A classic TV commercial depicts diners at a fine restaurant being informed that the coffee they just had with their expensive meal was really just freeze-dried Folgers from the supermarket. Naturally, they’re surprised that it wasn’t the fresh-brewed, gourmet drink they thought they were getting.
This says a lot about how people allow their expectations to undermine their objectivity, as well as raising the question of whether the identity of the product matters as much as its quality. Does it matter if it’s Folgers if it’s good? Is choosing a premium brand important or are generic and off-brand products acceptable? These questions of identity affect not only food, but also politics.
What qualifies something as “identity politics“, anyhow? Officially, it’s defined as the sort of politics where “groups of people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group“. (Emphasis mine.)
In other words, it’s explicitly partisan; identity politics is intended to help one group above others, as opposed to promoting equality. Of course, when a group has been pushed below others, attempts at equality can look partisan, especially when viewed from above. The shrinking of an unfair gap can appear to be bias when it’s your advantage that’s doing the shrinking.
The way to tell whether it’s about equality or partisanship is not to focus on the spin or rhetorical style. Instead, we have to consider whether their proposals show a disregard for others, as opposed to seeking to help everyone.
So, for example, BLM doesn’t suggest that cops should be free to shoot anyone they want, just so long as they’re not black. Instead, their proposals seek to prevent all unjustified shootings, with the focus on black people explained by the disproportionate impact. That’s not partisanship, despite any appearances.
In the other direction, being conspicuously neutral (i.e. color-blind) about forms of bias that don’t happen to affect you, or admitting that the bias is real but claiming it will somehow automagically go away when your own, more general problems are fixed is an indication of partisanship in disguise.
To be clear, by overwhelming numbers, the most common form of actual identity politics in America is white supremacy. Strangely, it’s often not considered identity politics because it’s taken for granted.
Logically, white supremacy is a great example of identity politics. Practically, the term has come to be used selectively as an insult; a slur by the more-than-equal to denigrate anyone who promotes the equality of the less-than-equal. There’s a saying about fish not having a word for water because it’s all around them: that’s how white supremacy is. It’s ubiquitous.
Accusing a minority of identity politics is a dog whistle, like saying that they’re uppity (because they want equality) or well-spoken (for what they are) or don’t know their place (which is the bottom). When you hear that whistle, look for white supremacy and you’re likely to find it. Coincidentally, Bernie Sanders has used the accusation of identity politics for years to smear his opponents, while supporting conspicuous color blindness that is quietly but distinctly white supremacist.
When Sanders harangues that it’s not enough for someone to say “I’m a woman! Vote for me!”, he is implying that the only reason to vote for her is because she’s a woman. Of course, when he aimed this attack at Clinton, it was insulting and laughable—she was the most qualified candidate we’ve seen in decades—but that didn’t stop him. For that matter, it didn’t stop him when he aimed it at Obama and tried to have him primaried.
Lately, Bernie Sanders and his surrogates having suggested that all the excitement about various minority candidates—women, black people, Hispanics, homosexuals—is due to “identity politics”; due to partisanship. This is, again, an insulting lie. Candidates such as Kamala Harris are at least as qualified as Sanders is and there is no shortage of good reasons to pick them instead of him.
When pushed, Sanders supporters like to redefine “identity politics” by shrinking it down to exactly match the specific way Sanders uses it. Instead of referring to partisanship as a whole, they say it’s literally only about voting for someone solely due to a shared identity. This is still dishonest and insulting, but it does raise an interesting question: Is it necessarily partisanship to allow someone’s identity to influence your vote?
I don’t think so. Assuming we’re talking about choosing candidates whose qualifications are comparable, there are legitimate reasons to prefer the minority. I’ll focus on two: signals and representation. And then I’ll discuss some anti-patterns.
When two candidates for a job look about the same on paper but one is a minority, the latter is statistically likely to be better because minorities are systematically undervalued; they have to work twice as hard to get half as much. Minorities are assigned lower grades, lower interview results, and lower performance scores than they deserve, due to implicit bias. As such, minority status among high achievers is an additional signal of quality, not some sort of noise to be filtered out. It shows that they’re even better than they might appear, because they had to overcome a societal handicap.
The other reason is representation. People are fundamentally equal, so when we see unequal outcomes, this has to be explained somehow. And, in the absence of a better reason, the default one is bias. When the demographics of a field don’t match those of the general populace, unless there are other factors demonstrably at play, it means they’re being unfairly selected. Therefore, intentionally choosing an equivalent candidate who differs only in being a minority is a reasonable way to make up for that by making the field more representative.
When doing this, the preference among minorities should not be towards your own, if any, but whatever is statistically justified. This is one of the reasons I somewhat favored Clinton over Obama in 2008: women are a larger “minority”, so large that they’re not even a numerical minority in the population at large. They’re a minority in the sense of being less than equal, which is why they’re a numerical minority in prestige fields such as politics.
Minority candidates can be better just because they’re minorities. They are likely to be more directly aware of and personally motivated by the issues that disproportionately, or even uniquely, face them. For example, when you see a room full of white men explaining why women shouldn’t have bodily autonomy, it’s hard not to think that the absence of women is relevant.
A related notion is that of role models. When people do not see themselves as being represented in our leadership, it has a chilling effect. Somewhat rightfully, they feel that this shows that it’s not their government and they’re not seen as important. This discourages political activism; especially voting, but also other forms of participation, including running for office. Every minority in power is therefore a role model for equality, encouraging and legitimizing buy-in. This is a huge boost for democracy.
Can this go wrong? Sure. I’ve been critical of the notion that you have to be a member of a group in order to care about it or that those who fight for equality should be relegated to the inherently-inferior status of ally if they’re not part of your group. In particular, I argue that, by virtue of not being members, they have a strong, built-in defense against accusations of partisan “identity politics”.
Another way it can go wrong is when the candidate is a traitor to their group, guilty of the same bigotry that the group suffers under. Consider Sarah Palin or Margaret Thatcher or Milo Yiannopoulos. Ironically, it’s not that unusual for the earliest examples of a member of a minority group openly entering a field to be one of those who are hostile towards their own identity; “self-hating”. After all, it is this very hostility that makes them more palatable and acceptable to the majority, which lets them get in.
Consider how a woman entering a field dominated by men might feel a pressure to show that she’s “one of the guys“, emphasizing her masculine traits and deemphasizing her feminine ones in order to be taken seriously. Another example would be a black doctor who keeps his hair closely trimmed and goes golfing. A third is the intentional use of respectability politics as a cover for denigrating others of their group and establishing themselves as “one of the good ones“. In all these cases, they’re overcompensating for their minority status by playing down their identity and throwing the rest of the group under the bus.
Of course, the most obvious way it can go wrong is when the candidate is underqualified or flatly unqualified, yet favored by members of their identity group. The example that comes to mind, both of this and the earlier problem of overcompensating, is Pete Buttigieg. While he doesn’t hide his homosexuality, he was closeted until very recently and is not really a member of the gay community in any social sense. Moreover, he identifies more strongly with being white than gay and wears his Christianity on his sleeve, hence his ongoing outreach to the bigoted “white working class”.
Pete is not the worst possible candidate, but he’s just not that impressive if you look at him objectively. His political experience is limited to being mayor of a small city, and his previous attempts to get traction at even the state level were unsuccessful. As suggested above, his political views lean away from liberalism and do not energize the base. If he was straight and wasn’t a white male, he’d be ignored by the press.
Aside from being a white man, why is he getting so much publicity? Much of it is not despite being gay but because of it. I can’t help but to notice that his candidacy has received undue attention from gay reporters and activists, such as Maddow and Takei. They’re so excited about finally getting some representation that they’re allowing themselves to be blinded to his faults and weaknesses.
This is unfortunate, because his attempt to appeal to white folks at the cost of throwing the Democratic base under the bus (which is like the back of the bus, only worse) will not work. No matter how hard he tries to blend in with the majority, the bigots will not vote for him. Not only is he gay, but his color-blind bias just can’t fire up the white supremacists the way Trump’s overt bigotry does.
On the other hand, Kamala Harris is clearly competent, and being a black woman (with Jamaican and Tamil ancestry) offers the non-white, non-male Democratic base the motivation and inspiration they need to overcome Republican voter suppression and work to get their votes counted. She is the positive side of so-called identity politics, whereas Sanders and Buttigieg are the negative.
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