"Is it racist" is a meaningless question.

Great Debates
21

BBC:

I completely understand identity politics, and intersectionalism. As philosophies/ideologies/political movements i’ve Considered them and have tried to think them all the way down to the bottom, to decide whether they make sense, and I should get on board. I did this with gay marriage beck when DOMA was being debated. I was on board, really before it was a thing. Why? Because the individual is sovereign and the individual has the right to live their life the way they choose, so as long as they are not actively interfering with another’s right to do so. The responsibility that goes along with this right, is that we need to actively protect evrybody else’s right as if they were our own, because they are.

It’s that simple. There really is no other argument necessary. People who who want to outlaw gay marriage are enemies of freedom. That’s all I need to know. I think hard about these things, and I’ve thought hard about identity politics. I will confine my response to the examples you’ve made and show you why I sincerely believe, that it is not just wrong, it is also both counterproductive, illogical, and racist.

You are not talking about anything that comprises identity here. If 60% of cars are red, you would expect to see 60% of cars as red in the movie. It does not make the world hateful to blue cars. If you think red makes a car smart or fast or interesting, you don’t know much about cars. Or people.

Is your identity that you are white, male, guy? I suspect there is more to you. People you love and who love you, deep interests, skills, accomplishments, foundational experiences good and bad. These are the things that give you identity. These are things that are with caring about when you oe others consider your quality.

Ok

No. If i were a gay man these things should have no bearing on my politics and how I should vote. Nor should they matter if I were a straight man. Nor should it matter if I am black, white, female or trans. As a human being I should be voting against segregation because segregration is morally wrong. If I am a black man and I am voting against segregation because of how it makes me feel, or because of what I want, I am missing the point.

It might be more urgent to me, but it would not be more important. If somebody else’s foundational rights are being violated, this is just as important to me as if my own rights were being violated. Gay rights are not a gay thing. They are a human thing.

There are many problems dividing people up to vote for their group interests rather than for the interests of the individual, or for the foundational interests of society.

  1. It can’t work. Gays are a minority. They can’t win by opposing the majority. They need the majority. They have won their gains, not from the standpoint of being a minority, but by joining the majority. That majority is those who believe human rights are a thing worth protecting.

  2. To the ectent that it can work, it has a bad outcome. We have had a society whereverbody voted according to their superficial group interests. The Nazis you’ll recall won in a landslide. The white, Christian, straight people decided that these were the things that were important about their identity, and they voted accordingly. For a period of time it went very well for that group (not so much for the Jews, gays, and people of color). In other societies throughout history and continuing into today we have had multiple examples of people acting politically based on these superficial attributes. These end up predictably with genocides and such. They all feel justified when they are doing so, they all have their reasons, but we should know better by now, because it always ends the same.

I think America is strong and good because our philosophy, our ideology is that of individual freedom, mutual protection and mutual respect of each other’s rights.

I could be the most hardcore, bible thumping religious homophobe of all time, but if I beleive in the foundational ideology of our country, than I have to support gay marriage under the law. I should do so, because I expect gay people to protect my right to practice my religion. Occasionally, in society we see this played out in small ways. Like when Chick Fil A delivered meals on Sunday for free after the gay nightclub was shot up.

Our foundational principle isn’t that we go our own way, it is that we protect each other’s rights. Are we perfect? Not even close, but we’ve been getting better steadily for 200 years and we’ve come farther than anybody else has. It’s a good ethic. Why throw that away for tribalism? We already know how that turns out.

This is bullshit, and it’s total bullshit. I know it is having a moment now, but a lot of odious shit has had it’s moment, and the fact that it is temporarily acceptable doesn’t make it right.

Go tell some poor kid in Appalachia who’s a meth orphan, with rotting teeth, no opportunity, and nothing ahead of him but suffering to “check his privilege” because he’s white, and playing life on the easiest difficulty setting.

I’m familiar with Scalzi’s argument. I doubt that he would tell a victim of child abuse that he was playing life on the easiest setting because he was white, or that he would go to a children’s burn center and tell all the white boys how easy they have it.

Do you?

Do you understand why it is mathematically stupid to apply the difference between groups to individuals, why it is intrinsically offensive and racist, don’t you?

It’s wrong for the same reason why racial profiling is wrong. It’s just racism pure and simple.

There is a lot more to privilege and ease than these superficial qualities. The variance within these groups is much greater than the variance between the groups. Any time this occurs it is mathematically stupid to think that you know anything about a member of a group based on which group he belongs to.

We are individuals. We all have challenges, advantages and disadvantages. Some of us even make use of our disadvantages and turn them into strengths in some ways.

Life’s easiest difficulty setting is being healthy, smart, attractive, rich, having two active parents advocating for you… than we can talk about white, male, heterosexual.

The “privileges” you are talking about are superficial and slight compared to the ones that actually count.

22

This is very easy for you to say. But think about this fact – 50% of black Americans report that they personally have been mistreated by police (I’ve cited this poll many times – I can find it again if you like). 3% of white Americans report this. This isn’t about belief – this is personal experience.

That’s a pretty significant difference in how these Americans are treated. And that can have ramifications that not only could endanger one’s own life and limb, but the chances of success for one’s children and the rest of one’s family, even generations down the line, as well. And it has affected half of all black Americans.

So that’s just one fact. But it’s a particularly notable one, IMO. If society is treating people that shitty, based on race, then maybe there really is a significant societal/institutional problem that needs to be fixed if we really want to be a country of equal opportunity.

23

So? 100% of blind people have a bigger problem than that.

My point is that everybody has challenges and everybody has areas in which they are fortunate. Some have a lot of one and few of another. There are nearly an infinite amount of factors that go into this. Picking just a few of the most superficial ones and making broad generalizations about individuals based on them is both intellectually lazy, and extremely ill-advised from a historical perspective. Every single time that this game has been played on a large scale it has ended badly. Everybody that played this game thought they were justified or had a good reason to ply it. They were always wrong.

It really is very simple. If you are making judgements about people based on superficial characteristics like race, gender, sexuality etc, you are being a bigot.

24

I think it “actually counts” that, for instance, all the gay and lesbian people I know have experienced significant and persistent fears of being beaten up simply for being homosexual—and several of them have actually had those fears realized—while I have never, not once in my life, felt even a twinge of concern about the possibility of being beaten up simply for being heterosexual.

I don’t consider that difference “superficial” or “slight”. Not even compared to, say, the fact that some of the same people are richer or more attractive than I am.

25

Sure, I don’t think anybody’s arguing with that.

There’s nothing either “lazy” or “ill-advised” about the generalization that people who benefit from favored-group privilege are often oblivious to the existence of that privilege and/or resentful of the suggestion that they benefit from it. That’s precisely how favored-group privilege works: by making the built-in advantages of the favored group seem normal, natural and neutral.

26

Have you had your own issues or difficulties? If you haven’t that’s great.

27

Sure; we just agreed that everybody does.

But that doesn’t mean that the particular favored-group privilege of never having to fear getting beaten up solely because of my sexual orientation is “superficial” or “slight”.

Just because everybody’s got a unique mix of different sorts and levels of privilege doesn’t mean that the major kinds of favored-group privilege become trivial or insignificant. Not having to worry about getting beaten up for my heterosexuality is a HUGE benefit of my favored-group status in that regard, IMHO.

28

I’m not making judgments about people. I’m making judgments about society. There are some massive problems that need to be fixed. In terms of politics, one party is actively interested in fighting against any efforts to fix problems related to racism and other forms of bigotry. And the other party is pretty hit and miss, but generally advocates in a just direction.

29

Let’s put a pin in this, shall we?

:smack:

Obviously there’s more to me than my gender, my race, or my sexuality. It’s just that when it comes to the law, these things are predominately relevant. The law of the land does not give two fucking shits about my predilection towards CCGs or my interest in recreational hypnosis. It did, up until only very recently, care whether I was takin’ it up the butt!

This is why I accuse you of not understanding identity politics. When you bring up things like skills or interests, you’ve completely lost the point.

:confused:

You say this as though it should be patently obvious to everyone that segregation is morally wrong. And yeah, it should be. At the time, though? It wasn’t. Meanwhile, are you aware that your party is currently flirting with legally defining trans people out of existence? Is that “obviously wrong” in the same way? Will you consider that a breaking point for your support of the republican party? Because Caitlyn Jenner sure did. Maybe it’s got something to do with her identity as a trans woman.

It is quite possibly the most trivial moral stand possible to say that civil rights battles that have already been won were a good thing. All it means is that you are aligned with the current status quo. (Although, to be fair, kudos to you for being chill about gay marriage back in 2004.)

What’s more, this places you as far more enlightened than basically anyone in your party while simultaneously implicitly holding you up as an avatar of your party. If everyone in the republican party was Scylla, we probably wouldn’t have this problem, at least to this extent. But you’re not the average republican. Mike Pence is. That skews the conversation somewhat. Because the reality is, for LGBT people, they have a choice between the democrats and the republicans. The democratic coalition has, by and large, fought for gay rights in the last decade. The republican coalition has a gay wing, but it’s a goddamn joke, because the party remains virulently anti-gay. A gay person voting for a republican is actively voting against their own rights.

In that context, those seem synonymous. Just as a gay person voting for a republican is actively voting against their own rights, a straight person voting for a republican is actively voting against gay people’s rights. It’s just that, for the straight person, this may seem considerably less urgent. After all, it may not be great for those other people, but does it really matter to me if they can get married? Is it as important as, say, making sure I can carry a gun wherever I am? A gay person will almost certainly answer that question very differently from a straight person.

(That’s not something I pulled out of my ass, by the way, that’s actually Bone’s stated, admitted position - he’s a single issue gun voter and will remain such until such time as he can open carry in his home state of California.)

Of course, that’s not how gay identity politics works. You’ll never build a majority coalition out of gay people, but if gay people don’t band together, they won’t even register. I’m really not that interested in giving you a history of the gay rights movement, and I’m not qualified to do so, but that coalition matters because it tells people that you exist, and that you’re human. That the dehumanizing propaganda against you isn’t true. That you’re not some tiny, rare aberration, but rather your friend and neighbor.

The distinction you’ve noticed here is between minority identity politics and majority identity politics. And yeah, this is a problem. Black people, gay people… These people have real problems on the basis of their identity, due to bigotry. White people may have problems, but I guarantee those problems are not because they’re white. That’s just not how racism works in America.

Now, is there a problem with minority identity politics leading to majority identity politics. No question. But that feels like a separate discussion.

Again, I refer to this article: Thank God For Identity Politics. Specifically, this:

You know why? Because you know what we had before Identity Politics? I’ll tell you. We had White Dudes.

We had white dudes as the pinnacles of power. We had white dudes on all our TV screens, we had white dudes reporting all our news, we had white dudes writing all our books. Sometimes they were accompanied by attractive white ladies (as all the white dudes were straight). But mostly, we had white dudes.

And if you were not a white dude? You didn’t exist. Laws were not written for you, infrastructure was not built for you, history was not written about you. You did not exist in film, television, or novels. You were not a part of the American dream.

And do you know what has been changing all of that? Do you know what has been saving this country from the monotony and tyranny of white, cis, heterosexual dudes? Identity Politics.

I think you have a very rosy idea of history if you think that what you described was ever actually what America was about. America was founded on the back of black slaves on land stolen from slaughtered natives. To the degree it granted minority groups any standing in society, it did so unwillingly, and only when forced to, with many cases of backsliding (life got worse for Black Americans for much of the early 1900s, not better). These platitudes you offer are a cute fantasy. They have nothing to do with the reality of America, where marginalized groups have had to fight tooth and nail for every right they have, and in some cases have to keep fighting just to retain those rights - for example in North Dakota, where thousands of Native Americans have effectively been stripped of their right to vote.

And you’re allowed to have that rosy idea of history because you’re not part of those groups. You were allowed to grow up with this myth of America as a great, accepting country where everyone gets a fair shake because, in almost every category (religion, sexuality, gender identity, and I’d bet ten bucks you’re white given the way you post), you belong to the one demographic this myth actually almost applies to!

Y’know what would instantly make that kid’s life harder? If he was a black appalachian meth orphan with rotting teeth, no opportunity, and nothing ahead of him but suffering. Or if he was gay. Or if he was trans. Any of those things would take an already hard life and make it virtually unlivable. If you don’t understand this, you haven’t understood Scalzi’s argument. If you don’t believe this, then you don’t understand reality.

30

Which is why I just go with, “this person said/did X, Y, and Z” where the saying or doing of X, Y, and Z speak for themselves.

Take Brian Kemp, the GOP candidate for GA Gov. I can’t read his mind, but he’s got a long history of using the powers of his office (GA Sec of State) to take black people to court who had been registering black voters and otherwise harassing them and throwing up barriers to black people registering and voting. Call it what you will.

31

It would be wonderful to live in a world where everyone was as enlightened as you are, that when anyone’s freedom was threatened, we all joined forces to stand in the way of those who would threaten it.

That isn’t our world. If blacks don’t stand up for equal rights for blacks, other people aren’t likely to join in. In fact, too damn few others do even when blacks stand up (or kneel) for themselves. Ditto gays or trans or any other group whose freedoms are often circumscribed.

The people in the group in question are also going to see and understand the scope of the harassment and oppression aimed at them. Until a few years ago, I had no idea just how disparate the policing of blacks and whites remained in this country; it took blacks to raise the issue and tell white guys like me about it. (And look at the resistance they still face.)

It took women speaking out to challenge a world that even still doesn’t take sexual assault and harassment very seriously. Many of us men certainly would have agreed that these things should be taken seriously, but those of us who were essentially bystanders had no clue of the scope of the problem, and were certainly not moving the ball forward on this issue back in, say, 2015. And they’re getting a shitload of flak even now from people who say #MeToo has gone too far.

And so forth.

If people in a particular group whose rights are curtailed aren’t going to fight against oppression that is specifically directed at them, nobody else is going to do much about it. That is reality.

32

That’s not a benefit or a privilege. It’s a right. It’s a small but important distinction.

Another is that you do have that fear. It’s not for your sexuality you are beaten up it’s for your perceived sexuality.

33

Yes, and I think that’s the whole point of the anecdote, is that black people can feel similar first reactions too. It shows that people of all races can be racist in some ways against people of all races, even their own.

34

RTF, BBC:

It looks to me like both of you are confusing identity politics with civil rights.

Here’s a good article that should help you with difference:

35

Hey, speaking of bad takes, it’s two white people coming to explain why Martin Luther King would totally take exception with modern identity politics. I’m sure this is totally not an egregious misrepresentation of the civil rights movement. Bonus points if it blames it all on “postmodernism”.

This new way of thinking was rooted in social constructivism, the idea that knowledge is not found but made by humans in the form of discourse – ways of talking about things. Knowledge is constructed, the theory goes, in the service of power and therefore perpetuates inequality. Under this approach, all dominant metanarratives – big, overarching explanations of how we are to understand the world – must be dismantled, including science and reason.

HA! Called it! Best case scenario, the author is arguing against something that someone may have believed at some point. This is not a mainstream position on any part of the political spectrum. Realistically, I don’t even think this is an accurate portrayal of postmodernism. Like, seriously - what the fuck is this crap?

They identified that these power dynamics arose largely on the level of discourse. Consequently, for true equality to exist, the knowledge of women and racial and sexual minorities, which are understood to be different and products of lived experience, should be foregrounded. Identity politics were born, and they claimed to be the true inheritors of the liberal civil rights project even as they abandoned both the epistemology and ethics that define liberalism both in theory and practice.

Yeah… no, not even close.

And of course, it remains a rather silly red herring. What I’m talking about with regards to identity politics has fuck-all to do with postmodernism. I’m simply referring to the basic fact that marginalized groups do better, politically, when they band together on the basis of said marginalization, along with the fact that when you are marginalized along one of those axes, it will be a far more substantial issue for you. That’s it. That’s the whole argument. And it is trivially true - the gay rights movement did not start with straight people coalescing out of nowhere and saying, “Hey, y’know, we’re kinda being dicks to gay people, maybe we should stop,” it started in Stonewall when LGBT people stood up for themselves. That first option? That’s never how these things go! Marginalized groups are marginalized because the majority either sees this marginalization as justified or does not see it as marginalization. Whichever is true, you have to fix that perception - be it by teaching people that racism wasn’t solved in 1964 or by teaching them that gay people aren’t distant oddities that will rape their children but rather the nice guy next door who just wants to live his life in peace.

You don’t have to get into bizarre strawmen of what “identity politics” means. You don’t have to start talking about postmodernism. All you have to do is acknowledge that if you are gay and you vote for a republican, you are voting for a party that wants to strip you of your rights. That’s it! It’s that simple!

(Also, wow, cute magazine. Its authors insist it’s staffed by liberals, but curiously enough every single take is against liberalism, against leftism, and against the democrats. That’s not weird at all! Call it the “Sargonite” school of classical liberalism, i.e. reactionary right-wingers who really want the social cache that comes with being able to say that they’re liberals. I want the time I spent reading that back. :mad: )

36

You said that I really don’t understand identity politics. The cite that I gave you is not a controversial interpretation. That is actually where it comes from and what it is. There are referencing the people and publications that founded the terms and ideology.

What you are promoting is not identity politics, it’s good old fashioned social activism.

Do some more reading on the subject. It’s scary stuff a person of goodwill would not associate themselves with,

37

No, I’m connecting them. Couldn’t have been more obvious that I was making the argument that denial of rights to a particular group, or harassment targeting that group, necessitates identity politics on the part of that group.

Don’t know how you missed that. I was pretty blatant about it.

Feel free to cite a source for facts, but you can’t outsource your arguments. You have to make them yourself.

38

Ok. Feel free to talk to somebody else.

39

Been doing that. Also, I’ve been talking with you. But if you don’t have anything to say, I agree that there’s no point in bothering.

40

As far as I can tell, “identity politics” either doesn’t have a hard definition, or refers to something that only the extreme fringe does. Social justice activism doesn’t seem to fit.