Tag: identity politics

No offense, my Democratic friends, but only in the modern Democratic Party could a Democratic icon such as Andrew Cuomo fearlessly and publicly claim that America "was never that great." "It was never that great. We will reach greatness when every American is fully engaged. We will reach greatness when discrimination and stereotyping against women, 51 percent of our population, is gone and every woman's full potential is realized and unleashed and every woman is making her full contribution." "The Governor believes America is great and that her full greatness will be fully realized when every man, woman, and child has full equality," she said in a statement. View Cartoon Notice that Lever admitted that Cuomo was responding directly to the Trump slogan, "Make America Great Again." Do they really treat them all with equal dignity? The person is treated, not just by black and female liberals but by preening white heterosexual liberals, as inauthentic -- as an Uncle Tom or a traitors to his or her race or gender. And despite their denials, the Democratic Party has come to fully embrace socialism. In view of its historical track record of abject failure, there is no way Democrats can defend socialism on the merits, which is why they will continue to defame their political opponents as being racist, sexist and multi-phobic.

An astonishing 55 per cent of Americans now consider being white important to their identity. I’m not white! Yet luxuries aren’t to be wasted, so I plan on continuing to be so-what about my skin colour. You cannot have black identity politics, and Latino identity politics, without conjuring the pastel version. It asked some 3,000 non-Hispanic whites, roughly: 1) Do they have a strong sense of white identity? 2) Do they have a strong sense of white solidarity? Six per cent of the sample answered strongly in the affirmative to all three questions. Yet NewsHour commentators would never decry a sense of black identity as necessarily ‘verging into racism’, or presume such respondents supported ‘black supremacy’ and held ‘extreme views’. To be clear, I’m not arguing for white identity politics, but against identity politics of any brand. In fact, by cavalierly characterising anyone who embraces a white identity as a ‘supremacist’, that NewsHour discussion was racist as could be.

Democratic senator from California says critics use phrase to 'minimize and marginalize'; reaction and analysis on 'The Five.' FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service dedicated to delivering breaking news as well as political and business news.…

I commend the two Grant High School students, Caiden D. Reid ("I'm a Grant student who's been berated for my views," July 23) and Oliver Kline ("Really? None of the 1,500 kids in my school leans conservative?," July 15), for their well-written and insightful articles submitted to The Oregonian/OregonLive. They should know, however, that it wasn't too long ago, before these young men were born, the conservative side took very strident positions in marginalizing liberal views going back to the 1980s and early '90s. Back then, "liberal" was a dirty word, and liberals were branded as anti-faith, anti-life (by taking a pro-choice position), soft on crime, anti-gun and weak on national defense. As a liberal, I resented their tactics and believed the left would not adopt them. It is unfortunate, however, that we have. The U.S. has faced tough problems in the past, but we were able to solve them by focusing on what both sides had in common first while working through the differences. July 15) and Caiden D. Reid ("I'm a Grant student who's been berated for my views," July 23) for your courage in speaking out. When I went to school, free speech and free exchange of ideas were encouraged. For you high school students to step out and speak your minds was a true act of courage.

Obama made the comments when he was discussing the best way to interact with those with whom we disagree. “Maybe we can change their minds, maybe they’ll change ours.” “You can’t do this if you just out of hand disregard what your opponent has to say from the start,” he continued. In fact, some people have taken this view to an even more extreme place. In a recent essay for the blog Everyday Feminism, a self-described “non-binary South Asian scholar and artist” named Ayesha Sharma stated that there is actually no way for a transgender person or a person of color to even be safe in a social-justice space where the majority of the group is white and cisgender. “No feminist space that is predominantly white and cis is ‘safe’ or ‘open to everyone,’” Sharma writes. Sharma explains that “the leaders of these spaces” may try and do their best to make those spaces comfortable to everyone, but “white and cis people, for example, end up having cultural and social power in that they’re in the majority.” “This can mean that marginalized people in those spaces can often feel silenced, small, and microaggressed,” Sharma writes. Issues such as racism and sexism are huge problems in our society, but the only way that we’re ever going to be able to solve them is by having open conversations. On this issue, Obama is right. A white man may not have experienced racism or sexism himself, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be able to talk about it. Yes, there is something to be said for the fact that no one can ever truly understand an issue unless they’ve lived it, but it’s definitely the wrong move to shame people for simply trying to discuss something.

For participatory republican democracy to work, the president added, pluralism was a non-negotiable prerequisite. South Africa’s complicated history, persistent racial disparities, and the associated violence render the problem Obama was addressing an urgent one, and it is not directly applicable to civic life in the United States. And yet, stripped of its regional context, you could be forgiven for thinking that Obama was taking a swipe at his compatriots. Washington State’s Evergreen State College exploded last year when biology professor Bret Weinstein objected to a student-led initiative called the “day of absence,” in which white students were asked to voluntarily leave campus. Weinstein called it a form of racial segregation. As New York Times columnist Frank Bruni observed, people like Mark Lilla, a Democrat and opponent of identity politics, come under attack from progressive activists who take issue, not with their ideas, but with their race and gender. “White men: stop telling me about my experiences!” read the graffiti that Bruni recalled seeing deface an advertisement for a campus talk Lilla was prepared to deliver in 2017. It only seems to become difficult for liberals to find evidence of the left’s efforts to silence those with perceived majoritarian traits when they are called to account for this separatism. When the president only called on women at a 2014 press conference, his White House made sure to call around to reporters after the fact to make sure they noticed. Divisive identity politics is now how both political parties approach the electorate.

Studies make clear, however, that racism has been decreasing over time, among Republicans and Democrats. Moreover, since racism is deep-seated and longstanding, reference to it alone makes it difficult to understand the election of Barack Obama and Trump, the differences between Trump and the two previous Republican nominees on race and immigration, and the dramatic breakdown of social norms and civility following the elections. Indeed, although this tendency is most dangerous among whites since they are the most powerful group in western societies, researchers have consistently found such propensities in all groups.) Understanding why Trump found it easy to trigger these reactions requires examining broader changes in American society. This lining up of identities dramatically changes electoral stakes: previously if your party lost, other parts of your identity were not threatened, but today losing is also a blow to your racial, religious, regional and ideological identity. Making matters worse, social scientists consistently find that the most committed partisans, those who are the angriest and have the most negative feelings towards out-groups, are the most politically engaged. Stenner, for example, notes that “all the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference … are the surest ways to aggravate [the] intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Over the long term of course the goal is repairing democracy and diminishing intolerance and for this promoting cross-cutting cleavages within civil society and political organizations is absolutely necessary. (Here, recent debates about ideological diversity and the new grassroots activism within the Democratic party is relevant.) This too has implications for contemporary debates about “identity politics”.

The US celebrated the 242nd anniversary of its independence this week, roiled by fallout from the Trump administration’s family-separations policy at the same time it considers long-simmering questions over addressing its racial history and confronts the world with an isolationist trade policy. At heart of the debate is the question of identity—of us and them. Why is identity so often a source of conflict? Jelani Cobb, a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a staff writer for The New Yorker, suggests the answer goes all the way back to founding of the republic. “The question of ‘We, the people’ has been our ongoing and unresolved conflict in American identity,” Cobb said at a Chautauqua Institute talk in western New York. “We’ve never sufficiently understood and defined who is included in that term.” Ever since Thomas Jefferson’s passage famously decrying the transatlantic slave trade in the Declaration of Independence was cut, American democracy has been characterized by a boom-and-bust cycle, Cobb said. “An expanding concept of ‘we,’” followed by “a contracting, fearful idea of who ‘we’ should be.” Identity politics—and a cycle of progress, followed by backlash— have shaped the course of US history. The Civil War was followed by Reconstruction—in which more than 2,000 African-Americans were elected to political office—which was followed by the repressive Jim Crow era. The US has vacillated between opening its borders to immigrants and lashing out against them, from an 1882 law that forbade Chinese immigrants from entering to turning away boats filled with Jewish refugees during World War II. And the past 10 years have seen both the election of the first black US president and the ensuing rise of political movements centered on the idea that the white identity is under threat.

Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, is a widely experienced international correspondent, commentator, and editor who has reported from Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Because this type of discrimination is the gateway drug of the identity politics balkanizing America, Tuesday’s decision is a boost for unity and a setback for those who want to divide Americans. But the administration should go even further. Just last Friday, the two of us published a Heritage Foundation paper calling on the administration to stop giving preferential treatment on the basis of “race, color, national origin or ethnicity in any of its programs and activities.” Indeed, we think that the administration should stop collecting data, including in the Census, on artificially created ethnic groups, such as “Hispanics” or “Asians,” which bring together under large umbrellas disparate cultures and races. That would really cut identity politics off life support. Yes, since the first one in our history in 1790, the U.S. Census has asked a question about race—but that has always been something quite incidental to apportionment and taxation. The question on citizenship, which the administration now wants to bring back, has been asked for much of America’s history, and until recently was uncontroversial. Reinstating a question about citizenship in the 2020 Census is a small but salubrious step. Even the New York Times said the Obama-era “guidance was controversial at the time that it was issued, for its far-reaching interpretation of the law. As U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said in 2007, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” >>> Read the new paper, “Eliminating Identity Politics from the U.S. Census,” by Gonzalez and von Spakovsky, here.

Allegedly, a passport officer had misbehaved with a Hindu-Muslim couple. Her senior colleagues, even the ones normally vociferous on Twitter, suddenly found other very important things to tweet about. But this quickly also became a story of how the Union Cabinet was not standing up to defend the ‘honour of a woman minister’. “And now through trolls, a lady minister and one of the most senior BJP leader is being harassed,” said Surjewala. Globally, women are 27 times more likely to be harassed online, according to Seyi Akiwowo, founder and director of Glitch!UK, a non-profit that fights online abuse and harassment in Britain. They should have been defending any colleague facing the Twitter mob, not just a ‘lady minister’. She has more political experience than the prime minister himself. Break Glass Sealing It’s not easy being a woman in politics. But Swaraj, who has broken many glass ceilings in her time, does not need the old (and middle-aged) boys’ club to come to her rescue in the virtual world. She would probably much rather they got out of her way in the real world.