The Triumph of Identity Politics

How the "identity trap" is ruining the country.

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Identity politics is the new religion of the United States. In its demand for conformity, its penances and indulgences, its ability to sniff out heresy, and its rituals and liturgies, it is all too similar to a religious cult. And that religious cult is taking over society.

The birth of identity politics can be traced back to the late 1960s. Despite the civil rights movement transforming the United States by abolishing most of the formal ways in which laws and institutions discriminated against African Americans, a young set of activists was left bitterly disappointed that triumphant legal victories weren’t manifesting in radical enough ways. Heavily influenced by postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory — obscure doctrines that began seeping out of the halls of academia like an infection — these activists argued that the progress made was a lie, that oppression was being masked with bromides of American optimism, and that a theoretical commitment to universalism too often existed alongside serious discrimination.

In the ensuing decades, the center of gravity on the Left swung from class and economics to culture and identity. This coincided with the emergence of a profound racial pessimism. The progressive movement started to dismiss calls for a color blind society in accordance with Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision as naive. In its stead, they increasingly embraced a vision of the future in which society would forever be defined by its division into distinct identity groups. If we are to ensure that each ethnic, religious, or sexual community enjoys a proportionate share of wealth and success, they argued, we must make the way we treat people depend on the groups to which they belong.

A new ideology was thus born—what Yascha Mounk calls the “identity synthesis.”¹ But the “triumph of identity politics,” as Park MacDougald puts it, didn’t occur until the post-Obama “racial reckoning,” when a series of events, most notably the death of George Floyd and the summer of riots and protests that followed, made progressive narratives about systemic racism and police brutality more plausible to larger numbers of people.

At the same time, a host of writers led by Ibram X. Kendi, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Ta-Nehisi Coates began providing a fatalistic counter-narrative to Obama-era post-racialism that became standard wisdom among the chattering classes: Progress on race had never really happened and the U.S. was even moving backward; white supremacy was still the foundation of American life.

As elite opinion gravitated toward fatalism, moral entrepreneurs supplied a bracing doctrine of indelible racial sin. They called for society to be remade by way of an expansive bureaucratic apparatus of moral oversight in order to abolish an oppressive system that supposedly permeates all interactions in society yet is largely invisible except to those who experience it or who have been trained in the proper “critical” methods that allow them to see it.

Their argument goes something like this: Because the U.S. is so oppressive, neutrality and color-blindness, the conviction that the system shouldn’t benefit any particular group, merely compound minority discrimination. Ergo, the only way to eradicate this discrimination is to totally abandon all pretense of neutrality and to actively discriminate in favor of “historically marginalized communities,” AKA everyone except “cis hetero white men.” In order to achieve true “equity,” society must jettison the aspiration that people should be treated the same irrespective of the ethnic or sexual groups to which they belong. Many adherents of the identity synthesis even believe that any set of institutions or arrangements that does not explicitly distinguish between people on the basis of their immutable characteristics will merely serve to oppress marginalized minorities.

Today, the entire interlocking infrastructure of American cultural and intellectual life has been captured by this single ideologically driven cohort. Parts of the American mainstream are replacing universalism with a kind of progressive separatism. Schools and universities, foundations and NGOs, and even government and corporations seem to believe that they should actively encourage people to conceive of themselves as “racial beings.” Increasingly, they are also applying the same framework to other forms of identity, encouraging people to define themselves by their gender, cultural origin, or sexual orientation. And of late, many institutions have taken yet another step: they have concluded that it is their duty to make how they treat people depend on the groups to which they belong.

Perhaps the most clear cut example of this ideological capture has occurred in public health. As the Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium has reported, with the backing of the Food and Drug Administration, at least three states continue to allocate life-saving covid drugs based on race. In New York, racial minorities are automatically eligible for scarce covid therapeutics, regardless of age or underlying conditions. In Utah, “Latinx ethnicity” counts for more points than “congestive heart failure” in a patient’s “COVID-19 risk score”—the state’s framework for allocating monoclonal antibodies. And in Minnesota, health officials have devised their own “ethical framework” that prioritizes black 18-year-olds over white 64-year-olds—even though the latter are at much higher risk of severe disease.

It’s not just state health departments, but private hospital systems as well. SSM Health, one of the largest hospital systems in the U.S., gave race more weight than diabetes, obesity, asthma, and hypertension combined in its allocation scheme for covid treatments, only to reverse the policy after threats of legal action.

Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services explicitly blessed these schemes. Utah’s allocation system was hailed as a “promising practice” for other states to consider.

Meanwhile, the CDC provided training orders of about $313,000 for a slew of courses, such as “8 Tactics for Courageous Workplace Conversations About Race,” “Let’s Talk About Systemic Racism, Unconscious Bias and Privilege,” and “Silence is a Statement: Understanding Race in the Workplace.” It also recently urged teachers, administrators, and school nurses to put up LGBT flags, separate physiology from gender, and adopt LGBT curriculums.

You’ll probably be shocked to learn that nonprofits are just as nuts as public health. For example, the largest domestic violence group in Philly, Women Against Abuse, paid “BIPOC” staffers more than white ones, asked white staffers to affirm their innate racism, and discouraged black abuse victims from calling the cops. Employees also proposed that there’s “no such thing as a non-racist white person.”

As an investigation by The Economist concluded in 2021, “Philanthropy is veering left.” Cash rich foundations are increasingly pursuing equity, “defined not as equal opportunity, but rather as equal outcomes.” As a result of this shift in the ideological assumptions of America’s biggest foundations, there’s been a massive influx of funding into organizations that campaign for ideas and issues based on the core tenets of the identity synthesis.²

In big business, we’ve seen multiple instances of mega-corporations abandoning neutrality in the culture wars and using boycotts to punish state and local governments whose policies on civil rights and gender identity differ from those of the political Left—just as they now engage in sanctimonious virtue signalling by festooning their web pages with the BLM logo, rainbow flags, and DEI statements.

Pfizer offers a prestigious fellowship that bars whites and Asians from applying—a blatant violation of numerous civil rights laws. Amazon even gives “Black, Latinx, and Native American entrepreneurs” a $10,000 stipend to launch their own delivery startups, an offer that a class-action lawsuit calls “patently unlawful racial discrimination.” And Coca-Cola has radically changed its internal culture in accordance with a “holistic Racial Equity Action Plan” rooted in the concepts and convictions of the identity synthesis. “Confronting Racism,” one of the trainings that the company has its employees sit through, for example, features a slide telling them to “try to be less white.” For those unsure how to go about doing this, the training helpfully elaborates that being less white is to be “less oppressive,” “less arrogant,” “less certain,” “less defensive,” and “less ignorant.”

Many prominent businesses are also writing racial and gender quotas into their credit agreements with banks, tying the cost of borrowing to the companies’ workforce diversity. These “race-conscious” credit agreements are incentivizing illegal hiring practices across corporate America and encouraging outright discrimination. The businesses that have struck such agreements include the consulting groups Ernst & Young and AECOM, insurers Prudential and Definity Financial, private equity firms BlackRock and the Carlyle Group, the technology company Trimble, and the telecommunications giant Telefónica. Over the past two years, each of these companies has secured a credit facility that links the interest rate charged by banks to the company’s internal diversity targets, creating a financial incentive to meet them. If the business achieves its targets, it won’t have to pay as much interest on the loans it takes out; if it falls short, it’s required to pay more.³

Businesses and universities have written racial quotas into their agreements, too. for example, Microsoft, IBM, and Google capped the number of white and Asian students that universities can nominate for research fellowships, even though Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits federally funded universities from discriminating based on race.

Unfortunately, the law might not provide protection against what can only be described as woke racism for much longer, as the identity synthesis has seeped into every part of the legal system, from law schools to law firms to the judiciary. The American Bar Association (ABA) has proposed making the accreditation of U.S. law schools dependent on their success in promoting goals like race and gender quotas among faculty and students. Obviously, this blatantly runs afoul of federal and state laws like the aforementioned Civil Rights Act of 1964, but amazingly, the ABA now says its own private, made-up accreditation requirements trump actual laws: “The requirement of a constitutional provision or statute that purports to prohibit consideration of race, color, ethnicity, religion, national origin, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, or military status in admissions or employment decisions is not a justification for a school’s noncompliance with Standard 206.”

And this influence on law is likely to get worse before it gets better. That’s because American universities have become petri dishes for this ideology. Time-honored principles about justice and neutrality have been under assault thanks to the politicization of campus life. For many law students, the imperatives of race, gender, and identity are more important than due process, the presumption of innocence, and freedom of speech.

Yale Law School (YLS) has been one of the worst offenders in this regard. Recall the high-profile incident last year, when hundreds of students attempted to shout down a bipartisan panel on civil liberties, causing so much chaos that police were eventually called to escort panelists out of the building. Afterward, nearly 400 students signed an open letter scolding Yale administrators for bringing an “anti-LGBTQ+ speaker” to campus and having uniformed police officers present, among other complaints. And let’s not forget the notorious “trap house” email brouhaha in which YLS administrators attempted to professionally blackmail a student into apologizing for utterly anodyne speech protected by the Constitution that they said was “harmful” to minorities.

But such incidents can distract from an even more pressing issue: What students are actually being taught in classes. As Andrew Sullivan wrote in 2018:

When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large.

Then there are the elementary schools and high schools that have started cutting honors classes because they don’t enroll enough minority students. Others are even segregating particular subjects. Evanston Township High School, in the suburbs of Chicago, now offers calculus classes reserved for students who “identify as Black and Latinx.” Many more are embracing “racial affinity groups” that specifically exclude white students. A school district in Wellesley, MA recently hosted a “Healing Space for Asian and Asian American Students,” an emailed invitation to which emphasized that “This is a safe space for our Asian/Asian American and Students of Color, *not* for students who identify only as White.”

Private schools aren’t any better. At Gordon School in Rhode Island, teachers start to divide children into weekly affinity groups by race in kindergarten. “A play-based curriculum that explicitly affirms racial identity,” wrote Julie Parsons, a longtime teacher at Gordon, is especially important “for the youngest learners.” Dalton, a prestigious school on New York’s Upper East Side, believes “antiracist institutions” must help their students achieve the right racial identity by encouraging them to see themselves as “racial beings,” and that the first step toward this goal is to reject the “color-blind idea” that what we have in common is more important than what makes us different. Some of these schools have even started encouraging white students to define themselves based on the pigment of their skin. Bank Street School for Children, which is one of the most renowned early education institutions in the country, divides its students into a “Kids of Color Affinity Group” and an all-white “Advocacy Group.” The goal of the white group is to “raise awareness of the prevalence of Whiteness and privilege,” and students are encouraged to “own” their “European ancestry.”

Needless to say, it matters a great deal that the identity synthesis has been adopted in the highest echelons of society at remarkable speed. We’re talking about the basic rules, principles, and background assumptions that will structure our society in the coming decades. Rather than pretend these changes aren’t taking place or are irrelevant, we need to analyze and assess them in a serious manner.

There’s a lot at stake. The woke missionaries pushing identity politics on the rest of the country are inhibiting cross-racial solidarity by interpreting all human sociological interactions in the most cynical way possible. Theirs is a worldview that centers social and cultural grievances and aims to make everything into a zero-sum political struggle revolving around identity markers. This movement is not only openly hostile to concepts such as personal responsibility and individual liberty, but it rejects liberalism as a form of oppression and is using authoritarian means to establish a thoroughly dogmatic fundamentalist ideology regarding how society ought to be ordered.

The good news is that the more deeply we have gotten stuck in the identity trap, the more obvious it has become that the aspirations of identity synthesis advocates stand in direct tension with the moral convictions of most Americans. My hope is that more people will begin to speak out against the perverse influence identity politics is having on the country. The current frenzy may well die down over time. But it will only do so if reasonable people point out the dangers of this toxic nonsense.

1. Identity politics is, today, a historical synthesis of several philosophical and socio-political threads, so the locution seems appropriate.

2. For example, according to Candid, an organization that compiles information about nonprofits, philanthropies either handed out or promised nearly $28 billion in “racial equity funding” from 2011 to 2021.

3. Under the terms of BlackRock’s $4.4 billion credit facility, for example, Wells Fargo will lower the firm’s interest rate by 0.05% if it hits two benchmarks — a 30% increase in the share of black and Hispanic employees by 2024, and a 3% increase in the share of female executives each year — or hike the rate by the same amount if it misses both.