As a child I saw an ad for movie — which I never watched — titled “Japanese Tank Versus American Armored Car”. All these years I’ve wondered what I missed by not viewing that extraordinary confrontation. But there was no need to worry as more bizarre spectacles awaited. Decades later Twitter is alive with matchups for the next presidential like “Two White Histpanics Versus One Elderly Woman” or “Elderly White Woman Versus White-Looking Native American”.
If it sounds weirder than Nipponese Tank vs Detroit Armored Car it is because identity politics is being driven by the American kaleidoscope of identities into a kind of reductio ad absurdum. One Tweet captures how strange things look through the traditional liberal identity politics viewport now that Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have declared their candidacy for president.
Really The GOP is just “old men”hmmm two Republican hopefuls are in their early 40s still while #Hillary is almost 70.
Who’s a minority? In 2003 the New York Times noted that “Hispanics have edged past blacks as the nation’s largest minority group”. Pew Research notes that in California whites are now minority in California because Hispanics are in the majority. NBC reports that by 2043, whites will no longer be the majority overall. So are Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio “minorities” (being Hispanic) or in the majority? Or are they in either category only sometimes?
Matt Walsh says its time to call identity politics off. “No, it isn’t ‘time for a woman to be president.'”, he says. “It’s time for a competent adult of either gender to be president.” But describing the possibility of a world without identity politics to the Left, a world in which only individuals matter, is like suggesting life after death. The “progressive” site South Lawn looks at one proposal to save identity politics by redefining “whiteness” as an ideology. It is “a specific and foundational origin of violence … an intentional and specifically curated identity, culture institution and strategy of domination created by white people themselves to keep Black, indigenous and other racialized pepole down”. In that world, anyone can be “white” as long as they think the wrong thoughts. But South Lawn’s authors object, if skin color is invisible how will we recognize it? After all, Thomas Sowell is “white”, appearances to the contrary, but how can anyone tell this up front?
There is nothing in this critique that one can use to organize or build community around; rather it is simply one more scold in an atmosphere full of them. I challenged the person who posted it to find me something similar on how you can build bridges or educate the mass of people that we will actually need in order to build a coalition for change. She replied that she was not necessarily using it to exclude folks from spaces; fine, I said. I do not understand how one can post something like that and say with a straight face that they “are not trying to exclude”, but I was ready to let it go.
In a situation where “identity” is no longer physically evident, the only solution to the problem of identity assignment is credentialing. After the Left decided to add the sexual identity product line to their traditional list of offerings they were faced with the nettlesome problem of transgenders. Recently a woman walked into a change room in Fitness Planet gym to find a biological male in it. The biological woman complained and was thrown out of the club.
Imagine walking into a women’s locker room at your local gym and you see someone disrobing only to reveal they have male private parts. According to Planet Fitness, that’s no problem at all, if the male sincerely thinks he is a female with male parts.
McCall Gosselin, director of public relations at Planet Fitness Corporate, provided this statement to Health in an email: ‘Planet Fitness is committed to creating a non-intimidating, welcoming environment for our members. Our gender identity non-discrimination policy states that members and guests may use all gym facilities based on their sincere self-reported gender identity. The manner in which this member expressed her concerns about the policy exhibited behavior that management at the Midland club deemed inappropriate and disruptive to other members, which is a violation of the membership agreement and as a result her membership was cancelled.
You can sympathize with the club. If they had thrown the biological man out of the biological ladies’ room the lawyers of the Left would have descended on it. When it is no longer possible to determine identity by inspection it will have to be defined by assignment. Some bureaucrat or certificate authority has to issue a token of Hispanic-ness or female-ness, otherwise identity is indefinite.
Who can be an identity certificate authority? Anna Louise Bardach of the New York Times thinks that America’s newspaper of record must have that power. She tries to assert that neither Ted Cruz nor Marco Rubio are Hispanic. How could they be? First of all they are Republican. In the second place they are “white” and therefore members of “”a specific and foundational origin of violence … an intentional and specifically curated identity, culture institution and strategy of domination created by white people themselves to keep Black, indigenous and other racialized pepole down.”
None have especially strong bona fides among most Latinos. Indeed, being second-generation white Cuban exiles puts them at odds with the overwhelming majority of Latinos in the United States, who are of mixed race or indigenous descent. Ted Cruz, who is not fluent in Spanish, has been called as Hispanic “as Tom Cruise.” In 2012, an anti-Rubio commercial on Spanish-language TV ended with the tag “No Somos Rubios” — a pun meaning both “We’re not Rubios” and “We’re not blonds” (or whites).”
The principal guardians of identity will be teams of lawyers hired by the Left ready to pounce on anyone who dares believe his own lying eyes. The problem with making race dependent on certification that is creates the danger that the number of whites will rise. Eugene Volokh in what has since become a classic LA Times article noted in 1998 that Asians were becoming white. ” I first noticed this effect 10 years ago, at a party where a friend of mine commented that the guests were all white. I responded by mentioning about a dozen Asians; oh, she said, that’s right, but you know what I mean. At a recent UCLA conference I attended, two speakers complained that everyone on the panel was white, without even realizing that one of the speakers was ethnically Chinese, and another was an Asian Indian with skin darker than that of many American blacks.”
What Volokh had unintentionally discovered was that when people became more prosperous and more mainstream Americanized they tended to become “white”. The end of the 20th century, as you will recall, was an era of rising prosperity and rapidly spreading education and therefore whiteness was on the rise. The fundamental problem with identity politics is that it cannot survive either success or the melting pot. It requires resentment and alienation as fire requires oxygen to burn. Fortunately the advocates of identity politics guarantee failure and hence provide enough resentment to fuel a securely self sustaining reaction.
Walsh’s observation that “it’s time for a competent adult of either gender to be president” captures the real nature of the threat to identity politics. Although the Leftist lawyers are presently in ascendance, the slightest whiff of competence represents a mortal danger. When persons are hired for a job based on their ability, rather than an identity proxy defined by a leftist certificate authority as equivalent to incompetence, then the identity system begins break down; it starts to operate on merit rather than group membership. And that is fatal to identity politics.
With the growing ethnic and racial diversification of America traditional definitions of group membership are no longer viable. In order to keep playing the old divide and conquer game the Left has to redefine identity on new ideological terms. To achieve this they must control the identity certificate authority process.
Otherwise Americans might just elect the best person for the job and that might lead to success. And before long, there will be far too many whites.
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