“Identity Politics” and Human Survival

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In my last essay, I pointed out an astonishing fact. The members of the House Judiciary Committee, which is even now drafting articles of impeachment, split neatly into two different tribes.

One tribe—the Democrats—has rough gender parity and “looks like America.” A third of its members are African-Americans, and three are otherwise outsiders to our dominant ethnic group of non-Hispanic whites. The other tribe—the Republicans—is 100% non-Hispanic white and 88% male.

Is my pointing out this simple fact playing “identity politics”? Am I “playing the race (or gender) card,” albeit putatively against my own “race” and gender? (I’m a male, non-Hispanic white and also a not-very-observant Jew.)

Or is this incontestable fact critical to understanding where we Americans now stand in our own history and our struggle to realize our own ideals? Read on.

As I’ve pointed out repeatedly in this blog [see, for example, this post and this one], Republicans and so-called “conservatives” are masters of the art of “applied philology.” The phrase “identity politics” is a brilliant example. While avoiding specific mention of gender, race, national origin or sexual identity, it subtly implies that those who raise the question of apparent categorical exclusion from politics and power are doing something wrong. It takes the onus off the sexist or bigot and throws it on the egalitarian.

That’s absolutely brilliant propaganda and PR, but is it wisdom?

To analyze, let’s throw away all the loaded words and look at things straight. Women today are no minority; they are an absolute majority of our people and our voters. Demographers tell us we Americans will have a “majority-minority” nation by 2043, just a bit over one generation away. So we can safely assume that so-called “people of color,” including Hispanics regardless of actual “color,” comprise somewhere between one-third and one-half of our total population right now.

Is it rational to exclude 76% (38% out of 50%+) of our majority-plus (of females) from full participation in one of the most important committees in “the people’s House”? Is it rational to exclude independently (with some overlap) 100% of what amounts to 33% to 50% of our population? Is that exclusion small-d “democratic”? Is it civilized?

What makes all this puzzling (if one assumes that our species is rational) is that we’re talking about politics. The three greatest politicians in recent human history were all “people of color”: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. The greatest politician of all time may have been Queen Elizabeth I, who took an island nation riven by internecine warfare and jump-started the rational, scientific, business and commercial culture now known as “Anglo-American.” Despite Trump and Brexit, that culture still inspires all humans today.

All three of the great men of color freed their people from oppression by tribes with vastly superior weapons. They did so effectively and without violence. What could be more “civilized” than that? What skills could be more essential in a world threatened by nuclear weapons that is pursuing still more?

Gandhi and Mandela freed the vast majority of people in their lands from domination by a violent minority (the Brits and the Boers, respectively). Mandela did so by negotiating from inside a prison cell. King freed his people from legalized oppression by the vast majority in the United States. (We know now that his success was only partial; but he restarted the process after our Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction.) If you were to base a tribalist opinion on these stunning facts, you would have to conclude that people of color make better pols than more violent whites.

As for women, for most of human history they’ve been playing the role that our species’ biological evolution assigned them: creating, nurturing and training the next generation. It’s only been during the last century or so that advances in science, technology, household appliances, and medicine have given them the time and leisure to play other roles than their species-sustaining one. (Queen Elizabeth I had to forsake her evolutionary role as mother.)

There’s a species-survival angle to women’s “liberation.” An explosion of population and pollution worldwide now threatens massive degradation of our environment, even changing the global climate in which our species evolved. Ever-greater population density also threatens us with catastrophic pandemics. Under these circumstances, the notion of employing half our species exclusively in making more babies seems a bit irrational.

“Politics” is the means by which we humans plan our future together as a species. Including all of us in that project is not just a matter of “fairness” and “justice,” although it is that. It’s also a matter of survival, at both the national and the global level. We Americans need all hands on deck to compete with a rising China, which self-evidently doesn’t play by the same rules and has over four times our population. And we humans need all hands on deck in order to avoid extinguishing ourselves with climate change, nuclear proliferation, failure to contain the next pandemic, or endless war.

To reach these goals, we must recognize, educate, and exploit the native talent of every individual, regardless of gender, race, creed, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, or anything else irrelevant to clear thinking, wisdom and good judgment. Anybody excluded, for whatever bigoted reason, could be our next Elizabeth I, Gandhi, King or Mandela, or maybe the next Greta Thunberg. Advocating and struggling for that sort of society is not “playing identity politics” or “playing the race (or gender, or other minority) card.” It’s advancing our species’ prospects for survival and happiness.

For Americans, it’s something especially dear. It’s bringing Tom Jefferson’s credo “all . . . are created equal” closer to practical reality. Jefferson may have been a slave owner whose human “property” had to be sold after he died to pay his debts. But that doesn’t mean we should abandon his succinct moral and practical credo.

Jefferson himself didn’t follow it. We today don’t either, although we’re coming closer. Yet we still pursue it because it makes our nation, with all its troubles, the envy of our entire species. It also blazes a pragmatic path to species survival.

So the next time you hear people disparaging “identify politics,” know where they stand. We are much less likely to survive as a species if we don’t get this right.

Footnote: Bigots accusing egalitarians of bigotry is just one small example of what psychologists call “projection,” i.e., falsely seeing and decrying in others undesirable traits that you possess yourself. Projection has become a fixed feature of Republican campaign tactics and ideology. For other examples, read this Washington Post editorial, cataloguing several recent acts of projection by Bill Barr, our latest Attorney General. As this piece points out, persistent projection is particularly egregious in a supposedly professional official charged with enforcing the law free from bias, relying only on facts.

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