Peddling Diversity

With the growing popularity of Black Lives Matter, Black people are now in demand. Suddenly, and in the name of “diversity and inclusion,” Black models appear in the advertising of every major retail store and fashion designer—even those who have built an image around an exclusive white or European pedigree. Fortune 100 firms, fine arts institutions, high-society philanthropic organizations, and elite universities have rushed to create racial justice and equity initiatives, which for practical and symbolic reasons require the participation of people of color. As a result, people of color have been invited to join selective institutions in unprecedented numbers.

Is this what progress looks like? Or is there something vaguely unsettling about this rush for diversity? These concerns animate Nancy Leong’s new book, Identity Capitalists: The Powerful Insiders Who Exploit Diversity to Maintain Inequality. The push for diversity and inclusion, Leong insists, is corrupt because it is driven not by the selfless quest for justice but by the ruthless logic of market exchange. Every gesture toward racial equity is designed to pay back dividends to the institution that makes it; racial justice extends only as far as the profit motive. “Identity capitalism is not about promoting tolerance, diversity, inclusion, or equality,” Leong explains. “It’s about self-interest and power … institutions use identity capitalism to make themselves look good … [it’s] an effort to gain social status without doing any of the difficult work to make substantive racial progress as a society.”

Leong, a professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, offers striking examples of cynical uses of diversity for public relations purposes. She looks at universities and corporations that put the same one or two people of color at the front and center of every promotional brochure, only to then relegate them to the margins once the cameras stop clicking. Some that can’t scare up even a token minority resort to stock photos or Photoshop. She looks at the legal cases where employers point to having Black, Asian, and Latino employees to deflect claims of discrimination. She writes about well-connected accused harassers, like Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who recruit (perhaps with promises of future favors) a parade of women to testify to their decency and character. According to Leong, this trade in the racial and gender identity is insincere and unlikely to achieve durable social justice—and, even worse, it forces people of color into a degrading form of self-exploitation: You can enter formerly exclusive workplaces, cultural institutions, and universities, but in exchange you must make your identity a spectacle and submit to its repackaging to serve a marketing and promotional campaign. 

The idea of identity capitalism echoes several well-established strands of critical social theory. Leong’s “identity entrepreneur,” the person of color who uses identity to get ahead, is sometimes the hapless “token” minority and at other times the reviled “sellout.” The idea that institutions embrace racial justice only when it is in their own interest borrows implicitly from the late lawyer and civil rights activist Derrick Bell, who proposed the interest convergence theory, which contends that Black people gain civil rights only when those rights converge with white interests. Later scholars have applied Bell’s insight to phenomena such as the relationship between civil rights legislation and Cold War-era propaganda, and university admissions practices as early as the 1980s. 

The psychological alienation that comes from turning an intimate aspect of individual personality into a commodity, the emotional toll that comes from conforming to a prescriptive script, distinguishes Leong’s identity capitalism from the more familiar but no less urgent problems of discrimination, illegitimate hierarchy, stereotyping, and familiar bad-faith attempts to justify them. 

The book’s very title suggests a question: Are the concerns that Leong explores unique to questions of identity or symptoms of capitalism more generally? However, she doesn’t address this question. The book is steeped in the rhetoric of identity politics, racial justice, and gender equity but has little to say about the logic of capitalism. However, Leong’s most convincing attacks on identity capitalism suggest a critique that applies to Marx’s theory of alienation. For example, Leong laments that “[n]obody wants to feel as though someone is their friend only for the purpose of posting photos on social media or dabbling in an unfamiliar culture … or to show off their identity. ... Identity capitalism stands in the way of deeper and more authentic relationships.” But this applies more generally to the kind of relentless self-marketing and self-exploitation that characterizes 21st-century capitalist meritocracies, regardless of the race of the influencers, hustlers, and “self-starters” involved. For Karl Marx, capitalism’s most distinctive evil is not economic exploitation but a type of social and existential estrangement that results from mediating human relationships through monetary exchange. A transaction that, in essence, involves mutual need and support is distorted to become the classic arms-length bargain defined only by self-interest. Ultimately, capitalism makes all human relationships transactional and self-serving, and all human characteristics of no more meaning or value than what they can be bought or sold for. 

From this perspective, different social groups may be alienated in distinctive ways, but alienation itself is universal: The golf-playing white male CEO may secretly yearn to be a romantic poet; a real estate mogul turned politician may be so thoroughly steeped in the ethics of the market that he can’t imagine—much less cultivate—a human relationship that is not fundamentally transactional. Increasingly, we all must trade on almost every aspect of our biographies and personalities in professional life: Employers make job offers based on psychological personality tests like Myers-Briggs; employees are expected to bring their personal experiences to bear on marketing and personnel management; and personal connections and social life are leveraged for marketing, rain-making, and career advancement. Why would social identities be exempt? In a society where the transactional mentality of bargaining, marketing, and rational self-interest influences almost every aspect of human interaction, it would be astounding if we did not encounter what Leong calls “identity capitalism.” 

Such transactional opportunism may be especially troubling when the deal involves absolving powerful institutions of responsibility for inequality and injustice, and much of Leong’s analysis focuses on such cases. But without a more comprehensive critique of alienation, it can be hard to distinguish these cases from sensible—even laudable—practices. From a conventional liberal perspective, identity capitalism is, at worst, a crisis of success: It’s only because our society at least purports to care about racial justice that any form of racial diversity and inclusion—even tokenism—serves institutional interests. The change in social norms that has made racial diversity culturally desirable and prestigious—an asset in terms of cultural capital rather than a liability, as it unambiguously was for most of American history—was hard won. Even purely symbolic inclusion can be more than empty virtue signaling.

Moreover, it can be hard to tell the difference between identity capitalism and a sensible deference to social experience. People of color rightly enjoy some authority with respect to questions of racial justice; their voices will be sought out by people seeking enlightenment and guidance and also, inevitably, by people hoping for support for their own preexisting positions. If a Black person speaks out about police racism or discrimination or segregation and enjoys any degree of added deference because of her race, she has in some sense traded on her race. If she begins to speak in public or publish opinion pieces or books on issues of race relations, she is a kind of identity capitalist. But, of course, whether or not this is a bad thing depends on what one thinks of the opinions. Indeed, Leong herself relies on her race as an Asian American woman to bolster her authority in writing about the indignities of identity capitalism. Would a similar book written by a white man have the same credibility?

'Identity Capitalists' suggests how inequality and self-estrangement can be worsened by our society’s obsessive focus on identity and diversity.

Of course, some people use identity as a source of authority cynically, but as these examples suggest, many do so in good faith. And sometimes a sincere desire to do good is mixed with a self-serving bid for absolution. Suppose a white manager, sincerely concerned that she may harbor unconscious biases and also worried about liability for discrimination, decides to seek out the advice of people of color before making a difficult personnel decision. Or suppose a business makes a conscious effort to diversify its hiring committees to try to reduce the risk of biased decisions. Much of today’s social justice activism and anti-discrimination law involve naming and shaming, identifying and punishing, institutions that do not make such efforts; a necessary implication is that those who do should enjoy some immunity from the same criticisms and sanctions.

At its best, Identity Capitalists suggests how inequality and self-estrangement can be worsened by our society’s obsessive focus on identity and diversity. But it is also an example of that obsession: Self-alienation is to be lamented only because it allows powerful insiders to maintain inequality (to quote from the book’s subtitle)—a profound and universal impediment to human flourishing is visible only through the lens of identity politics. But if one acquiesces in the values of a ruthless market economy and hypercompetitive meritocracy, then identity capitalism is simply one small brushstroke in the art of the deal: There’s no reason to treat a transaction in identity any differently than any other side-hustle. Inequality, from this blinkered perspective, if a problem at all, is simply a question of distribution, addressed by guaranteeing everyone an equal opportunity to peddle whatever they have for whatever the market will bear. Tantalizingly, the very title—Identity Capitalists—gestures at a deeper critique. But because the book only gestures, it leaves us to ask whether identity capitalism is a symptom of a dehumanizing transactional social economy that we must reject as such or whether the solution just boils down to sweeter deals with better pay.