Common Sense Manifesto #4: Identity politics won't save us

Democrats should try to reclaim one of MLK's boldest ideals

The “Great Awokening” that began during Barack Obama’s second term was supercharged when Donald Trump took office, only to explode during the Lockdown Spring of 2020. Yet by the time Joe Biden took office in January of 2021, a backlash was already brewing, following a summer of rising crime and institutional upheaval. Thus Biden’s term began with the Day One executive order “On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” but ended with a Democratic campaign that focused largely on abortion and performed historically poorly with Black voters.

Everyone is exhausted by the Woke Wars, nobody on the left seems to even know what they want to say about racial justice at this point, and nobody in the center wants to poke the bear. Corporate America is sloughing off its DEI programs, and America’s colleges and universities seem poised to face a slew of civil rights litigation alleging anti-white or anti-Asian discrimination. And yet, the I think an answer is staring us in the face in the form of a cliché that has, unfortunately, been superficially embraced by the right.

As I said in the Common Sense Democrat Manifesto, we should, in fact, judge people by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin, rejecting discrimination and racial profiling without embracing views that elevate anyone’s identity groups over their individuality.

But on the one hand, progressives have somewhat ceded the concept to conservatives, alleging that colorblindness as a regulative ideal is a reactionary plot and that skepticism of relentless efforts to reify racial categories is, itself, a form of racism. On the other, conservatives have taken too much of the progressive haterade to heart and act as if King’s ideal requires nothing of us in a world where literal Jim Crow laws are no longer on the books.

The truth is that this is actually a challenging and ambitious doctrine, one that in many ways goes against basic human instincts. It would take a lot for conservatives to actually live up to this ideal! At the same time, it also runs contrary to many progressive impulses that are making it hard for the contemporary left to manage functional institutions in a diverse society.

The long shadow of disparate impact

This past October, the Department of Justice sued the city of South Bend, Indiana on the grounds that their use of a written test with multiple choice questions to screen candidates for the police department was an illegal form of racial discrimination. Why? Well, because white and Black candidates had different pass rates for the test, and because they decided the “use of these tests is not job related or consistent with business necessity.”

I don’t want to get too dug in on the specifics of this case, but it’s an example of contemporary Democrats applying simplistic disparate impact logic in the absence of any specific evidence of discriminatory intent in a way that I think is troubling. I’m happy to concede that in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights Act, it was reasonable to suspect institutions of trying to find facially neutral ways to accomplish de facto discrimination. The “grandfather clause” rules that were used to restrict voting rights in the Jim Crow South — creating a very difficult test you had to pass to vote, but exempting anyone whose grandfather was an eligible voter — were very real. The idea of disparate impact isn’t just a paranoid fantasy.

But the concept is too often used today, 60 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, to claim that any racial disproportionality in outcomes is per se unjust.

It’s what led some people to decide that if traffic cameras catch more violators in Black neighborhoods, that’s problematic discrimination. But is it? Or does it mean that traffic cameras are solving a problem (unsafe driving) that primarily threatens residents of Black neighborhoods? A lot of anti-police sentiment in 2020 was driven by outrage over the fact that African-Americans get arrested at higher rates than white Americans. But when a reduction in police effort led to fewer arrests and also soaring murder rates in 2020 and 2021, it was predominantly Black people who were killed as a result. For most Black Americans, questions of crime and public safety have higher stakes, but the disparate impact observation doesn’t always offer anything informative about what we should do about this problem.

The tendency in progressive areas to push schools to de-track their classes also has an important racial equity gloss.

There are valid questions about how some gifted and talented screening has been implemented and how we can open the doors for more kids to do advanced coursework. But the tendency in practice to try to ensure an equitable outcome by denying advanced work to all kids is a disaster. My kid attends a diverse urban public school that’s about a quarter white. If they created an advanced math class for fourth graders, it’s true that the students in the class would be whiter than the school as a whole. But the upshot of not doing this is that my son sees a math tutor after school for more challenging work. The kids who actually lose out are the talented low-income kids whose parents can’t give them this kind of extra support.

Racial discrimination is a big problem

After 9/11, Americans wanted tougher counter-terrorism measures, but they also worried about things like privacy and the rights of the accused. On the right, it was taken as a given that the way to balance security and liberty was to engage in large-scale racial discrimination — in other words, significantly reduce civil liberties, but only for Arabs and Muslims.

And we continue to see similar debates over urban crime and policing. One of the two things that people call “broken windows” policing is the idea that cops should try to catch people committing low-level but easy-to-detect offenses (driving with a busted taillight, jumping the turnstile, open container violations), because that generates a basis to search them for concealed handguns and run their name for open warrants. Deterring illegal gun-carrying and effectively enforcing warrants are both highly effective crime control strategies, but since a concealed gun is, by definition, concealed, it’s hard to do this without some pretextual stop. This style of proactive crime control works. But there’s a reasonable concern in the Black community that in practice, it’s going to be differentially applied — that traffic enforcement will fall harder on all African-American motorists (particularly Black men), because the stops are pretextual and the cops have varying levels of underlying suspicion based on drivers’ racial identities.

I think the solution to that concern about discriminatory enforcement is to not do it.

When I was a teenager, some friends and I got busted on open container charges and were thoroughly searched. The cop could have saved himself some time by just verbally telling us to scram, because I think he could’ve reasonably guessed that we were probably not violent criminals. But instead, he appropriately followed the full procedure, because white people committing minor legal violations do not deserve to be given more lenient treatment on the basis of statistical guesses.

And this is the part of King’s dictum that conservatives tend to be uncomfortable with.

They hate the whole concept of white privilege. But it clearly is a privilege to go through life without being subject to negative stereotyping about your intellectual ability or your proclivity for violence. I’ve had the experience of walking fast at night and seeing someone turn and glance suspiciously at me because she hears my footsteps. But she sees a middle-aged white guy and it’s fine. Black and Latin friends have the opposite experience. They are much more deliberate about maintaining sufficiently upscale attire, even in casual settings, so that they aren’t judged as out of place. You’re not going to wave a magic wand and cause people not to make statistical inferences about strangers. But this is a real burden that people carry, and I think it’s correct to stigmatize this sort of discrimination and to make a strong effort to purge it from official policy and institutional conduct.

Identity politics as internal dysfunction

Beyond espousing a robust form of individualism as a policy message, Common Sense Democrats need to try to rid the party of its bad habit of over-prioritizing identity considerations in its internal calculus.

Biden announcing that he was only considering African-American women before filling what became Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court seat was an embarrassing spectacle that poorly served her own interests. In the real world, identity has always mattered in personnel selection (Antonin Scalia was picked as identity politics for Italians, and there used to be a “Jewish seat” on the Supreme Court), but that’s not the kind of thing you should say in public. And Biden had already made this mistake back in the summer of 2020 when he selected Kamala Harris as VP. He’d pre-committed to selecting a woman, then the post-Floyd protests made it seem like it would be good to select a Black woman, and he decided Harris was the best Black woman available. But she’s also an electoral under-performer from California who had no track-record of appealing to swing voters and who ran to Biden’s left in the primary but also wasn’t well-liked by progressives. That was a bad choice, and he should’ve widened his search.

These same dynamics brought white man Tim Walz onto the ticket in 2024.

Democrats are so identity-brained that they struggled to conceptualize Harris’s political weaknesses as stemming from anything other than identity, so they figured picking the most vanilla white man available would be a good idea, even though he was kind of a dud. Better candidates were available who were female or Jewish or gay. And, of course, Biden rather than Amy Klobuchar won the 2020 nomination in no small part because voters were convinced “electable” meant “a white man.”

This all just becomes a very destructive way of making decisions. It was absurd for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to denounce as racist the idea of Sonia Sotomayor making a strategically timed retirement. During the July Days crisis, we had people saying it was racist to ask the white president to step aside. It’s totally fair to demand that the interests of minority communities not be scanted in policymaking, but this vision of racial justice as a kind of giant spoils system is ridiculous. It also obviously doesn’t help the broad mass of Black and Hispanic people in the way that an expanded Child Tax Credit or making health care better would.

Of course symbolism and representation matter, to a point. But it’s a pretty limited point. People are mostly people, and you’re either making their lives better with policies that deliver broadly shared prosperity and quality public services, or you’re not.

Reifying racial categories is risky

As a light-skinned person with a Spanish last name and one Cuban-American grandparent, I think a lot about how progressives seem to have gotten way too invested in modes of thought that reify racial categorizations that we should be trying to dissolve.

Obviously, walking around like a doofus saying “I don’t even see race!” isn’t going to change the fact that race and racism do structure social life and experiences for many Americans. But it’s also the case that questions like “Are Arabs white?” don’t actually have factual answers, because these categories aren’t real. Unless you happen to know that the Sununu family origins are in the Greek Orthodox communities of Lebanon and Palestine, you’d never think Chris Sununu was anything other than a standard-issue white guy. But there are Arab-Americans with darker skin, with less assimilated family backgrounds, and with different religious identities that make them more distant from whiteness. There was a funny moment after Anya Taylor-Joy won a Golden Globe where she was described as a “woman of color” because she’s from Argentina.

That’s silly in a kind of obvious way. But when you insist on making people jump through these racial categorization hoops, you need to make these calls. When I was at Vox, we had to do a diversity exercise that required us to make calls about how to classify a person of Iranian ancestry and whether I should count as Hispanic. How about half-Brazilian Ezra Klein? Is a Filipino guy Asian or Latin? None of this has very much to do with the major inequities in American society. But the way affirmative action in college admissions and many other diversity initiatives work raises the stakes around these kind of categorizations. I met a woman in college who was the daughter of a coffee plantation owner in Central America and another whose dad was part of the Fujimori dictatorship in Peru. They (and I) all counted toward the diversity stats, and we were all fine people and okay students, but our presence at Harvard was not advancing social mobility or justice.

I think a lot of people who are aware that diversity programming is a little silly and ineffectual nonetheless see it as a kind of second-best alternative to true justice, or else feel that complaining about it is cringe and bad. But these programs are often directly counterproductive and can actually increase animosity, so it’s worth complaining.

Beyond that, I think the impulse to slice and dice people into racial groups fundamentally undermines solidarity. Historically, trying to get people to pay attention to racial difference was a right-wing plot to prevent egalitarian economic policy. In his later, more radical phase, King focused less on identity and more on universalistic economic programs, doing takes like this:

• “This proposal is not a ‘civil rights’ program, in the sense that the term is currently used. The program would benefit all the poor, including the two-thirds of them who are white.” [“Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community”]

• “We shall eliminate slums for Negroes when we destroy ghettos and build new cities for all. We shall eliminate unemployment for Negroes when we demand full and fair employment for all. We shall produce an educated and skilled Negro mass when we achieve a twentieth century educational system for all.” [Forward to “A Freedom Budget for All Americans”]

• “I feel that this movement in behalf of the poor is the most moral thing — it is saying that every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth.” [Interview with Jose Yglesias]

King was murdered shortly after this, and we got Nixon, oil shocks, Reagan, and all the rest. But that vision is still a better path forward for justice than our current DEI programs, microaggression suppression efforts, and affirmative action. At their best, the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations all pursued these ideals of inclusive economic growth and good public services, and that is still the most effective framework for addressing these issues.