CovOps
Location : Ether-Sphere Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator Humor : Über Serious
| Subject: A Different Way to Think About White Identity Politics Sat Mar 02, 2019 12:34 am | |
| Does white identity deserve a place in politics? The question may seem absurd, though for different reasons depending on where you stand. For many on the left, whiteness is already implicit in nearly every aspect of Western politics and culture; white people have woven their own particularistic identity into the very fabric of our shared political life, stigmatizing and suppressing any expressions of difference. According to some popular theories of race, moreover, whiteness itself is something of a delusion, a pseudo-ethnicity invented to legitimize the domination of others (the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates thus refers not to white people but to “people who believe themselves to be white”). To positively assert a white identity is, in this view, an act of racial aggression. Conservatives, of course, reject this narrative. They tend to see the dominant culture as, in principle, universal and condemn as divisive any attempt to code it as “white.” Although they may believe it is hypocritical for the left to promote minority identities while disapproving of white identity, their solution is typically to criticize “identity politics” altogether — everyone, white and nonwhite, should think of themselves as an individual, or else as a member of some nonethnic community like their church, neighborhood, or nation. White identity politics, whether in the form of Trump or the alt-right, is no better than — and is in fact the mirror image of — the left-wing identity politics they have been warning about for decades.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/a-different-way-to-think-about-white-identity-politics.html |
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