Moving beyond the Color Line: “Whiteness” and Identity

Comment published on New York Times online blog in response to article by Emily Bazelon, “White People are Noticing Something New: Their Own Whiteness,” New York Times Magazine, June 13, 2018,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/magazine/white-people-are-noticing-something-new-their-own-whiteness.html?comments#commentsContainer

Ours is the only country where the political is assumed to be the implementation of demographical identities. This is ad hominem and fits the moralization of the political and the carceral state. 

Identity justifies everything. Yet, of "your" culture I like some things and don't like others, and in a democracy I should be free to say this. Let's discuss as a people how we want to be. 

"White" is an identity with no appeal outside racism. Black lives are specified in a way ours cannot be. Oppressed minority groups are "marked" and dominant ones "unmarked." The tragedy of identity politics is that the oppressed cannot counter their oppression without such identifications. Left moves to right when the categories become essential rather than problematic. 

The cultural left wants to blame persons and cultures that are majoritarian as responsible for their oppression, in a set of false notes that support no left politics, only Democratic Party progressivism. An ad hominem culture reduces ideas to persons. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party is largely a coalition of demographic interest groups, and "radicalism" here tends to mean attacks on aristocratic pretensions, or "privilege."

We must be one nation not with many subsets but defined and united politically on the basis of shared values while in principle open to all cultures. These are more like languages than sets of bodies. Let us all freely appropriate them, and argue about what we want and why.