Initially I thought it was a failure to communicate.

My allergist and I were talking past each other. I would explain a symptom and she would minimize it saying perhaps I wasn’t using the medicine she prescribed to its fullest.

The most frustrating thing was her lack of acknowledgement of my most persistent symptom: headaches that started behind my right eye. Well, maybe that wasn’t the most annoying thing. Perhaps I can give that designation to her unwillingness to look me in the eye as she spoke. When I addressed her to explain what was happening in my body or when I asked her to explain something, rather than make eye contact she looked through me at the wall behind me.

What’s this lady’s deal, I wondered.

Blacks don’t feel pain

A study by Sophie Trawalter and her University of Virginia colleagues found that white students and nurses perceived whites as experiencing more pain than blacks for the same injuries. The results suggest that black people are perceived as being able to withstand more pain because it’s assumed they have been toughened by their life circumstances.

I’m left to wonder, perhaps the problem with my allergist wasn’t miscommunication, but rather implicit bias. If a doctor believes my headaches can’t be that bad, then how do I convince her otherwise?

The black skin I live in informs my everyday experience. Some would say this is another example of identity politics. There those black people go complaining about what they can’t get or how hard they have it. For me this goes beyond identity.

I take issue with the term identity politics because it assumes that people of color can claim their identity when it is convenient for them. When in fact, racial and ethnic identities are often foisted upon us, as was the case when I went to the allergist. One can’t escape being black, though I know I am more than the color of my skin and the symbol it represents for white people. I didn’t go to the allergist as a black woman. I went there as a human being wanting to resolve my chronic headaches. But the allergist couldn’t see beyond my black skin.

Implicit bias in doctors’ offices is just one factor that gives rise to health disparities among blacks. You only have to go to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to look at the stats to see that black people don’t have it so good in America. And black people aren’t the only groups hurting. Native Americans, poor whites, LGBTQ, brown immigrants, and women, all have their struggles in institutions whose policies were not created to give them a leg up or even a leg to stand on.

Identity politics hurts liberals?

Yet, a growing debate among liberals is calling for disenfranchised groups to lay down their arms, to put aside their protests for social justice. Many of these protestors are even called “social justice warriors,” almost a slur more than an accurate descriptor, dripping with contempt. I can’t quite figure where this disdain comes from, but I suspect it stems from the belief that these “warriors” are talking too loudly and drowning out moderate and conciliatory voices that “deserve” to be heard. With this derogatory word comes the assumption that the claims of these “warriors” aren’t a priority, right now. Something people of color have been hearing for generations.

One voice in this camp is Mark Lilla, a humanities professor at Columbia University. He’s the author of  “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics,” which grew from a 2016 Op-Ed piece he wrote for the New York Times. In the Op-Ed piece he argues that identity politics will be the downfall of the Democratic Party and unless Democrat tribes are willing to give up their individual beefs, then it will never defeat the Republican Party, which has managed to grab large swatches of support in middle-America – code word white middle-America.

In an August 2017 New Yorker interview with David Remnick, Lilla agrees with the now familiar Steve Bannon quote: “The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I’ve got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

In the interview, Lilla goes on to say that there has been too much talk regarding identity politics. I couldn’t agree less. Yes, as of late we’ve talked about the plight of transgender youth and the gender-neutral bathroom issue, police brutality in black communities, and the #metoo movement. But there has been too little discussion about power. Who’s making policies, who benefits, who gets money, wealth and power from these policies, and who has the influence to maintain this power?

To answer these questions two lines of thought should be followed.

Origins of identity politics and who benefits

The first has to do with identity labels and who ascribes them. People of color didn’t start out with these labels. They were assigned to racial groups by white supremacists who wanted to use the label to stigmatize people and limit their power, while at the same time elevating their own. When I say white supremacists, I don’t mean necessarily the KKK. I mean the colonists who were happy to use race to subjugate black slaves and ravage Native Americans. Here, the label of “other” justifies these actions. Here, identity was a tool to divide. As a result of these labels and their continued power and legacy, people of color and other disenfranchised groups can only acknowledge the stigmatized label and fight for full citizenship.

The other line of thinking that has to be honestly followed is that too many white people believe that identity politics is only a movement that advantages people of color. But think about: White people have a greater investment in being white. George Lipsitz, an American Studies scholar, makes the case well in his book, “Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics.”

There he states: “I argue that white Americans are encouraged to invest in whiteness, to remain true to an identity that provides them with resources, power and opportunity. This whiteness is of course a delusion, a scientific and cultural fiction that like all identities has no foundation in biology or anthropology. Whiteness is, however, a social fact, an identity created and continued with all-too-real consequences for the distribution of wealth, prestige and opportunity.”

Here, Lipsitz is talking about racial privilege. The reality is, in our complex society there are several layers of privilege, including class, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, able-bodied status, just to name a few.

Fighting for full citizenship

Lilla argues that people in these groups should not protest so much for their own interests, rather they should protests for shared interests, which on it’s face is not a bad piece of advice. But there is something about his frame of mind when he says this that causes me concern. For example in the New Yorker interview he says:

“Well, certainly on the American right, ever since the Ku Klux Klan, we’ve had explicitly framed identity politics. That is in the sharpest sense. Now, you can say that people think of themselves as Italians or Jews or Germans, and then they become a kind of interest group. We’ve had interest-group politics before. But there’s a kind of essentialism to identity politics, where it means going out into the democratic space, where you’re struggling for power and using identity as an appeal for other people to vote for your side. And I think Bannon’s completely right, and I’ll stand by what I said: that it works for their side and it doesn’t work for our side, for all kinds of reasons. Now, that is not to say that we don’t talk about identity. To understand any social problem in this country, you have to understand identity. And we’re more aware of that than ever, and that’s been a very good thing. But, to address those problems with politics, we have to abandon the rhetoric of difference, in order to appeal to what we share, so that people who don’t share this identity somehow can have a stake, and feel something that other people are experiencing.”

OK, I’m sure identity politics happened long before the KKK, which hit its stride in the early 20^th century. Identity politics started with slavery, continued with the Three-fifths Compromise, whereby slaves were counted as three-fifths of a citizen, and was constitutionally circumscribed with the U.S. Supreme Court Dred Scott decision, which ruled blacks (free or enslaved) were not citizens and therefore had no standing in federal courts. Let’s also remember that identity politics played a huge role in justifying the massacre of millions of Native Americans.

Then Lilla goes on to say this:

“To give you an example, I’m not a black motorist. I will never be a black motorist. I don’t know what it’s like to look in the rearview mirror of a car and see the lights flashing and feel my stomach churn. But I am a citizen. And that person is a fellow-citizen. And, if we can make the case that there are citizens in this country who can’t just go for a drive without being worried about this, and they won’t be equally protected by the law, I think I can make the case to people who aren’t black that that’s a terrible thing, right? And so I want to frame the issue in terms of basic values and principles that we share in order to establish sympathy and empathy and identification with someone else.”

The problem here is that Lilla seems to believe that society sees blacks as full citizens with the same rights as whites, yet all the evidence out there shows society believes otherwise. Just look at the disparities I referenced above. It seems Lilla wants blacks (and other disenfranchised groups) to abandon their everyday lived experience, their truth.

The point can’t be to ask African Americans and others to give up their protest politics. The point has to be that whites need to set aside their identity as a privileged class and begin to see that if part of the citizenry is ailing, then they also will soon ail.

Canary in the coalmine

A friend of mine often makes the point in political conversations that white people need to see that blacks are really the canary in the coalmine. If blacks are suffering, it won’t be too long before whites too will suffer. We can look at the opioid epidemic for that lesson. When crack was the scourge of black communities across the nation, the national response was punitive. With the opioid epidemic, which is hurting middle-class and low-income white communities hard, the response initially has been sympathetic, but now the Justice Department under Trump is alluding to punitive measures for drug users who are caught rather than treatment strategies. Soon white incarceration rates may grow disproportionately. Maybe.

African Americans have long suffered from income inequality, yet, since the 2008 financial crisis, income inequality has now spilled onto the front doorsteps of white families as well. Gun violence is another example. For years African Americans have experienced gun violence at disproportionate rates. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2016, the rate of deaths for blacks by firearm was 26.1 per 100,000 people. Compare that to whites who in that same year had a rate of 11.9 per 100,000 people. That is a slight rise from the 9.2 per 100,000 deaths by firearms of whites in 2013. Recent high-profile mass killings – Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut and the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, just to name a few – have sparked a national dialogue about appropriate gun control measures. Gun violence feels more ubiquitous and less circumscribed to black urban neighborhoods. Gun violence is not just a poor black problem.

The point is, if privileged Americans look at, address, and raise holy hell about the issues plaguing various social groups, we all will live in a much healthier society. That’s the message we want to persuade our fellow citizens of in middle-America. This requires empathy from those who are privileged towards those who are less privilege. Empathy is what I wish my allergist showed me that day in her office.

Somebody at Twitter thought it was a good idea to throw a frat-theme happy hour last month for some of its workers, complete with beer pong, red plastic cups and kegs, as if waxing nostalgic for the glory days of male campus life.

The problem with the party isn’t just its symbolic power as Twitter works to resolve a sex-discrimination suit. The problem runs deeper, because it illustrates the boys’ club culture — and often the white boys’ culture — that telegraphs to women and minorities that they belong on the margins of the business. This culture is not unique to the tech industry, as there is a long tradition in newsrooms of nostalgia about the golden age when newsmen drank and smoked as they banged out superlative copy. Hard news, it was believed, was the ultimate masculine pursuit, and in some ways, that thinking hasn’t changed. If tech and media are truly willing to make their workplaces more equitable, there is a means to do it.

It would be easy to say that the decision-makers at Twitter and in most tech companies are unthinking, but the reality is that gender, sex and minority bias in companies, including in the news media, tends to be more subtle but no less insidious. It’s often an unconscious affair that involves split-second thinking and assumptions we make about groups of people who are not like us. This old boys’ culture is replicated in industries across the country.

Last month, the Columbia Journalism Review released a study done by a doctoral student from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Alex T. Williams found that the most common reason news organizations gave for the lack of diversity in their ranks was the dearth of qualified people of color. But then he looked at the percentage of people of color who recently completed degrees in journalism. The numbers didn’t square.

According to the American Society of News Editors, which has been conducting the newsroom diversity census since 1978 and just released its 2015 figures, minorities make up 12.8 percent of newsrooms. This number has stayed relatively stagnant over the last eight years, but it hit a peak at 13.7 percent in 2006. The numbers in broadcast media are not much different. Yet based on an annual survey of college graduates in journalism and mass communication — the Grady College Survey — minorities made up about 21 percent of journalism or communications graduates in 2013. Women haven’t quite made it either. While they made up 73 percent of graduates in the field in 2013, they made up 36 percent of the news editorial staff in newspapers that year, according to the Women’s Media Center.

Even so, the numbers in the news media are better than those we see in most tech companies. Twitter’s diversity numbers from last year found that women made up 10 percent of tech jobs. And while Asians made up 34 percent of tech jobs at Twitter, Latinos and African Americans made up a total of 4 percent. Should tech companies look to news media companies for answers? Not necessarily. Most of the efforts over the decades to improve diversity in newsrooms haven’t budged the needle much. But we have new tools in hand, and with the common intersection of tech and media, working together might bring about a different result.

With emerging research on unconscious bias, we now understand so much more about how bias can play out in the workplace without intention. One initial step companies can take is conducting a blind review of resumes. There are many other remedies, but first companies have to commit to the idea that diversity isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s also the smart thing to do. One need only look at the changing demographics of America to know that neither tech nor media can afford to disenfranchise the very people it’s catering to.

This opinion piece ran originally in the San Francisco Chronicle Aug. 3, 2015.

As MLK Day approaches, we will begin to see stories from the mainstream press about the man and his message. Over the years the press has tended to concentrate on his August 1963 speech at the March for Jobs and Freedom on the Washington Mall. But if we look at the message from an older King, the King of 1967 or 1968, we see a man much wearier and skeptical of government and the social infrastructure keeping their contract of equitable access to opportunity for all its citizens.

Journalists who examine King’s legacy need to include this latter period in their retrospectives. According to Thomas F. Jackson who wrote “Politics and Culture in Modern America: From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice,” King had been leaning more toward a social democratic political and economic philosophy by 1965, not long after President Lyndon Johnson had announced at Howard University his administration’s War on Poverty. Though King was keen with Johnson’s goals immediately after announcement, he soon became disillusioned with the gap between Johnson’s rhetoric to create greater access to opportunity and the administration’s policies.

A month after Johnson made his announcement about the War on Poverty, he made Vietnam a greater priority. King was particularly dismayed with Johnson’s budget cut to the program in 1967 from $3.4 billion to $1.75 billion with most of the lost money going to fuel the war in Vietnam. King also became concerned that the administration was too focused on “Negro pathology” – Patrick Moynihan, Johnson’s undersecretary of labor, attributed poor social and economic conditions of blacks to the breakdown of the family – rather than what he saw as the real root causes of poverty: a lack of jobs and financial security.

Jackson writes:

“But his political and structural explanations of poverty increasingly challenged liberal definitions that focused on something poor individuals lacked – skills, education, habits of work discipline, or “mainstream” norms they might pass on to their children. What if poverty resulted from each new generation’s confrontation with changing but relentless forms of economic denial, as the anthropologist Elliot Liebow argued in his powerful 1967 portrait of Negro streetcorner men, Tally’s Corner? (10) The island of poverty was larger than King had recognized, and millions of affluent Americans afloat on the vast ocean of material prosperity were dependent on the underpaid labor of its inhabitants.”

Journalists writing about education, housing, wealth and income, jobs and the criminal justice system have a lot to learn from this passage and King’s overall message from this final period of his life. In order for the public to understand poverty and racial disparity, audiences needs to understand the institutional and economic mechanisms that often constrain people’s agency to lift themselves up. Of course people have choices, but journalists need to reveal the context that often limits those choices.

Here is to better reporting in this area as we celebrate MLK Day.

When I was a college student at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, I had my first encounter with a Republican student. Coming from Chicago, a Democratic town, it blew my mind to hear arguments from my conservative classmates justifying President Ronald Reagan’s policies, which hit African Americans hard and some would argue took black progress back several notches. Notably, Reagan’s deaf ear to civil rights issues became apparent during his two administrations, which dismantled federal civil rights enforcement.

I remember one particularly trying argument with a fellow resident adviser, a young Republican who often wore ties and button-down shirts to the most casual of campus affairs. We had been talking about the difficulty for African Americans of getting middle class jobs, and affirmative action – giving preference to blacks – was not the answer he said.

How is it giving African American’s preference if they have limited access, I asked. Well, you’re giving blacks preference above others, he responded. It’s the principle. What he was really saying was it was unfair on principle for blacks to receive any preferences above whites, who all along had been receiving an unacknowledged preference. We can call it affirmative action for whites. And that the preferences whites were receiving (and still receive to some extent) have been unacknowledged for so long demonstrates what it is to be white in America. Whites expected access. That was the norm. The Nixon Administration’s affirmative action policies tried to shift that balance a bit. But even with those policies, African Americans still made up a small percentage of the middle class workforce.

This brings me to a piece I read in the New York Times by columnist Thomas B. Edsall. Generally, I like to read his column, because he finds interesting polls, studies and statistics about political strategies and demographics. But in the column titled “Have Democrats Failed the White Working Class?” Edsall offers a problematic frame for his argument.

He starts out the piece asking what have Democrats done for white working class voters and relies on two studies to conclude that the party hasn’t done much for them lately.

“At work and at home, their lives are worse than they were a generation ago,” he writes. “Their real incomes have fallen, their employment opportunities have diminished, their families have crumbled and their ties to society are fraying.”

“This is how daily life feels, to many in the white working class,” he continues. “Unlike blacks and Hispanics, whites are not the beneficiaries of affirmative action programs designed to open doors to higher education and better jobs for underrepresented minorities; if anything, these programs serve only to limit their horizons.”

Contrary to Edsall’s argument that blacks have received great benefits from Democratic policies, black mobility hasn’t improved much either. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the black unemployment rate has stubbornly stayed twice the rate of whites. In November 2014 the black unemployment rate was 11.1 percent while for whites it was 4.9 percent.

In his column, Edsall cites the work of Andrew Cherlin who looks at racial and economic change in Baltimore at the Sparrows Point plant of Bethlehem Steel in “Labor’s Love Lost” published by Russell Sage. Cherlin’s work looks fascinating and I look forward to reading it, as it coincides with my research on black steelworkers in Chicago from 1942-1976.

But Edsall’s frame implies that black working-class families have fared better than white working-class families. Using Cherlin’s work, Edsall makes a case that Democratic civil rights policies of the 1970s that helped blacks did no favors for the white working-class. Prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, African Americans were locked out of the higher paying jobs through hiring practices that were sanctioned if not protected by the union. It wasn’t until the 1970s that African Americans began to experience greater opportunity and options in steel mills across the country. Many of these newly instituted affirmative action polices for seniority, promotion and apprenticeships also benefited white workers who were sometimes trapped in dead end jobs. Edsall makes no mention of these benefits across racial lines.

As these changes began taking hold, the steel industry started to shrink, partly in response to foreign competition. These great jobs in steel that provided a means for people with no more than a high school degree were disappearing and now black and white working class communities were feeling the hit.

To read Edsall’s piece, we would believe that whites took the hardest blow as Democratic policies providing civil rights for blacks and more rights and autonomy for women took its toll on the white working class. The upshot, Edsall says, is that lack of jobs for men and a liberal cultural shift that allowed men to walk away from family obligations have left white working-class women in a downward spiral, many unmarried, with children and working low-wage jobs. He points out that the percentage of white unmarried mothers without a college degree jumped from 18 percent in 1980 to 30 percent in 2010. Yet, according to U.S. Census data the percentage of African American unmarried mothers increased from 37.8 percent of families in 1980 to 52.6 percent in 2010.

Edsall goes on to use a 2012 Pew Research poll, which compares black and white responses to the question: “When your children are your age, will their standard of living be worse, the same or better than yours?” Blacks’ responses were by far more optimistic than whites’. But this comparison figure says more about the mindset of blacks and whites than it does about actual disparity. In this same Pew poll, 30 percent of whites and 30 percent of blacks believed they were in the lower classes. The black percentage was unchanged in the last four years. But for whites this sentiment grew from 23 percent in 2008.

Perception can be deceptive. Henry J. Kaiser Foundation data shows that 10 percent of whites live in poverty, while 27 percent of blacks do.

Edsall states clearly that the numbers he presents are based on perception, but he offers no data to show readers the reality that whites, blacks and Latinos live. Without the numbers to show this reality, it is easy to walk away from Edsall’s column thinking that black lives are pretty good, while white lives are the worse for wear. In reality, economic difficulties are becoming the norm for people across racial lines, yet blacks still have the greater struggle.

Only now as we continue to see wages stagnate, while CEO incomes hover above the stratosphere, a growing percentage of white are people feeling a shove down the economic ladder. The so-called economic recovery has been too slow for many. Audiences can and should debate the merits of Democratic and Republican policies, but to do so the debate has to be based on facts, not perceptions. Unfortunately, when it comes to race, perception tends to win out.