Creating identity crises amid reality of fluidity
Let’s revisit identity politics again, shall we?
America’s melting pot long ago stopped simmering. The menu of what constitutes Americana now features a dizzying array of à la carte options, with national cohesion no longer being the favored meal.
Celebrating identity inspires even less agreement than our usual politics. It is no less a bare-knuckle sport. Personal offense is quickly taken. Redemption rarely granted. And yet inconsistencies abound because no one bothered to broker the rules.
Misgender someone who identifies as trans or binary, botch the culturally preapproved list of pronouns, suggest that a woman might prefer to raise a family rather than smash every glass ceiling in sight, wonder about the strong attachment Islamists seem to have with terrorism … and good luck maintaining an existence on social media or joining a sorority, receiving tenure or climbing the ladder at corporations where woke is more valued than work.
If you’re running for president, best to stay clear of the identity of your opponent — especially if she is a female and a person of color. No good can come of it. Donald Trump took a news cycle hit when he questioned the identity-fluidity of Kamala Harris, his opponent for the White House. She has an Indian mother and a Jamaican father. She identifies as an African-American woman, but Trump suggested that earlier in her career, she opted for South Asian.
So what? People deploy their backgrounds to their advantage all the time, whether it be geographic, religious, educational or professional. It doesn’t necessarily make them phony. Harris went to Howard Law School in Atlanta and, when campaigning in Georgia, her accent sounds like she’s ordering soul food in the Bayou.
• • •
Barack Obama and Bill Clinton both maintained alternating personas that could be showcased depending upon the crowd and moment.
Clinton was from Arkansas but he was also a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. When speaking to farmers, he played up his Southern roots and small-town proclivities, which he knew quite well.
Obama’s mother was from Kansas and his father from Kenya, and he grew up as “Barry” in Hawaii. His “Hope and Change” came in different flavors.
Donald Trump improbably appeals to America’s heartland — with its country music, NASCAR, Friday night high school football games, megachurches, pick-up trucks and populist playlists — as if he is Williams Jenning Bryan or Huey Long. But actually, he descends from a New York City real estate family, attended an elite university, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and, as an adult, sat on a toilet seat made of gold.
There are all sorts of special sensitivities today. In the era of Black Lives Matter, most biracial people self-identify as black. And there is a strong undercurrent of concealing or denying one’s white ancestry.
Former ESPN star anchor Sage Steele damaged her relationship with her employer when she publicly stated that she would never downplay the role her white mother played in her life.
She was responding to a comment that Obama apparently made about the centrality of his blackness. He must have forgotten that his father abandoned him and returned to Africa, while his white mother and grandmother set him on a path that led to the White House. In both presidential elections in which he was victorious, a majority of white Americans chose him over uber-white guys like John McCain and Mitt Romney.
He shouldn’t casually disown the white side of his family.
Or maybe he has a point. After all, despite all the hoopla over differences, this is also a time of disfavored identities. Identity politics doesn’t welcome everyone. It plays favorites.
• • •
Two identities, in particular, are being unceremoniously told that there’s no room at the inn — those who are either white or Jewish. Some (those who are biracial and Jewish) are fortunate enough to be able to hide both. Nowadays, Lenny Kravitz, Drake, Lisa Bonet, Tracee Ellis Ross and Tiffany Haddish have some career decisions to make. It’s a good thing Sammy Davis Jr. is dead. He was pretty uncompromising about his tribal commitments.
For everyone who is white and Jewish, it’s too late. They have long since been outed.
Take Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. He has discovered the consequences of once having had a bar mitzvah. He is immensely popular in his home state, which happens to be a battleground state. Polling shows that his presence on the ticket would benefit her the most. But her progressive base vomited at the prospect of such a selection.
What about recognizing and respecting different identities?
Well, putting ordinary antisemitism aside for a moment, Shapiro openly supports Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas. Worse still, he shattered the First Amendment presumptions of all those pro-Hamas encampments. He wondered whether progressives would tolerate mobs of KKK sympathizers singing genocidal songs about ridding the south of African-Americans “From Key West to the Mason-Dixon Line.”
The politics of identity suggest she might have to tweak the First Family a bit. As the first female African-American, South Asian president of the United States, her first order of business might have to be pardoning the First Husband of his identity that knows no name.
