of 1924, the first real ethnic quotas against Eastern-European immigrants began to be set in place. (An earlier exception, albeit directed towards a local California context, was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.) Yet the aftermath of WWII as well as the Civil Rights movements of the 1950s produced a public sphere conducive to the explicit repudiation of previous immigration controls along racial lines. The new 1965 laws replaced national with economic criteria -- that is to say, replaced race with class, and the Asian-American population grew from 500,000 to 12.5 million between 1960 and 2005 (while the population of the States overall roughly doubled.)
Thus the Model Minority Myth is misleading: it represents an economic problem as a cultural one. Its success lies in the fact that Americans like like to discuss culture, not class. A conversation organized around concept of racial/cultural identity rather than class belonging gains support from both public and private interest groups. Racism, sexism and homophobia are more attractive targets than economic inequality. Benn Michaels holds colleges and universities as complicit in this: they stress ethnic diversity, not economic diversity. Somewhat controversially (?), he holds that Jews were more beneficiaries than victims of the officially-racist immigration policies of late 19th and early 20th century America, just as Asian-Americans were more beneficiaries than victims of the officially-non-racist immigration policies after 1965.
But if Anti-Racism has replaced Racism, it has done so only in its role as the official mode of racialization. The growth of the academic discipline of "Asian-American Studies" on the Malcolm X model hides the economic in favor of ethnic. Diversity, then, is "Liberalism for Rich People." Proof that even Marxists can craft compelling sound bytes, Benn Michaels holds that "Anti-Capitalism mitigates the consequences of racism in a way that Anti-Racism does not mitigate the consequences of capitalism."