Social Policy in Ontario

The sterile, vapid, chauvinistic alley of identity politics

Posted on June 11, 2016 in Inclusion Debates

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NationalPost.com – Full Comment
June 10, 2016.   Rex Murphy

Identity politics is an instrument of division and a stew of contradictions. Curiously or otherwise, this thought emerges out of the one of Donald Trump’s many flare-ups, his current denunciations of the judge hearing the case of the university that bears Trump’s name.

I’ll not focus on that as such, but the controversy has called into play remarks made by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor during her confirmation hearings, on her “special” qualifications as a judge. She challenged the notion oft-cited by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor, women both, that “a wise old man and a wise old woman would reach the same conclusion when deciding cases.” In their eminent view, sexual differences do not obscure reason or disoblige justice.

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” Sotomayor said. Call it the Sotomayor principle: you’re better because you’re different. Elsewhere in that same address, she nailed the point even more strongly: “Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences … our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.”

This Sotomayor principle holds that ethnic and sexual considerations plainly offer an advantage, a superiority. The wise Latina woman, because she is a woman and Latina, would by the mysteries of identity, be a better judge, reach a “better conclusion,” than a “white male.” Something attaches inescapably to her biology and race, her personal sex and ethnicity, that lifts Sotomayor above, proves her as more competent or wise, than (the natural counterpoint and foil of all identity politics arguments) “a white male.”

If sex and race, in one instance, improve the judging mind that possesses the “right” combination, it is surely the case that in other circumstances, they will restrict and degrade it. To argue otherwise would be sexist and racist. Surely, the engine of “difference” doesn’t drive in one direction only, doesn’t belong to just one sex, or select ethnicities? Are we not then free, as Sotomayor was, to imagine a circumstance in which a “wise Caucasian male with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life. ” And if we are, her observations are null, since there is nothing “special” as such to any one race or sex.

The Sotomayor principle, an identity politics principle, is just a rephrasing of the blind theory that biology is fate, and geography, birthplace, is its handmaiden. It is a regressive principle, one that places unpassable frontiers on human understanding and empathy.

This is the kind of sterile, vapid, chauvinistic alley identity politics draws you into. If we start claiming special and exclusive intellectual and moral capacities because of one’s race or sex, offering those capacities as intrinsic to race and sex, then have we not merely put a happy face on the repulsive and core ideas of racism and sexism?

Allied with this understanding is an added one — that sex and background “bestow” or “endow” these special advantages, and that they exist and are available only to those within the sacred circles of sex and race. For example, the numerous assertions from feminists that woman (and only woman) can understand women’s circumstances, that certain experiences are intellectually and empathetically “closed” to all males. In this sense, identity is a prison, a zone impenetrable to those outside its walls, an unshareable, unbridgeable chasm between sets of human beings.

All this forgets two obvious considerations. One, that we are all human, and two, that we — at least most of us — try to educate ourselves
Under identity politics, people can never reach into an understanding of those who are different from them, which is, rather explosively, the absolute undermining of diversity philosophy: that diversity broadens and enriches and expands our moral and political boundaries by the blend and interaction of all our different selves.

Under the dogmas of identity politics we can never really share, never really see others, or have a real understanding and sympathy for a fellow human being. Simply by virtue of belonging to a different caste, a different racial mix, or an opposing sexuality, we are cut off, isolated from our fellow human beings. Every man, or woman, is an island after all. To understand another we must be the same as another.

Which is behind the underthought insistence that all public and private institutions must always make sure they are “representative.” That there must always be on a board, panel, commission or court, persons who come from the specific set and subset of each chosen category of race and sexual orientation. How, after all, could a female judge from Ontario possible rule in a case on man from B.C? Since there is no possible overlap of experience, sex, or background, because there is such a void between the two, obviously we need more male loggers on the bench, or more female judges with chainsaws in B.C.

All this forgets two obvious considerations. One, that we are all human, and two, that we — at least most of us — try to educate ourselves. Instead of diving into the defining boxes of race, sex, orientation and sealing the lids, why not start at the higher level of what all of us have and are in common: we are human, we have moral faculties, we are gifted with the capacity to lead ourselves out of our narrow, restrictive particular facts of circumstance and race. We transcend our local boundaries through education and reflection.

Why not remember, too, that we all share on this planet the common heritage of collective history, the cross-fertilization and harvest of all the great and good people who preceded us. The combined wisdom of philosophy, history and science doesn’t come with sexist or racist tags: every race and people of both sexes have added to our common inheritance, and that inheritance, with application and study, is open to the heads and hearts of every human being. Diversity, as it is narrowly understood, and the identity politics that has grown out of that narrow, corrupt understanding, breeds identity politics — which is a form of collapse of our common humanity.

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Tags: ideology, multiculturalism, participation, rights

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