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One of the strangest and dysfunctional ideas in our society has been “identity politics.” This creation sprang from Cultural Communism’s exploitation of the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society’s federal legislation and agencies’ redistribution of taxpayer money. The purpose was to keep the newly franchised black citizens mired as victims still oppressed by racist whites, and to make blacks political clients of the Democrat left, a project launched in the U.S. by Stalin decades earlier.
The effort was a success if measured by the subsequent predictability of black voters’ loyalty to Democrats. They have remained loyal despite a lack of reciprocation by the Dems. For example, look at black politicians who have ignored the persistent scandal of black-on-black violent crime. The current Democrat assault on the police and efforts to reduce fighting crime is disproportionately dangerous for “black lives,” who don’t “matter” to Dems as much as we’ve been told.
After the Civil Rights Act ended Jim Crow law, savvier American leftists knew that the improvement in black lives starting in the 1920s and increasing in the postwar period, and the growing distaste for racism, would create difficulty for the Democrat left’s plan to capture black votes.
So, they continued to treat blacks as victims, thus creating a reliable constituency. In fact, the black vote has gone Democratic for decades until Trump’s second presidential election achieved the highest number of black voters by any modern Republican candidate.
In addition, either unknown or indifferent to the moral hazards when the Dems started federal redistribution of Great Society funds in the Sixties, the plan actually worsened black lives. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Jason Riley catalogued the earlier decades of improvement, as well as the decline after the Civil Rights Act, the Great Society programs, and their malign moral hazard of the federal dole that worsened black lives:
Between 1890 and 1940, for example, black marriage rates in the U.S. were higher than white marriage rates. In the 1940s and ’50s, black labor-participation rates exceeded those of whites; black incomes grew much faster than white incomes; and the black poverty rate fell by 40 percentage points. Between 1940 and 1970—that is, during Jim Crow and prior to the era of affirmative action—the number of blacks in middle-class professions quadrupled. In other words, racial gaps were narrowing. Steady progress was being made. Blacks today hear plenty about what they can’t achieve due to the legacy of slavery and not enough about what they did in fact achieve notwithstanding hundreds of years in bondage followed by decades of legal segregation.
In the post-’60s era, these positive trends would slow, stall, or in some cases even reverse course. The homicide rate for black men fell by 18% in the 1940s and by another 22% in the 1950s. But in the 1960s all of those gains would vanish as the homicide rate for black males rose by nearly 90%. Are today’s black violent-crime rates a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow or of something else? Unfortunately, that’s a question few people on the left will even entertain.
That failure of black identity politics just to maintain those earlier improvements and grow them, didn’t slow down other anointed “protected” identity politics “victims” like women, Hispanics, American Indians, and later, homosexuals and transgenders. More and more groups were allowed to use their ancestors’ historical oppression, no matter how ancient or even made up, like Senator Elizabeth Warren’s false Cherokee roots, as a sort of perpetual trust fund upon which they can call on for cultural and economic advantages and social leverage, no matter how personally unworthy their claim may be.
Affirmative action programs, rebranded as DEI, and other set-asides for selected political “protected” classes, have been the most pernicious and unjust privileges for people based on their ancestors’ suffering, no matter how long ago or dubious. Such violations of merit and equal treatment are skirting the Constitution’s bedrock principle of citizen equality, and pitting one faction against another and imposing a dangerous oikophobia.
More despicable, the identity politics that has balkanized and divided Americans is an insult to the achievement of the Civil Rights movement and its creator, Martin Luther King. King predicated his movement on restoring the rights and freedoms given by God, just as the Constitution affirmed were “unalienable” possessions by nature of every individual citizen.
This codifying of true human identity had been besmirched by slavery, and then by the Jim Crow “laws” that identified Americans by superficial physical features, and was an insult not just to the Constitution, but also the God that created all people as free and equal––a pollution of those epochal ideals by specious “identities” subordinated to political ideologies and ambitions.
Finally, such identity politics ignores the most important identities for success in American––higher education and family affluence. Yet those advantages belonging to affluent blacks have not stopped some from leveraging their “victim” status and alleged targets of “white supremacy” and “white privilege.” They indulge the ghetto-black patois and venerable black honorific like “brother” and “sister,” even though they spend very little time among those racial siblings, let alone working to improve their manifold dysfunctions.
Such unseemly appropriations are especially guilty of stolen racial valor. Politicos like Kamala Harris, the buffoonish House Representative Jasmine Crockett, and rich, objectively white, NYC fellow-traveler candidate for mayor, Zohran Mandani––who claimed African-American roots when applying for university––are just current examples of this racial dog-and-pony show.
Meanwhile, black people are trapped by the long dysfunctions caused by welfare largesse and politicized schools, which continue their malfeasance, while progressive activists and race-hacks yelp about Donald Trump’s mean tweets and “threats to our democracy,” which the badly educated mean our Republic.
Meanwhile, Trump champions the “forgotten men and women” like the working class of all races. He has called out and exposed the self-appointed, arrogant, cognitive elite leftist Dems of all races who have tended to their true identity of education and wealth. If Trump’s success continues, we stand a chance of eliminating divisive “identity politics” and going back to being Americans defined by political equality and political freedom granted to us by our Constitution.
