They are rejecting and erasing cultures, that they don't like based on long past injustices. Injustices that were forgiven generations before they were born.
That is the opposite of living in harmony..
Identity Politics is having an impact that is in recession, or an ebb if you will.
I see no indication of any serious decline in "Identity Politics".
The whole 'consensus' for Identity Politics on the left is breaking up.
How Identity Politics Is Destroying The Left And Being Used By The 'Alt-Right'
This tactic is also in use in how many self-described feminists are choosing to respond to questions of gender and rights in cultures outside their own. A disturbing case study of this can be found in the vitriolic response to a
2012 article by Adele Wilde-Blavatsky, who called the Islamic hijab "discriminatory and rooted in men's desire to control women's appearance and sexuality." Besides being kicked out of the editorial collective of the magazine she wrote the article for, a seething open letter by 77 (North American) "feminists," Wilde-Blavatsky was
called a "racist," "white imperialist" and accused of obfuscating her whiteness, in her response to the attacks. In other words, being white, she was made aware she had no right to engage in a discussion on social justice that concerns non-white women (notwithstanding that there are in fact white Muslims too).
If we accept and expect certain things for ourselves, but not for others -- justifying this on the basis of identity -- we're advocating a double standard, and actually falling prey to what philosopher Pascal Bruckner called the
racism of the anti-racists.
And while those advocating that a white person can never escape their whiteness, can only ever speak from a position of privilege, likely think of themselves as radically progressive, they're using the same tactic as the "alt-right": reducing people to the ethnically identifiable threads of their DNA.
And the truth is, we humans -- whether we come from from a historically repressed race or a historically privileged one -- are more complicated than that. ...
The identity politics espoused by a growing faction of the left is carving up what was once a "we" into fragmented fiefdoms. As Haider points out, racists are effectively using the currently prevailing discourse of antiracism, found in identity politics, to their own ends. What is it about this discourse that lends itself so well to both the far right and the far left? To me, it's the emphasis on difference rather than on equity, equality and on what unites us.
And I may be old fashioned, but my left -- the one I want some day to be "the" left again -- is the Left of George Orwell, of when people of one race or nation or ethnicity took up the causes of people of another's when their rights were threatened. ...
It's about whether you want the world to be perpetually hyper in tune to race -- the position identity politics advocates -- or whether you want the world to eventually be blind to race.
“Identity politics like McCarthyism has run its sad and destructive course.”
So sneered a reader in an email criticizing
my story last month about Georgia’s contentious 6th Congressional District race. I had noted that the state was poised to elect its first Republican woman to Congress.
“A large majority of the American people have rejected this divisive tactic at the ballot box,” the reader — he or she did not include a name — continued.
This person was talking about the November election of President Trump. The assertion has become a common refrain among those who believe discussions about gender, race and ethnicity distracted Democrats from “real issues” or — as my critic put it — issues that resonate “with people in their everyday lives.”...
What is the future of diversity politics after the 2016 election? Uncertain at best—and for a variety of reasons.
One, intermarriage and integration are still common. Overall, about 15 percent of all marriages each year are interracial, and the rates are highest for Asians and Latinos. Forty percent of Asian women marry men of another race—one quarter of African-American males do, as well—and over a quarter of all Latinos marry someone non-Latino.
Identity politics hinges on perceptible racial or ethnic solidarity, but citizens are increasingly a mixture of various races and do not always categorize themselves as “non-white.” Without DNA badges, it will be increasingly problematic to keep racial pedigrees straight. And sometimes the efforts to do so reach the point of caricature and inauthenticity, through exaggerated accent marks, verbal trills, voice modulations, and nomenclature hyphenation. One reason why diversity activists sound shrill is their fear that homogenization is unrelenting.
Second, the notion of even an identifiable and politically monolithic group of non-white minorities is also increasingly suspect. Cubans do not have enough in common with Mexicans to advance a united Latino front. African-Americans are suspicious of open borders that undercut entry-level job wages. Asians resent university quotas that often discount superb grades and test scores to ensure racial diversity. It is not clear that Hmong-Americans have much in common with Japanese-Americans, or that Punjabi immigrants see themselves politically akin to Chinese newcomers as fellow Asians.
Third, ethnic solidarity can cut both ways. In the 2016 elections, Trump won an overwhelming and nearly unprecedented number of working class whites in critical swing states. Many either had not voted in prior elections or had voted Democratic. The culture’s obsession with tribalism and special ethnic interests—often couched in terms of opposing “white privilege”—had alienated millions of less well-off white voters. Quietly, many thought that if ethnic activists were right that the white majority was shrinking into irrelevance, and if it was acceptable for everyone to seek solidarity through their tribal affiliations, then poor whites could also rally under the banner of their own identity politics. If such trends were to continue in a nation that is still 70 percent white, it would prove disastrous for the Democratic Party in a way never envisioned during the era of Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton discovered that Obama’s identity politics constituencies were not transferrable to herself in the same exceptional numbers, and the effort to ensure that they were often created new tribal opponents.
Fourth, it is not certain that immigration, both legal and illegal, will continue at its current near record rate, which has resulted in over 40 million immigrants now residing in America—constituting some 13 percent of the present population. Trump is likely not just to curtail illegal immigration, but also to return legal immigration to a more meritocratic, diverse, and individual basis. Were immigration to slow down and become more diverse, the formidable powers of integration and intermarriage would perhaps do to the La Raza community what it once did to the Italian-American minority after the cessation of mass immigration from Italy. There are currently no Italian-American quotas, no Italian university departments, and no predictable voting blocs.
Fifth, class is finally reemerging as a better barometer of privilege than is race—a point that Republican populists are starting to hammer home. The children of Barack Obama, for example, have far more privilege than do the sons of Appalachian coal miners—and many Asian groups already exceed American per capita income averages. When activist Michael Eric Dyson calls for blanket reparations for slavery, his argument does not resonate with an unemployed working-class youth from Kentucky, who was born more than 30 years after the emergence of affirmative action—and enjoys a fraction of Dyson’s own income, net worth, and cultural opportunities.
Columbia Professor Says Democrats Need To Move Beyond Identity Politics
LILLA: Well, Democrats have simply lost the country. They have lost the capacity to speak to the vast middle of America, an America that is, in large part, white, very religious and not highly educated.
INSKEEP: Let me stop you for a second because already some Democrat out there, maybe many of them, are shouting at the radio, hold on a minute; Hillary Clinton actually got way more votes than Donald Trump - popular votes. What do you mean Democrats have lost the country?
LILLA: Well, we have 31 Republican governors in this country. We have roughly the same number of Republican legislatures. We have 24 states where Republicans run both of them. But in terms of a liberal project that people feel they can sign on to, that feels that it speaks to everyone in the country, that speaks to what we share and the principles we hold, Republicans have developed a message for all of that, you know? Ever since Reagan, they've been able to capture the message and an understanding - or persuade people of a certain understanding of what the nation is about and what's good for it.
INSKEEP: What is identity liberalism?
LILLA: Identity liberalism, as I understand it, is expressive rather than persuasive. It's about recognition and self-definition. It's narcissistic. It's isolating. It looks within. And it also makes two contradictory claims on people. It says, on the one hand, you can never understand me because you are not exactly the kind of person I've defined myself to be. And on the other hand, you must recognize me and feel for me. Well, if you're so different that I'm not able to get into your head and I'm not able to experience or sympathize with what you experience, why should I care?
INSKEEP: Who were some of the groups that liberals have appealed to in ways you find to be counterproductive?
LILLA: To take one example, I mean, the whole issue of bathrooms and gender - in this particular election, when the stakes were so high, the fact that Democrats and liberals, more generally, lost a lot of political capital on this issue that frightened people. People were misinformed about certain things, but it was really a question of where young people would be going to the bathroom and where they would be in lockers. Is that really the issue we want to be pushing leading up to a momentous election like this one? It's that shortsightedness that comes from identity politics.
Democratic candidate decries party's 'identity politics and victimology'
A Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate scolded his own party for its embrace of “identity politics and victimology,” in a striking appeal to do away with “subgroups” and come together.
Matt Flynn is one of 10 candidates in a crowded Democratic primary field, seeking the nomination to compete against Republican Gov. Scott Walker in November.
Flynn, who previously was state Democratic Party chairman, complained about the culture in an interview last week with
WHBY’s “Fresh Take with Josh Dukelow.”
“Our party right now, and I’m probably the only one who says this, is pickled in identity politics and victimology,” Flynn said. “When I was at the convention recently, in Oshkosh, there were multiple caucuses of, there were all these subgroups, and there is no assimilation of the party anymore.”
According to the
Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s website, the party has the American Indian Caucus, the Black Caucus, the Labor Caucus, the Latino Caucus, the LGBT Caucus, the Progressive Caucus, the Rural Caucus, the Veterans Caucus and the Women’s Caucus.
“When I was the chairman, there were no caucuses,” Flynn said.
I used to believe in identity politics because it told me: You and your experience matter. Your identity gives you authority. Your beliefs can’t be invalidated because your identity can’t be invalidated. This logical leap was empowering to take.
In the case of race, non-white people decided that their non-whiteness enabled them to speak with authority on topics of race. White people could only participate when they admitted that they were less worthy of speaking.
This kind of identity politics failed me when I went home. At the dinner table, I was ready to proselytize why we Asians, as people of color, needed to fight institutionalized racism and support minority movements like Black Lives Matter. I was armed with my experiences and the rhetoric of how America was built on a history of racism and white superiority.
But it was like I ran into a brick wall.
The problem wasn’t that my parents didn’t know these things. They simply didn’t care much about them. They emphasized their own lived experiences as Asians instead—immigrating to America in the 1980s and creating new lives in a time of arguably more open racism than that of today. They didn’t have any reason to oppose whiteness and support black-led movements. White people weren’t any more racist to them than black people. The trajectories that other immigrants led proved that America was a land of opportunity, even for minorities.
Under the rules of identity politics, arguing with my parents about race became essentially impossible. I could never make progress if I kept staking my correctness on being Asian and my experiences living with that identity. My parents, who had the same marginalized identity, could do the same thing. We’d be at a standstill. Admitting that our beliefs were wrong would mean essentially yielding our identity, and nobody was willing to give that up.
I realized that I had lowered the standard of conversation by opening with appeals to our race. I was not giving reasons why we should act; I was merely arguing that external factors obligated us to act. But arguments following the logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” make for halfhearted allyship at best.
The best solution was to deemphasize identity altogether. Appealing to my parents on the basis of race was unnecessary to the discussions I wanted to have. I wanted to make them care about what I saw as unjust killings of innocent people and unjust verdicts freeing culpable cops. But police brutality, at its core, is not about race. Why is it wrong for a police officer to shoot a man reaching for his wallet in his own car and then go free, for example? As Columbia professor Mark Lilla
argues in his book "The Once and Future Liberal," those acts are wrong because the victim is another citizen, another human. Humans do not deserve to be deprived of the benefit of the doubt and killed for ordinary acts. Similarly, humans deserve to be held accountable for their misdoings and wronging of others.
This kind of rhetoric would be a much more effective strategy for groups like Black Lives Matter, which need widespread support to effect change. It’s tragic that, though the statement “black lives matter” is so obviously valid, after several years, most Americans still
don’t support the movement.
But that’s because its most vocal members have made everything about race—citing their race as the reason why everyone must listen to them, instead of trying to convince people why they must be listened to. They make as many sweeping generalizations about race—who can speak, who can ask questions, who can understand, who must try to understand but will never understand anyway—as they accuse others of making. So, they shouldn’t be surprised when, instead of effecting change, they are now mired in cultural wars—the product of dissenters turning identity politics against them.
Identity politics makes people feel better about themselves at the expense of productive discourse. A person’s lived experience should never be invalidated. But
no identity makes the beliefs that someone derives from their lived experience automatically more correct. This is not just a logical fallacy that should be avoided on principle. In practice, it is actually a hindrance to persuading others. In a time of such polarization, identity politics makes us close ranks with the like-minded when we need to reach out.
Slowly but surely reasonable people in the Democratic Party are realizing that they cannot defeat racism by being racist themselves.
