Identity Politics Now the Driving Force of the Democratic Party

UPDATE 12.13.23: Recent testimony by the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and UPenn could end up being the straw that broke woke camel’s back, as Americans have almost universally recoiled in disgust at the vacillation of the college officials’ over the question of whether or not calling for the genocide of Jewish people met the threshold of the universities’ policies on bullying and harassment. If you haven’t seen the startling footage, you can watch it here. The presidents may have displayed the peak of the diversity delusion, the idea that all viewpoints, even calls for genocide, are acceptable “in context.” But that delusion has already been eroding as donors and businesses decide that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs are more trouble than they’re worth. Axios’s Erica Pandey reports:

The backlash over diversity, equity and inclusion programs, or DEI, is sharpening in politics, business and academics.

Why it matters: Diversity programs are being cut and donors are pulling millions, citing DEI.

What’s happening: College DEI programs support historically underrepresented students and faculty members, such as people of color, people with disabilities and veterans.

• Critics have argued for years that these programs make universities overly sensitive to only certain groups.
• They leapt to make that connection after university presidents hedged when asked how they would respond to hypothetical instances of antisemitism on their campuses.

What they said: Billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman wrote an open letter to his alma mater calling for Claudine Gay to resign as president, and said the university’s DEI office was a “major contributing source of discriminatory practices on campus.”

• Ackman also suggested that Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, was hired because of a DEI initiative. Civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton told AP, “Now we have one of the richest men in America attacking a Black woman whose academic credentials are impeccable.”
• Gay’s job is safe, Harvard’s board said Tuesday.

Originally posted on August 20, 2019.

Political opponents of President Trump often accuse him of “sowing division” with his “racist language,” Heather MacDonald writes in the WSJ.

Yet Mr. Trump rarely uses racial categories in his speech or his tweets. It is the elite media and Democratic leaders who routinely characterize individuals and groups by race and issue race-based denunciations of large parts of the American polity. Some examples:

• “As race dominates the political conversation, 10 white Democratic candidates will take the stage” (the Washington Post).
• Trump’s rally audiences are “overwhelmingly white” (multiple sources).
• Your son’s “whiteness is what protects him from not [sic] being shot” by the police (Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand).
• White candidates need to be conscious of “white privilege” (South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg ).
• “White supremacy manifests itself” in the criminal-justice, immigration and health-care systems (Sen. Cory Booker ).
• “Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri” (Sen. Elizabeth Warren ).
• Whiteness is “the very core” of Mr. Trump’s power, whereas his “predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness” (Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic).

Liberal opinion deems such rhetoric fair comment, even obvious truth, not “racially divisive.” America’s universities deserve credit for this double standard. Identity politics dominate higher education: Administrators, students and faculty obsessively categorize themselves and each other by race. “White privilege,” often coupled with “toxic masculinity,” is the focus of freshmen orientations and an ever-growing array of courses. Any institutional action that affects a “person of color” is “about race.” If a black professor doesn’t get tenure, he’s a victim of discrimination; a white professor is presumed to be unqualified.

The Trump Phenomenon

Susan Rice, President Obama’s national security adviser, recently denounced Mr. Trump’s “almost daily attacks on black and brown people.” But “almost” and “black and brown” are superfluous.

Mr. Trump’s attacks on his fellow 2016 candidates—and on more-recent adversaries as homogeneous as Robert Mueller, Rep. Adam Schiff, Joe Biden and Ms. Warren—were as nasty as anything he’s directed at Rep. Elijah Cummings or Rep. Ilhan Omar.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Identity politics is now a driving force in the Democratic Party, which celebrates the racial and ethnic identities of designated victim groups, while whites—especially heterosexual white men—are consigned to scapegoat status, observes Ms. MacDonald.

If “whiteness” is a legitimate topic of academic and political discourse, some individuals are going to embrace “white identity” proudly.

Read more here from Ms. Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.”

Read more here.