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I think it depends on the type of identity awareness. There’s definitely a time to be an individual and a time to circle the wagons. The individual can do great things, certainly. But when you’re in electoral politics, ten individuals lose to a group of five if the five acts as a bloc. This is exactly the issue. Whites have been taught that they are evil if they form a voting bloc over their race and racial interests. Other minorities are allowed to do so. And thus when things like DEI are decided, blacks, Hispanics, women and others are there demanding to be included in the program. Whites aren’t there and thus cannot push back even though the entire process is based on removing whites from coveted positions in the workplace and schools to give them to others. Is that working? Are the political needs of whites being considered in these programs?
But if you entertain one groups racial grievances you have to entertain all groups racial grievances. That door gets shoved wide open. Yes, in more recent times some whites have been vilified and discriminated against in some awful cases. Welcome to the club. Now lets slam that door in Ibram Kendis face, dismantle such programs (as Trump recent initiated), and move towards a legally colorblind, merit based society. Organizing around race mistakes the map for the territory in most cases. The political needs of whites aren't inherent to them being white. Not all whites are equally susceptible to opioid addiction or welfare dependency. Whiteness certainly doesn't explain who those people are. And whoever they are, they have agency and thus responsibility. Government help is not out of the question, but skin color is a bad heuristic. And keep in mind that all this grievance is in the face of increasingly median prosperity, while bring the most decisive voting block, over-represented in positions of power.
Because we aren’t there and are rapidly running in the opposite direction. In 1990 we could have more or less said something like that without a problem. But as it sits today, the racial, sexual, and gender groups are much larger and stronger with more group cohesion than ever before. To ignore this simply means choosing not to have your political interests matter. Nobody cared about the problems of poor whites until said poor whites began to organize themselves into the alt-right movement and other similar groups. Nobody cared what white men wanted until they began to see themselves as a group that has needs and has every right to get those needs met. Nobody worried about what Christians wanted until they started uniting around the ideas of Christian nationalism.
Once it became clear that whites were going to demand that DEI stop, sure people started paying attention to it. Before that point, it was taken as a given that since blacks were watching and voted as a group, that it was politically wise to make sure to not anger the Black vote because they vote as a block.
Unilateral disarmament is quite simply deciding to lose on principle.
And what you are saying is that we should run faster?
That instead of pushing back against the identitarian left we should instead embrace thier values as our own?
Sounds to me like it's you who is pushing for "unilateral disarmament", not @justmotteingaround.
I disagree simply because we are and have been running in the direction of more identity politics rather than less. Trump might well represent a step away from that, but for how long? If we start back up again, will not being at the table be good? When blacks are allowed to get boosts from the government as minority owned businesses, in a downturn, why does it make sense that white owned businesses can’t say anything about the government choosing those businesses when everyone needs work?
And you believe that this is a good thing?
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And I oppose continued running in that opposite direction. In the data, the groups are getting smaller in absolute terms, although they may be forming larger and more robust coalitions (around identity characteristics, which I obviously oppose). That trump made historic gains with minorities shows that its not an insuperable boundary. Urban/rural, BA/no-degree, costal/center, religious, and economic categories usually show a wider disparity than almost all identity labels. This is the norm for all of US history. North/south, and urban/rural divides go back to de Tocqueville, and arguably back 14th century Irish cracker culture, which would appear in the American south. Over the past few decades blacks have probably lost more than they've gained from in-group and party loyalties. I don't wish that on anyone. But having been governed under wildly disparate laws for centuries, this at least made sense. And even then only for a handful of decades.
People of every political persuasion have long cared about poor whites by dint of caring about poor people generally. Both black and white poors have often been derided in the culture, but those hurt feelings don't beggar a policy response. As far back as 1900 there were assistance programs for poor, disproportionally white Southerners which they often pridefully rejected (talking about hookworm eradication here). Blacks were often squeezed out of such assistance (their current welfare dependency notwithstanding). More recently, technology led to globalization, which hurt specific, largely white, regions. Industrial and trade policy should care just as much about the blacks in Detroit as the whites in Appalachia. Both got screwed. Otherwise you necessarily invite useless arguments over relative privation, apparently extending all the way to 1619. Its lunacy.
My advice to black America has long been "Yeah, you got historically screwed. But rest assured, help is very much not on its way. Therefore, just copy Asians where possible." Its no different for whites. There was a brief window where idpol achieved something useful. Trump rescinding Johnsons EO is good precisely because the policy has been bassackwards for decades. The territory is that certain people need specific policy to serve their interests. This is normal. But race is a bad map.
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