That gender equality and diversity thing

"Rigorous pursuit of equality of opportunity exclusively within the terms of given patterns of capitalist class relations—which is after all the ideal of racial liberalism—has been fully legitimized within the rubric of “diversity.” That  ideal  is  realized  through  gaining  rough parity  in  distribution  of social  goods and  bads among designated population categories.  As Walter Benn Michaels has argued powerfully, according to that ideal, the society would be just if 1 percent of the population controlled 90 percent of the resources, provided that blacks and other nonwhites, women, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people were represented  among  the  1  percent  in  roughly similar proportion as their incidence in the general population.

 Given the triumph of racial liberalism, it is entirely possible that new discourses of ascriptive difference might take shape that fit the folk common sense of our time and its cultural norms and sensibilities. Indeed, the explosive resurgence in recent years of academically legitimated determinist discourses—all of which simply rehearse the standard idealist tropes and circular garbage in/garbage out faux scientific narratives—reinforce that concern.

The undergirding premises of intellectual programs like evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics, genes and politics, and neurocriminology are strikingly like straight-line extrapolations from  Victorian race science— although for the most part, though not entirely, scholars operating in those areas are scrupulous, or at least fastidious, in not implicating the familiar racial taxonomies in their deterministic sophistries. Some scholars imagine that “epigenetics”—a  view that focuses on the interplay of genes and environment in producing organisms and genotypes—avoids determinism by providing causal explanations that are not purely biological. Recent research purporting to find epigenetic explanations for socioeconomic inequality already foreshadows a possible framework for determinist “underclass” narratives  that avoid  the  taints  associated  with  biological  justifications of  inequality and  references to currently recognized racial categories."

Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism

Adolph Reed, Jr.