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 20th 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.