No country for identity politics
Will there ever be a post-racial America? Should there be?
Over at The Politico, Roger Simon has an interesting take on the rapid “demise” of a supposedly post-racial America:
And Obama’s comments regarding the Cambridge police department and the arrest of professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. released reactions that seem over the top even in the world of talk TV. Glenn Beck, a popular commentator for Fox News, said: “This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture, I don’t know what it is. I’m not saying that he doesn’t like white people. I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.”
So much for post-racial America.
But how did things turn around so fast? They didn’t. They may never have turned in the first place.
Largely overlooked in the understandably good feelings generated by the election of our first black president was the simple fact that white America did not vote for him.
Most white Americans voted for John McCain. In fact, Barack Obama lost the white vote in 2008 by a landslide. While Obama won the overall vote by 53 percent to 46 percent, he lost among white voters by 55 percent to 43 percent.
Whenever I give speeches and mention that no Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson has won the white vote, I always see some head shaking in the audience, as if that could not possibly be true.
The question of persisent differences has been a troubling one for most liberal governments. Philosophically, race, gender, age, and other differences should be about as relevant to life opportunities as eye color. But they’re not. Differences matter. We care about them and, perhaps as a result, they play a profound role in what people can expect to do and achieve.
Simon observes that, whatever our hopes, we haven’t moved beyond race and its divisions despite the election of our first black president.
Another question is whether we can or ought to move beyond recognizing the importance of social difference. This question has come up again and again, both in practical politics and in philosophy.
From the French Revolution, to Marx’s On the Jewish Question, to Plessy versus Ferguson, to Bakke and affirmative action, to Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, to Brian Barry’s Culture and Equality, ad nauseum.
As societies grow increasingly diverse, the stakes of this debate will raise only higher. For what it’s worth, America has seemed to shy away from difference-blindness. Instead, we’ve attempted to achieve equality by accommodating difference.
Obama’s election may have triggered a fleeting hope that we could take a new approach on race, but maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised to see that hope dashed.
–Sam
Related posts:
- The politics of identity
- What’s wrong with racial profiling?
- Should Harry Reid step down?
- A changing political philosophy?
- Be prepared
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