CHRISTOPHER Caldwell has an unusual take on diversity in today's New York Times, reviewing a book called "The Trouble with Diversity" by Walter Benn Michaels. 

Michaels, a left-winger, calls affirmative-action-type arguments over race and gender

at best a distraction and at worst an essentially reactionary position.

They distract society from what should be, in his view, the real focus of concern: disparities in wealth. We are encouraged to approach differences in wealth much as we approach differences in race and sex

identifying the problem not as the difference but as the prejudice (racism, sexism) against the difference. 

It is OK for people to be poor, in other words, so long as nobody wishes ill on the poor, and so long as they are not made to feel inferior. 

As Caldwell points out, most of those who share Michaels’s anger at affirmative-action policies

tend to run this argument in the opposite direction, to show that corporate America has, for a pittance, sold the country out to race radicals, feminists and gay activists. Indeed, this is the essence of much populist conservatism.

This is a different line, and there is a touch of genius about it.

The problem comes with Michaels's underlying leftist agenda. He wants to see inequalities of wealth reduced by a new non-capitalist economic system. We can't follow him there, but we'll be chewing over the diversity stuff a bit longer.