Saturday, October 22, 2011

The Diversity Fetish

There is a diversity fetish that vexes people on the 'Left' and occasionally finds expression in public debates, for instance when OWS is denounced as 'too white'. But bringing in some materially comfortable 'people of color' hardly represents a real solution, though certainly in the context of the Left's diversity fetish , it would. If one actually lives in the developing world, white folks are far a few between, and the local exploiters are universally 'people of color'. That they are often on the low rung of the international ruling class is not a question of importance. The world's most powerful steel corporation is owned by an Indian consortium based in Luxembourg, whose children very well may attend elite American universities where they would be 'people of color' - in equivalency with a sharecropper from TJ - in the political context of a common 'Leftist' analysis.

The ruling class as long since incorporated diversity into their worldview, and with the planet's billionaires increasingly 'people of color' one would hope the Left could go back to some common sense class analysis. If it doesn't, it will certainly maintain its irrelevancy.

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