Question, because I dont know. Do identity politics help or hurt racism? My knee jerk reaction is that is highlights differences and can cause folks to dig their heels in on issues surrounding race/gender/sexuality/<personalidissuehere>. However pretending that all of these sorts of differences dont exist seems a bit naive at best and boneheaded at worst.
What is the path forward? How do you integrate different races/cultures/etc in a thoughtful way where you can simultaneously acknowledge that we're different but we're also the same?
The only solution I can think of is that we need to be able to talk it through and not get cancelled/shut down/provoke reactions if we get it wrong. Ive changed my point of view on a million different things a million different times, but not because I was force fed the "right" one.
“Identity politics” is too broad of a category for that to be usefully or meaningfully answered beyond “it depends”. You might as well ask “does use of words help or hurt racism”.
White supremacism/nationalism is itself “identity politics” (as is Nation of Islam style black nationalism); the civil rights movement was “identity politics”, the effort in revolutionary Mexico to build a post-racial unifying national identity was “identity politics”.
An enormous amount of "being against identity politics" is itself identity politics. The most blatant example is "all lives matter", a deliberate misunderstanding of what "black lives matter" means. It's white identity politics, predicated on the assumption that whiteness is the default for human beings, and so anything that addresses issues that don't apply to them is ipso facto racist.
I interpret accusations of "identity politics" as, most of the time, playing identity politics itself. It just gets to assume that their identity, as the default identity, can't be identity politics.
The way forward is difficult, because these are thorny and deeply linked issues. But they're not made any easier by demands that we erase any dicussion of race from discussions of racism. What is clear about the way forward is that it starts by listening to what people say about racism rather than assume that our experience accurately reflects what happens to people.
If you're getting "shut down" because you're telling black people what happens to black people, maybe you could imagine that they feel that you've been canceling them -- and feel entitled to do so.
This assessment is very wrong. While All Lives Matter as a slogan is completely tone deaf, it does not in any way demonstrate that 'whiteness is the default for human beings'. These people want to call attention to the fact that there doesn't appear to be racial bias in lethal police shootings, there's no clear evidence that blacks are disproportionately murdered by cops than whites when armed conflict disparities between the populations are taken into account[1]. While criticizing the slogan is warranted and arguing that the black community needs disproportionate _support_ because of the endemic crime in some communities resulting in an over-all more lethal situation (and resulting police violence), you can't just go around calling these 'All lives matter' folks white supremacists! Doing so is another example of the boxes we've been putting people in that has gotten us into this mess McWhorter is talking about.
It's telling that your arguments ignore the history of how some black communities got so dangerous. When considering the history of how rich white people abused their status to repress black people then we must discuss reparations in terms of things like scholarships, extra funding for social services, more school funding, more resources for the poor or disabled, etc. You know, things a lot of white Americans take for granted.
The tone deafness is in watching a man be murdered in front of you and saying, "They also kill white people". That's not about somebody gathering statistics. It's about the fact that clearly you're looking for statistics to support your cause instead of responding to the fact that a man was murdered and being outraged by it.
If you had started by joining in a chant to lock up the police officers involved, they might have listened to you after they were. Instead, it looks exactly like you're finding excuses to let those police officers off, and that's way more tone deaf than the slogan.
From a european perspective there is currently no nation more divided that the USA in terms of culture and politics.
In france, equality means making nation-wide republican programs where everyone should be treated the same at all part of society. This is a bottom up approach.
In this US, equality means there are grants for women, black, disabled, asians, mulims, jews, blinds, deafs, natives... and pretty much none for white people. Or it's Positive Discrimination. Pretty much everyone is doing stuff for its own group, AGAINST the other groups...
The people (democrats) pretending to fight for equality are just fighting for SPECIFIC MINORITIES all the time. No wonder people voted trump.. at least he was a honest asshole.
> In this US, equality means there are grants for women, black, disabled, asians, mulims, jews, blinds, deafs, natives... and pretty much none for white people. Or it's Positive Discrimination. Pretty much everyone is doing stuff for its own group, AGAINST the other groups.
If you want evidence of this look at how COVID vaccines are discussed in the US media. The constant refrain isn't about getting the vaccine out to as many people as fast as possible, it is about getting it out to this or that minority group.
American minority is more likely to get covid and more likely to die from it. There are multiple reasons from that (biology, the types of jobs they have, etc).
"male patients have almost three times the odds of requiring intensive treatment unit (ITU) admission (OR = 2.84; 95% CI = 2.06, 3.92) and higher odds of death (OR = 1.39; 95% CI = 1.31, 1.47) compared to females. With few exceptions, the sex bias observed in COVID-19 is a worldwide phenomenon."
What is the path forward? How do you integrate different races/cultures/etc in a thoughtful way where you can simultaneously acknowledge that we're different but we're also the same?
The only solution I can think of is that we need to be able to talk it through and not get cancelled/shut down/provoke reactions if we get it wrong. Ive changed my point of view on a million different things a million different times, but not because I was force fed the "right" one.