Review: The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality by W. B. Michaels. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006. 268 pp. ISBN 978-0-8050-7841-1 In the Bakke decision (1978), Justice Blackmun famously wrote, “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way.” This idea is being turned on its head by the Conservative Right, who frequently argue that in order to get beyond racism, we must ignore race (see for example, Steele, 1990; D’Souza, 1991, 1995; Sniderman & Carmines, 1997; Thernstrom & Thernstom, 1997, 2002; Connerly, 2000). Less common is a leftist attack on multiculturalism, but this is precisely where Walter Benn Michaels has positioned himself in the new book, The Trouble With Diversity. Michaels has provoked many intense reactions with his central thesis: a focus on racial and ethnic diversity distracts higher education from true inequality, which he defines as economic. Situating himself as the champion of the poor (unlike, according to him, elite actors of any race or political orientation), Michaels takes direct aim at affirmative action and multiculturalism under the guise that race is socially constructed and therefore lacks the power to structure opportunity as class does. Michaels begins by arguing that racism is largely a relic of the past, as illustrated in the following rhetorical question: Why does racial difference remain so important to us when the racism it was used to justify is so widely condemned and when the basic idea about race that gave it its power—the idea that there are fundamental physical and cultural differences between people that line up with our division of them into black, white, et cetera—has been discredited? (p. 49) Referring to race as a “phantasm,” the foundation of Michaels’ argument is to ignore the power of contemporary racism, thereby arguing that race- consciousness is not only unnecessary, but harmful. This is also a critical weakness in the text because he relies on an antiquated understanding of racism to justify his thesis. Recent theorists have described the means by which racism, despite overt bigotry falling out of fashion, remains a prominent method of social stratification in contemporary U.S. society (see for example, Omi & Winant, 1994; Bobo, Kluegel, & Smith, 1997; Bonilla-Silva, 2003). The consistent theme of these scholars is the continued significance of racism because the mechanisms that (re)produce racial inequality are largely driven underground. Additionally, numerous studies have shown that in many spheres of U.S. life (e.g., housing, employment, criminal justice, and education), to quote Cornel West (1994), “race matters.” 1 It is specifically within this context that race and