Tag: identity politics

Edwin Meese III and Mike Gonzalez’s “Trump Can Help Overcome Identity Politics” (op-ed, Feb. 28) pinpoints what is happening to our country today and why so many people are missing the obvious while they obsess about the unimportant and inane. I’m in my eighth decade, have done everything I wanted to do and gone wherever I wanted to (except in segregated Mississippi where I was stationed at Keesler AFB in the 1950s). My race has never been a big deal to me, and if it was to someone else, that was their problem. When I started at Pitney Bowes in 1966 as the first salesperson of color in my part of the country it may have been meaningful to others, but to me it was simply a way to provide for my wife and four children and to escape the restrictive environment at the Detroit News where I had been a “ground-breaking racial pioneer” the previous two years. I did OK at Pitney for 14 years and worked another 10 at Viacom in unsalaried sales positions. The pitiful part of the entire scenario is that those of us this racial score-keeping is supposed to help are harmed the most. I can’t be the only African-American living a normal, stress-free existence, while the unusual, bizarre and cruel get the most attention. Let’s apply the Rotarian Four-Way Test. Is it the truth? The authors present an excellent idea to eliminate, perhaps, the identity politics that government has helped create by having national descent information rather than racial and ethnic information collected in the census and on EEO-1 forms, for example.

With voting trends focusing less on policy, the catalyst that is springing candidates into political positions is increasingly influenced by the personal qualities they possess, such as gender, race, ethnicity, religion or sexuality. Some people are beginning to allow these factors to play a more significant role in who they cast their ballots for, which can be seen in recent voting trends. Voters’ tendency to gravitate toward candidates belonging to certain groups or social backgrounds in terms of political alliances is known as identity politics. The socially accepted crusade of identity politics augments a movement away from broad-based party politics to valuing a more culturally or socially popular candidate. Ideally, a larger base of the population could be represented by those in political office. People may be discounted for their opinions on certain topics such as Black Lives Matter if they are not black. Judging people based on their race, ethnicity, gender, religion or sexuality is a form of prejudice. Professor Bret Weinstein of Evergreen State College was candid about his distaste for a college activity called a “Day of Absence” that asked white students to leave campus for the day. The movement was an effort to eliminate identity politics and see people as individuals rather than a group. People should be judged on the content of their character, not on uncontrollable factors such as their gender or ethnicity.

Government played a key role in creating these identities. “Without much thought given to what they were doing, [policy makers] created and legitimized for civil society a new discourse of race, group difference and rights. Added to the two familiar races, black and white, were three incongruous pan-ethnic categories. If you don’t think of yourself that way, the government will do it for you. There’s a box on the census for “some other race,” but the bureau explains: “When Census 2010 data were edited to produce the estimates base, respondents who selected the Some Other Race category alone were assigned to one of the OMB mandated categories.” For people who tick multiple boxes—permissible since 2000—OMB has instructed the Census Bureau to “allocate” responses that “combine one minority race and white” to “the minority race.” As Mr. Hollinger puts it, “thus the federal government quietly reinserted into the tabulation of the census the principle of hypodescent”—the technical term for the old segregationist one-drop rule—“that the opportunity to make ‘more than one’ was publicly said to repudiate.” Until the Trump administration stopped it last month, the census was preparing to add in 2020 yet another vast pan-ethnic grouping—“Middle East or North Africa”—for residents with ancestry anywhere between Morocco and Iran. Mr. Hollinger has proposed to do away with the pan-ethnic groups altogether and “count instead those inhabitants who identify with descent communities from specific countries.” The 2020 census starts down that path by adding a “write-in area” for countries of descent for both whites and blacks, as well as Hispanics, but will still divide them under the pan-ethnic umbrellas. Such revisions “would indicate that the census and the government are not interested in group characteristics in the third generation and beyond,” Mr. Glazer wrote. Mr. Hollinger’s solution is to include a box labeled simply “African.” As Mr. Glazer puts it, “this is the group that has suffered from prejudice, discrimination, and a lower caste status since the origins of the republic.” The Commerce Department must submit 2020 census questions to Congress by the end of next month. Mr. Trump could instruct agencies to report back on their progress after, say, six months. Mr. Gonzalez is a senior fellow at Heritage and author of “A Race for the Future: How Conservatives Can Break the Liberal Monopoly on Hispanic Americans.”

Democrats who stand in our way will be complicit in every murder committed by illegal immigrants. Of course, none of Donald Trump's and the Republican Party's claims about "illegal immigrants" and crime are true. As a group, immigrants in American commit less crime than the general public. Undocumented immigrants also commit less crime than almost any other demographic group in the country. White identity politics is a social and political force that harms sick children, threatens to ruin the lives of people who have contributed to American society for decades, and can even be mobilized to hold the federal government hostage in exchange for a wall on the Mexican border. White identity politics has several elements. White identity politics has an especially powerful hold over today's Republican Party and the conservative movement as a whole. Because their electoral coalitions are so racially divergent, and because white racial animus structures a range of other political values and beliefs, it has become extremely difficult for Democrats and Republicans to find any reasonable ground for compromise. Donald Trump is a racial authoritarian and a petit-fascist. Trump and the Republicans are using that chaos to destroy the federal government, undermine the social safety net, and render hollow any notion of shared political and social community.

BJP emerged as a serious contender for political power at this time and in 1995, three years after the Babri demolition, the saffron party stormed to a majority in Gujarat for the first time and has not lost an election in the state since. Hindutva is in power in 18 states and the Centre and a Hindu rashtra is firmly in place in Gujarat. Just as Congress played identity politics under the cover of secularism, now BJP plays identity politics through Hindutva. But does identity politics always win? Identity politics in the form of secularism has extracted a heavy price and Congress is down to its lowest tally of 44 seats. After the riots, Hindutva won in 2002 and 2007, but in 2012, let’s face it, Hindutva took a back seat to the reinvented persona of Modi. If Hindutva was the only consideration for voters VHP’s Pravin Togadia would have been a voters’ delight. If playing the Hindu identity meant an easy cakewalk into voters’ hearts, BJP would never lose an election. Importantly, a year after the Babri demolition BJP lost in UP. Mosque demolishers don’t win elections, those who position themselves as administrators – however subliminally Hindu – do.

. But the left should not be surprised whites are beginning to operate by the same rules of identity politics progressives encourage for everyone else. After all, on American college campuses, identity politics has long since driven out any serious discussion of principles. It’s all about teaching victimhood, who can be the biggest victim and how to use your racial or gender or sexual identity to gain more privileges and power on a college campus. Greer said the rise of the so-called alt right and white-identity politics is not surprising, given how the left has demonized white students purely because of the color of their skin. “Absolutely, it’s a result of what we’re seeing from the left, of what I call in my book minority-identity politics,” said Greer. “On a college campus, they encourage all sorts of identity politics unless it’s white identity politics. “And they take the natural conclusion [from what’s happening on college campuses] – I’m going to start advocating for white-identity politics against everybody else’s identity politics. “To see how bad it is, I would simply just point at what happened at Evergreen State in May,” Greer said. “There was a woman at Evergreen State, I believe she was actually a leftist herself, who said, ‘I don’t want to speak up in class because I’m a white woman and I’ll be immediately shouted down by my classmates, told to shut up because you have privilege, you wouldn’t understand this topic.

Alan Dershowitz: Hard Left and Hard Right Both Engage in Identity Politics. "Both the hard right and the hard left engage in identity politics," the retired Harvard law professor told "Fox & Friends" on Saturday. "I'm a centrist liberal, many of you are centrist conservatives, we can talk. We can have a rational argument." In contrast, several recent incidents showcase the unwillingness of the extreme right and left to have a discussion, he pointed out. Last month, violent white nationalists rioted in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing one. The violent far left group Antifa has popped up there and around the country, destroying property and injuring people, including police officers. "I love to quote my old grandmother from Poland," Dershowitz joked. "I would come home and say 'Grandma, the Brooklyn Dodgers won.' And she would say, 'Yeah, but was it good or bad for the Jews?'"

In the mid-1970s, a group of black feminist scholars and activists began meeting in Boston to form an organization that would address the political concerns of black women, which they felt had been ignored by the larger feminist movement. In 1977, the group issued “A Black Feminist Statement,” the culmination of their work to clarify their politics, “while at the same time doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements.” They made clear that they were “actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression” and that they saw “Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.” Having found that other groups—including the civil rights, black power, and feminist movements—were lacking in their approach to ending the oppression of black women and women of color, the collective wrote: “We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation is us. For some, the Democratic Party’s insistence on focusing on identity politics—or at least, a certain definition of identity politics—is what cost them the election. At least, not as the Combahee River Collective, which coined the term and theorized its meaning, originally laid out. In fact, Lilla spends very little time engaging the collective’s meaning of the term, instead devoting his energy to his own interpretation of identity politics. As the feminist authors of the Combahee River Collective put it baldly in their influential 1977 manifesto, ‘the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.’” Lilla’s spin on this statement would make identity politics sound like a selfish political theory. When the collective writes that the “most radical politics come directly out of our own identity,” Lilla reads this as applying to each individual group’s identity when the Combahee River Collective meant “our own” to apply specifically to black women. It is a result of their belief, as they write later in the statement, that, “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” The original intent of identity politics was articulating black women’s struggle at the nexus of race, gender, sexual, and class oppressions, and then forming strategies for dismantling each of these, both in black feminist spaces and in coalition with other groups. The Combahee River Collective was assembled to define a radical vision for black women’s freedom—and thus, as they believed, all people’s freedom. It remains to be seen whether the Democratic Party is prepared to fully embrace this strategy, but liberals undermine it by coopting its revolutionary language, which only dilutes the impact of actual identity politics and its ability to challenge systems of power.

Republicans are making a choice. Rewriting our political and racial history using identity politics isn’t just immoral and dangerous, it’s a desperate choice. Identity politics are destroying our ability to govern. Identity politics are a tool for distracting away from actual policy debates. If Republicans have the better argument, if Republicans have the better policies and if Republicans have the better ideas, shouldn’t they be able to rise above the identity politics that they purport to hate and argue facts? A single-payer system doesn’t mean the private market disappears, it just means that you don’t die if you can’t afford health insurance. As the most powerful nation in the history of the world, we can afford to improve the lives of all Americans. We are the greatest country in the world, but with greatness comes an obligation. When that day comes, Republicans will have to answer for the decades of distractions, divisiveness and identity politics that have hurt countless Americans. When that day comes, it will be a truly great day.