Political Tribes by Amy Chua

Author:Amy Chua
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

THE NEW TRIBAL LEFT

A decade and a half later, we are very far from Obama’s America. Indeed, for today’s Left, group blindness is the ultimate sin, because it masks the reality of group hierarchies and oppression in America. As writer Catherine Crooke puts it:

America has always channeled its politics and its power through hierarchies of identity. . . . European America acquired its land through the genocide of American Indians. It grew rich thanks to the importation and forced labor of enslaved blacks, who on the one hand became undeniably part of the American family through widespread sexual coercion, and on the other hand were legally and socially excluded from the American political community for generations. . . . In light of these realities, to insist upon a singular America is to deny the impact of violent marginalizations past and present. Progressives reject the whitewashing of the lived experiences of non-white or non-male Americans . . .

It’s indisputable that whites, and specifically white male Protestants, dominated America for most of its history, often violently, and that this legacy persists. Thus, for the Left, identity politics is a means to “confront rather than obscure the uglier aspects of American history and society.”

But in recent years, whether because of growing strength or growing frustration with the lack of progress, the Left has upped the ante. A shift in tone, rhetoric, and logic has moved identity politics away from inclusion—which had always been the Left’s watchword—toward exclusion and division. For much of the Left today, anyone who speaks in favor of group blindness is on the other side, indifferent to or even guilty of oppression. For some, especially on college campuses, anyone who doesn’t swallow the antioppression orthodoxy hook, line, and sinker—anyone who doesn’t acknowledge “white supremacy” in America—is a racist. When liberal icon Bernie Sanders told supporters, “It’s not good enough for somebody to say, ‘Hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me,’” Quentin James, the National Black Americans Director for the Ready for Hillary PAC, retorted that Sanders’s “comments regarding identity politics suggest he may be a white supremacist, too.”

Once identity politics gains momentum, it inevitably subdivides, giving rise to ever-proliferating group identities demanding recognition. One of the most important concepts in left-academic circles today is “intersectionality,” which understands oppression as operating on multiple axes simultaneously. Thus Columbia law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term over twenty-five years ago, has explored how the claims of black women were often excluded from both feminist and antiracist movements because the experiences of black women did not reflect the typical “women’s experience” or “black experience.” Similarly, political activist Linda Sarsour has pointed out that while equal pay for women is an important issue, “look at the ratio of what white women get paid versus black women and Latina women.”

Pathbreaking in the 1990s, intersectionality has in recent years been misinterpreted and used in ways not originally intended, becoming, as Crenshaw put it in 2017, “basically identity politics on steroids,” dividing people into ever more specific subgroups created by overlapping racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual orientation categories.

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