Race is an absurd illusion with material consequences, a paradox that makes it slippery to discuss. (In the words of author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “race only matters because of racism.”) Race is an invented political idea with no biological basis, but because of our collective buy-in to this idea, it has very real power and effects — ones that have profoundly shaped the contours of our society.
Whiteness, similarly, is not an essential state, but a social status and a state of mind fostered by that status. That state of mind may include feeling like your experiences are the norm, and thus universal, because that’s the message society reflects back at you. It may include never having to think about race, because society doesn’t put “race” onto you until someone (most likely a leftist) brings it up.
This state of mind afflicts the line of reasoning in Jonathan Chait’s much-criticized article arguing that political correctness is “perverting liberalism.”
The article suffers from a central confusion that seems to come up every time someone writes about the perils of “call-out culture.” Let’s take a moment to untangle that confusion: that between what is essential and what is experienced.
Of course, a white man is allowed to criticize identity politics. It’s not that some essential quality of being a white man renders Chait incapable of having smart thoughts on the subject. But whether he’ll completely miss the mark because he hasn’t had to experience the very pains that brought about the need for identity politics in the first place — that’s another matter.
A lack of experience can be overcome by a leap of empathy. Chait, however, seems to have made no such leap, instead casually dismissing ideas that were conceived to describe experiences he has never had.
For instance, microaggressions erode the quality of life for many, but Chait writes the term off as some kind of frivolous fad. It’s easy for Chait to dismiss concepts like “microaggressions,” “non-binary” and “mansplaining” as p.c. jargon. He doesn’t have anything to lose without them.
And Chait has made no effort to show the empathy required to understand what other people have to lose in this debate. He says that “p.c. culture” is “exhausting.” Yet there’s no sign he’s tried to understand how exhausting it can be simply to exist in the world as a member of a non-dominant group, sitting quietly and tolerantly through “reasonable debates” in which your counterpart diminishes your experiences and humanity, or the experiences and humanity of others.
Take the way Chait handles a conversation leaked from a private Facebook group for women writers: He quotes a post in which one of the women appeals to the group to be more mindful of the diversity of its members, a message that was clearly written out of long-standing frustration. Chait doesn’t examine what might have caused this frustration, even though he’s launching readers into the middle of the story — a story that wasn’t actually meant to be consumed by the general public, and one that has much more to it than he presents (Disclosure: I’m a member of this Facebook group, and the sub-group for women of color).
–
Identities are survival strategies, ways of taking ownership and control over the way society has branded us. We rally around identity to mitigate that injury, to take comfort in all the positive things that have come out of a shared experience of otherness.
The tragedy of identity politics is that, in rallying around our identities, we naturalize them as much as we build up the will to abolish the conditions that first brought about the need to rally at all.
The focus on identity can foster a backsliding into essentialism — one of the things identity politics is meant to combat. The concept gives way too easily to an infuriating way of shooting down any argument: simply find someone of the same identity who disagrees (a crude example is the old justification for doing something racist: “I have a non-white friend who says this is OK”). The marginalized person’s very existence, rather than her ideas, is marshalled to refute the point.
Even among the well-intentioned, constant “privilege-checking” turns the gaze inward and feeds white guilt, itself a dehumanizing force. The mode of the privilege discourse is confessional; it lends itself to a kind of anxious narcissism. Though I respect the privilege discourse as a corrective to the arrogance that can come with a dominant identity, it obscures the fact that everyone deserves to live in the absence of structural oppressions.
McIntosh recently told The New Yorker that when trying list instances of her privilege, she would ask herself: “On a daily basis, what do I have that I didn’t earn?” But no one should have to earn what the privileged already have. In the world I want to live in, everyone would be entitled to what we call “privilege.”
“Privilege” doesn’t have that aspirational quality, though it describes the unfair distribution of freedoms and comforts in our present society. As a result, the word gets misused as a tool of unproductive self-flagellation, in which privilege is conceived of as something one must disavow and cast off.
Chait concludes that what he calls political correctness is “a system of left-wing ideological repression.” I disagree: Identity politics embodies a deep commitment to social equality, although its tools are flawed, and contain paradoxes.
All I can do is sit with these paradoxes, in tension with them. I can’t find a way out of them, because I know that without identity politics, a lot of us would have a lot more to lose.
