Brilliant article.

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I remember where I was sitting when Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels told the left that it was making a historic mistake. It was a fall day in 2016, at a bookstore on the University of Chicago campusa room dense with graduate students, academics, and a few journalists, the kind of crowd that fancies itself the intellectual vanguard of a revolution that never quite arrives.

Reed, the political science professor and democratic socialist, and Michaels, the literary scholar who had spent a decade skewering diversity politics, were there to argue that the political left could not simultaneously prioritize race and class. It had to choose. That had been the thesis of Michaels's 2006 polemic The Trouble With Diversity: The more you emphasize the disproportionate suffering of particular groups, he argued there, the more you end up with a politics that accepts inequality as long as it is properly distributed: a rainbow-hued C-suite presiding over a Dickensian shop floor. In a society where the top 10 percent includes people of every background, anti-racism becomes compatible with, even useful to, the concentration of wealth. Class, meanwhile, disappears.

Progressives denounced The Trouble With Diversity as racist blasphemy, something like The Bell Curve for Marxists. Unsurprisingly, some members of the audience in Chicago, including an editor at Jacobin, pushed back. You can have both, the argument went. Identity and material conditions aren't in tension; they're inseparable.

I left that bookstore thinking that Reed and Michaels were probably correct, but too pessimistic about where things were headed. A decade later, they look like prophets.

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