The Census Bureau recently has rejected changes to the census that Obama had proposed as a parting gift to the Democrats. As the party of identity politics, the progressives were going to be gifted a new bloc of clients––“MENAs,” people of “Middle Eastern and North African” descent. As the tribunes of “people of color,” the Dems were eager to add yet another member to their conga-line of identity grievance. But the Bureau’s decision to reject the classification should be just the first step to completely discarding identity categories predicated on superficial and reductive characteristics.
First, our census rubrics like “black,” “Asian,” “white,” and the incoherent “Hispanic” are crude to the point of being meaningless. “Black” cannot express the incredible cultural, religious, social, and linguistic variety and diversity of the African continent and its diaspora. Neither does “Asian,” a geographical term equally as simplistic. “Hispanic” is a linguistic category even more hopelessly crude. So too with “white,” which lumps together under the rubric of superficial color a variety of cultures, mores, and classes. In fact, this impulse to label people by appearance is a leftover of “scientific racism,” the pseudo-scientific ideology of progressives in the first half of the 20th century that aimed to help Darwin out by excluding, sterilizing, and in Germany eliminating those deemed “inferior” and “unfit” because they weren’t “Anglo-Nordic,” that is northern European.
Second, our political system is predicated on “inalienable rights” that belong to individuals, not groups. Of course, all people are part of a collective identity, but that collective does not possess rights that are exclusive of individuals or that trump their rights. Such an idea of exclusive group rights reflects a persistent tribalism that rejects a universal human identity. The genius of the Founding was its recognition that universal human rights did not make everybody identical, but established a barrier against the attempts of any faction or group to dominate other factions, or compromise their freedom, or seize for itself power and privileges that encroach on others. Our collective identity is political, not biological. Within that unifying civic identity––the unum–– space is left for the expression of diverse identities––the pluribus–– created by region, religion, occupation, or ideology, whose potentially tyrannical contests for power and privilege are constrained by federalism, divided government, and the balance of power.
Identity politics rejects this foundation of our liberal democracy, and returns to zero-sum tribalism and its inalienable differences. One clan is given privileges denied to the others, or stakes a claim to political power specific to that clan. Backed by the coercive power of state institutions and regulations, identity is thus weaponized as selected clans compromise the freedoms of excluded clans, and reserve the right to violate the rights of others. We see this today with progressive assaults on the First Amendment to marginalize public speech about race that doesn’t follow the grievance narrative. Identity politics, then, is a form of tyranny that the Founders wanted to avoid.
Like the old Jim Crow racism, moreover, the identities are predicated on reductive, superficial characteristics that ignore all other factors––such as socio-economic class and its social capital, or our unique personalities, characters, beliefs, and talents––that make us who we are. The result is a meaningless notion like “white privilege,” as though less melanin can override wealth and education and social capital. I grew up in rural Fresno County with poor and working-class people of all colors, and I can tell you the Dust Bowl Scotch-Irish migrants had no more “privilege” than blacks or Mexicans. Their prospects were all pretty much the same: Vietnam, the penitentiary, or death. The lucky ones became carpenters or plumbers, the real lucky ones became school teachers or realtors. Some were hardworking and law-abiding, some were no damn good, as everybody called them. But you couldn’t tell which was which just by looking at the color of their skin. The valuable lesson I learned is that you have to take people one at a time, and judge them by their actions and the content of their characters.
