Can Identity Politics Be Liberal?

A recent piece in Vox maintains that liberalism needs identity politics. A close examination of the piece shows the opposite.

It begins with a reference to a 30-year-old piece by the late University of Chicago philosopher Iris Marion Young :

In 1990, Young published a classic book titled Justice and the Politics of Difference. At the time, political philosophy was dominated by internal debates among liberals who focused heavily on the question of wealth distribution. Young, both a philosopher and a left activist, found this narrow discourse unsatisfying.

In her view, mainstream American liberalism had assumed a particular account of what social equality means: "that equal social status for all persons requires treating everyone according to the same principles, rules, and standards." Securing "equality" on this view means things like desegregation and passing nondiscrimination laws, efforts to end overt discrimination against marginalized groups.

This is an important start, Young argues, but not nearly enough. The push for formally equal treatment can't eliminate all sources of structural inequality; in fact, it can serve to mask and even deepen them. Judging a poor black kid and a rich white one by the same allegedly meritocratic college admissions standards, for example, will likely lead to the rich white one's admission — perpetuating a punishing form of inequality that started at birth.

In this example, Young very cleverly conflated two attributes then ignored one of them. Let's assume that the premise is correct, that a rich white kid would be admitted before a poor black one but why bring wealth into it at all if this is about race? What about a rich black kid and a poor white one? Or two rich kids, one black and one white? Or a black and white kid who are both poor? Or two middle class kids? The assumption is really that rich kids will be admitted before poor ones coupled with the implication that black kids are always poor.

There's a word for assuming that someone who is black must be poor: "prejudice". It's a harmful one, also. 40% of black families are middle class compared with 42% of all families. It's the largest income group for blacks. Yes, twice as many blacks are below the poverty line as the general population (21% and 11%) but that's still half as many black families as are middle class. Even if you add in working poor (25% of black families) you still have the majority (56%) of black families middle class or above.  So Vox is justifying identity politics by perpetuating a racial slur - that backs are automatically poor.

Identity politics also eliminates any discussion of why more blacks are poor than whites. It looks at the percentages by race and assumes institutional racism is the sole cause. That creates a helplessness among minorities. "The system is stacked against you and there's nothing you can do to fight it."

But, it's been well-established that two-parent families are wealthier than single-parent families. And black families are much more likely to be single-parent. What if the two are connected? What if the prevalence of black poverty has more to do with the destruction of the black two-parent family? There's no room for that in identity politics.

So how is this liberal?

The Vox article goes on to name other disparities:

• The median black family's wealth is one-tenth that of the median white family.
• The average American woman spends over 11 more hours per week doing unpaid home labor than the average man.
• LGBTQ youth are about five times more likely to attempt suicide than (respectively) straight and cisgender peers.

These are all misleading on one way or the other.

The first bullet point is because of a handful of billionaires at the top end of wealth are disproportionately white. If you discount them then the wealth gap closes significantly.

The second point is grossly misleading. According to their source, the reason women do more of the housework is because men are spending much more time at work.

As for the third point, it's been well-documented that 50% of youth on hormone treatments for gender transitioning try to commit suicide. If, as the statistics imply, it's the drugs that cause suicidal urges then no amount of identity politics will help these people. It's a medical issue, not a societal one.

So Vox is misrepresenting the world as an excuse for more identity politics. I already mentioned the problem with assuming that blacks are poor. There are other problems with grouping people into easily-identifiable groups and treating them differently. Once you decide that this is acceptable then it's inevitable that you start having disparate treatment. Identity politics advocates assume that they will always be in control of this and that it will always work in their favor. That is not always the case.

Look at Mayor Bloomberg's Stop and Frisk policy. It's a perfect example of identity politics gone wrong. As Bloomberg himself explained, the biggest cause of murder in New York City was minorities. So he advocated treating all of them as potential suspects and checking them for weapons as often as possible (up to a million times a year at its height). The justification for this is that it helped the minority communities since the most common victim was also a minority.

Identity politics institutionalizes racism disguised as helping "marginalized" groups. If convinces members that all of their problems come from a system designed to crush them and teaches them to see racism/sexism/etc. where none exists. None of this is liberal and it only helps the liberals by creating a mob mentality intent on change that they hope to channel.