What history tells us about today’s identity politics.
It’s an article of faith that diversity is a strength, a faith that appeals to me, given that I spent a career at the leading edge of equal opportunity, affirmative action (i.e., outreach), and, before it was hijacked by radicals and anti-intellectuals, the diversity movement.
Even the high priests on the U.S. Supreme Court have ruled that diversity is a strength, saying in their ruling years ago on affirmative action that diversity enhances learning in college.
That sounds dubious, but what do I know? The justices went to Harvard and Yale and thus are smarter and more connected to the real world—wink, wink! I went to college in south Texas, where about half the student body and half my friends were a mix of poor Mexican Americans and wealthy Mexican nationals. Like this Italian American, the Mexican-American guys were interested in girls, sports, where to buy beer, and where to find part-time work to pay for school. I don’t remember our respective ethnicities helping us learn accounting, finance and other subjects in business school.
Granted, I did learn that Mexicans who had poor and poorly educated immigrant grandparents, as I did, were no different from third-generation Italians like myself in terms of patriotism, assimilation, and aspirations.
But that was long ago, long before the diversity movement was hijacked and transformed into divisiveness. It was also before the War on Drugs went into high gear and the Mexican cartels caused extreme crime and corruption in Mexico and a marked increase in crime and in drug-addicted homeless people in border towns and states, which is not only a human tragedy but a tragedy for communities in terms of the associated blight, disease and costs.
For sure, diversity can be a strength under the right conditions and the right political, economic, and social systems. It can bring different ideas, perspectives and skills, resulting in innovations in the arts, sciences and industry while avoiding cultural and economic stagnation. That certainly holds true in my diverse extended family.
On the other hand, as will be discussed shortly, diversity can be a weakness and even danger, especially the way it is being promulgated and enforced today.
Of course, the U.S. has no choice but to make diversity work, since it is one of the most multiracial and multiethnic nations on the planet and remains a magnet for immigrants. This is a testament to its market economy and its political system of pluralism, liberal democracy, and a constitutional republic with a Bill of Rights. Yet much of the intelligentsia and academia want to replace these foundational systems with something undefined but in their own egotistical image because they see America as racist and evil. They don’t have the wisdom to paraphrase Winston Churchill and see the systems as the worst possible systems except for all others.
A big problem with today’s diversity movement is that Americans have been conditioned to believe that there are only six racial/ethnic groups: White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American. But these are contrived categories that hide the fact that, as with the world at large, there are hundreds of unique ethnocultural groups in America, each with its own history, customs, cuisine, beliefs, facial features, skin shade, and distant or recent experiences of being victims of atrocities or discrimination, or perpetrators of atrocities and discrimination.
Perhaps anthropologists know of a major ethnocultural group or race that doesn’t have blood on its hands somewhere in its past, but in my lifetime of reading history, I don’t know of one. The only difference between groups in this regard is time. Some have been more recent victims of atrocities, and some have been more recent perpetrators of atrocities.
The force-fitting of hundreds of unique ethnocultural groups into six categories makes a mockery out of diversity. And the categorizing hides the fact that there is no majority ethnocultural group in America. There are so many groups that each one is a minority.
Much mischief has resulted from the categorizing. This is especially true with respect to the White category, which is erroneously seen as homogenous in privilege, social status, income, education, work ethic, prejudices, and viewpoints. Under this trope, a descendant of J.P. Morgan or John D. Rockefeller is no different in background, advantages and worldview from an Appalachian backwoodsman, who is no different from an orthodox Jew in Brooklyn, who is no different from a Muslim in Detroit, who is no different from a Cajun in a Louisiana bayou, who is no different from a Walloon in wherever Walloons live, who is no different from . . . . Well, you get the point, a point that is over the pointy heads of the intelligentsia.
Make no mistake, as I know firsthand from my career experience, it’s permissible and even encouraged to discriminate in diversity and inclusion programs against those in the White category, especially males, because, as the trope goes, all whites have discriminated against people of color and owe their elevated station in life to keeping other people down, in what is seen as a zero-sum economic system, in which someone’s wealth must have come at the expense of someone else.
Conversely, excruciating processes that entail huge amounts of time, energy, money, and red tape are required in organizations to ensure that so-called minorities are treated fairly and are hired and promoted in the “right” numbers proscribed by directors of diversity and inclusion.
The net result is that in the name of social justice, it’s now okay to be unjust, as long as the injustice is targeted at whites.
Try as they might, the intelligentsia can’t square this double standard with the noble idea of individual rights. To avoid going mad with cognitive dissonance, they think in terms of categories, not individuals, and then they stereotype the categories in certain oppositional ways, such as white versus non-white, advantaged versus disadvantaged, powerful versus powerless, rich versus poor, racist versus virtuous, victimizer versus victim, fragile versus anti-fragile, and so on, ad nausea.
If someone doesn’t fit cleanly into one of the categories, the person will be hammered into the “right” category in a corporate racial sensitivity seminar; or in a public school classroom, where white children are now shamed for being privileged and racist; or behind the scenes by a director of diversity and inclusion.
Naturally, such heavy-handed pounding causes resentment and divisiveness, and it can lead to a backlash of populism, nativism, and extremism.
Another name for this corruption of diversity is identity politics. Such race-based politics are reminiscent of the racial definitions in the Nuremberg Laws, or the counting of American slaves as three-fifths of a person for determining congressional representation, or the use of such labels as octoroon and quadroon to differentiate the amount of black blood in a person, or the use of the pejorative “swart” to describe Italians, as the New York Times used to do.
The counterargument is that unlike the racial categories of the past, today’s categories are employed for good purposes, not bad ones. They are employed to stop discrimination and to help the disadvantaged, it is claimed. Perhaps that’s the intent, but it’s not the reality.
The reality is that identity politics are fraught with danger, as has been seen in history and is still being seen in much of the world. For sure, diversity is a danger, not a strength, in countries where minorities don’t have rights and legal protections.
Diversity was certainly not a strength when a half-million Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutus during the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
Tribal, ethnic and religious massacres continue today in large swaths of Africa where diversity isn’t a strength. For instance, tens of thousands Nigerians have been killed as a result of resurging conflicts between Muslims and Christians. And as Walter Russell Mead recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning Ably Ahmed launched a war against the Tigrayan regional government that has now become a civil war featuring genocidal massacres and ethnic cleansing reminiscent of post-Tito Yugoslavia.” Mead went on to mention that Sudan was broken in two in 2011 by ethnic and religious conflict. Now, ethnic blood is being shed in the new country of South Sudan.
Diversity also was not a strength in the genocide of Armenians at the hands of Turks during World War I. Armenians remember the genocide but are silent about Armenian soldiers massacring several hundred Azerbaijani civilians on February 26, 1992, in the Nagorno-Karabakh war, a war that resulted in twenty thousand to thirty thousand deaths and the displacement of more than a million people. But Azerbaijanis don’t have a clean history, either. During the 1920 civil war between Azerbaijanis and Armenians, Azerbaijani soldiers marched into the Armenian quarter of Shusha and massacred at least five hundred defenseless Armenians. (Some estimates put the number much higher.)
Put your finger on just about any part of a globe and you’ll find a history of ethnic and racial hatreds, especially at the borders between two nations of different ethnic and racial make-up or within nations where different ethnic and racial groups live together. The 1947 partition of India is a case in point. Not able to live together in peace, Muslims and Hindus split into two countries, with Muslims forming the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and Hindus, the Republic of India. Tension are high along the border between the two countries, which have a combined population of 1.5 billion people, or 20% of the world’s population—a 20% that lives in fear of diversity.
To the west of Pakistan is Afghanistan, a country riven by traditional hatreds and rivalries. And to the north of India is China, a country of 1.4 billion people, where the majority Han Chinese have little tolerance for ethnic minorities.
Diversity is dangerous in much of the world because the default position of human nature is to be suspicious and distrustful of those who are different—that is, those with a different culture, religion, language, ideology, and appearance. Throw economic status and class envy into the mix, and it can be a volatile combination, easily set off by an accidental or intentional spark, as was the case when the cultured and educated Weimar Republic gave way to the Third Reich.
Demonizing some groups as evil and some groups as good sets the conditions for social unrest or worse. It is particularly troubling when the demonization is done by a liberal democracy that values individual rights enough to have a Bill of Rights. And it is inexplicable that the same country doesn’t know better, considering its history of slavery and its oppression of Native Americans.
Diversity is a strength in America. Those who want to turn it into danger are a danger to civil society and should be recognized as such.
