Identified

Amy Chua, she of "Tiger Mother" fame, has written a new book, "Political Tribes." The Guardian has an excerpt from it, titled, "How America's identity politics went from inclusion to division." And the piece is what is says on the tin; it purports to be a brief history of Identity Politics, and a supposed transition from being "inclusive" in the civil rights era, to being much more limited to individual groups today. I'm not sure if I buy into the argument that Mrs. Chua lays out, but it is, after all, and excerpt. Maybe the complete book includes more details.

In any event, the excerpt in The Guardian includes a long quote from a blog post in The American Conservative, which Mrs. Chua considers illuminating, presumably of the reasons why White Americans, and Conservative White Americans in particular, are embracing their own brand of Identity Politics. Here is a part of it:

I find some of the alt-right stuff exerts a pull even on me. Even though I’m smart and informed enough to see through it. It’s seductive because I am not a person with any power or privilege, and yet I am constantly bombarded with messages telling me that I’m a cancer, I’m a problem, everything is my fault.

There's a part of me that wants to say to this guy: "Welcome to my world. I'm sorry you're here."

This is why I doubt the power of shared suffering to foster empathy. Many people who suffer don't (whether they can't or won't is beside the point) take the time to understand that their reactions to adversity might be the same as other people's. I'm Black. I can tell you hours of stories about what it's like to be regarded as a cancer, a problem and at fault for other people's woes. I can tell you what it's like to be confronted by a friend's father because he was afraid that we may start dating. I can tell you what it's like to be pulled over by a policeman and asked if I've stolen my own car. I can tell you what it's like to be ignored in stores because the staff there don't think I'm worth waiting on. And I can tell you what it's like to be followed around, because the staff suspect I'm a thief. I can tell you what it's like to... well, I'm sure you gotten the idea by now. And my world has vastly improved during my nearly half century. My co-workers wouldn't dream of calling me "nigger" to my face in the casual way my schoolmates used to.

There's a strain of American thought that doesn't understand the need that some have for "a 'safe space,' if you will." They don't understand the retreat into identity so many people have undertaken. Except for their reasoning for doing it themselves. Which makes sense. After all, I've had a much longer time to think about it than they have. At no point in my life past the age of four have I had a permanent home in a neighborhood where the majority of people were Black. For that matter, I've never even had a home in an area where the percentage of black people reached the national average. The bombardment has been constant. For the most part, I don't even notice it anymore. (Leaving the country is an exception - then it becomes first conspicuous in its absence, and later in its return when I arrive back at Sea-Tac.)

As you may have guessed by the fact that I've linked to it, I went to The American Conservative, and read Mr. Dreher's blog posting, which is little more than him posting letters from a pair of his White readers that place the responsibility for their newfound tribal identities on "the Left." "Zapollo" goes on to say:

[People on the Left] have no problem understanding, and even making excuses for, say, the seductive pull of angry black radicalism for disaffected black men.

And in this, he seem to understand that he's not alone in what he's feeling, and to understand that people not like him undergo the same pressures. He concludes:

If the Left can’t let go of identity politics, then let me be clear: What comes next is on THEM. A lot of us don’t want to live in a world of tribes, and we never asked for it. But people will like those young dudes attracted to white nationalism are going to play the game according to the rules as they find them, and they will play to win. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

And that left me with this question. "The seductive pull of angry black radicalism for disaffected black men;" who is THAT on? Who ignored THOSE warnings? Or does he think that it was "disaffected Black men" or La Raza that invented our modern tribalism? If "the Left" is "just feeding, feeding, feeding the growth" of angry White radicalism, who simply fed, fed, fed the growth of angry Black radicalism?

And that is where the empathy fails. Because here you have someone who is convinced that the bitterness and hatred that is infecting his community is being driven from outside of it by people who believe they mean well, but stops short of seeing the bitterness and hatred that has infected other people's communities may have been driven by his family and friends. I don't recall anyone in my childhood, in my extended family asking to live in a world of tribes, either.

The people I went to school with, less than twenty years after the end of the Civil Rights movement, were so convinced that racism, in all it's forms had been stamped out, that they could recite its obituary by heart, even while they sprinkled it with racial epithets. The American desire to see the nation and its people as unfailingly just (if perhaps misguided at times) prevents many of those same people from saying, "Maybe some of this is on me." People will look high and low for places to fix blame, as long as it isn't in a mirror.

Mark Lilla made the point, in his interview for The New Yorker, that:

But there’s no denying that the [Identity Politics] movement’s decision to use this [police] mistreatment [of African-Americans] to build a general indictment of American society and its law-enforcement institutions and to use Mau Mau tactics to put down dissent and demand a confession of sins and public penitence played into the hands of the Republican right.

And, according to The Atlantic, Mrs. Chua herself makes this same point:

[Mrs. Chua] blamed “coastal elites” (identifying herself as one) for not being able to understand what gave rise to the president’s “Make America Great Again” motto, and also for “weaponizing” words in the form of identity politics. Berating from the left, she said, drives bigoted ideas underground, and “that’s where the real extremity is.”

But does the Right's desire to demand a confession of responsibility for the resurgence of White radicalism or their berating of others "weaponize" words and drive radicalism underground into the hands of extremity? We understand that this has happened. We understand that White use of violence to enforce racial hierarchy goes back a long way, even before the Ku Klux Klan was a home-grown terrorist organization. If the Alt-Right can, with help from people outside their number, claim that their radicalism is not of their own making, can the rest of us? Or does that, as I suspect, stretch empathy too far?