The Unintended Consequences of Identity Politics

History is a tale of unintended consequences. Take the existence of Palestinian nationalism. "Palestinian" did not exist as a self-conscious identity prior to the creation of modern Israel. The Arabs who lived in what would become Palestine did not see themselves as Palestinians, but as part of the Muslim Ummah, or Arab nation, or Greater Syrian subset of the Arab nation. The Jewish intellectual Gershom Scholem observed, "We educated the Arabs about nationalism. It was our very existence that created Arab national consciousness. That is the peculiar dialectic of history and I'm not sure that there is any escape from it." Palestinian identify developed in symbiotic response to the emergence of Israeli identity. Israel unwittingly created Palestine, just as anti-Semites unwittingly created Zionism, by dashing the assimilationist dreams of European Jews like Theodor Herzl.

Today, I see the "peculiar dialectic of history" that Scholem spoke of working on various fronts. Its incubator is typically the university. (I speak as a Canadian, but I take it that American colleges function in a similar manner.) The university celebrates multiculturalism. Every cultural group has its own club, and will often man a table in the concourse to advertise or proselytize or raise funds. When I was an undergraduate, an acquaintance spoke half-jokingly of forming a Western European club. This acquaintance was not a right-wing radical, or a racist, or even someone particularly political at all. She simply thought, "Everyone else has a club, so why not us?" The idea never came to fruition but it will, eventually. As the multicultural paradigm becomes ever more dominant, the formerly majority culture will become but one culture among many (as it already has in many major cities, i.e. in Canada, Toronto), and develop similar institutions of cultural representation.

Darker-skinned folks are trained by universities to identify themselves as "racialized." The term "racialized" acknowledges that race is a construct, yet the bearer claims the right to a racial identity based upon the fact that other people define her by this social construct. As Hannah Arendt wrote, in the context of European anti-Semitism, "You can only defend yourself as the person you are attacked as. A person attacked as a Jew cannot defend himself as an Englishman or Frenchman. The world would only conclude that he is simply not defending himself." Barack Obama defines himself as black, though he is only really half-black, because most Americans see him as a black man. "Racialization" fortified if not created Obama's identity as a black man. Obviously one can, like Tiger Woods, stake out a multiracial identity even if most people see a drop of black as equal to fully black, but few people of any race are strong enough to go against society's flow.

When I am in my heavily white hometown of Hamilton, I am part of the white majority, and am not conscious of being "racialized." When I am busing to work in minority-majority Scarborough, I am aware of my heretofore non-existent or subliminal identity as a white person (even if, by some more stringent white people's definition, I am not white but "ethnic"). Demographically, the North American metropolitan future is Scarborough, not Hamilton. Consequentially, white or European racial consciousness will begin to be more frequently articulated, even if in a carefully post-postmodern, "racialized by the Other" sense. As my apolitical (and this qualifier is key, because most people are apolitical) university acquaintance said, "If everyone else has a club, why not us?" I am not making a value judgment here. I am simply predicting, based on what I know of social psychology, what I foresee happening.

The other modern example of the "peculiar dialectic" I wish to mention is the emergence of a self-consciously "masculinist" identity. Again, the university is typically the incubator; it is where the educated classes come to a rudimentary political and cultural self-awareness. "Feminism" is a broad term, but one wing of it, a wing with undue influence in the university, demonizes men. At the very least, that's how the situation is perceived, by both men and women I talked to who had taken Women's Studies courses in university. Recall Arendt: "You can only defend yourself as the person you are attacked as." Attacked as men, men will defend themselves as men. This is simply human nature. Men will, and already have begun to, articulate and defend their own group interests. Extreme masculinists will be the inverse of Andrea Dworkin and the "penetration is rape" school of feminist hyperbole. Cooler heads will, hopefully, push the movement in a more moderate position where it can meet feminism somewhere in the middle.

Feminists tend to be confused and/or threatened by a masculinist identity. This is because they think of men as the dominant class in society. Yes, most CEOs are men, but most men are not CEOs. Yes, most "players" are men, but most men are not players. The silent majority of men are no more "privileged" than women and, in some circumstances, less so. Where men are a minority, which includes the university and an increasing number of middle and upper-class professions, men will increasingly become conscious of themselves as a "genderized" interest group. Nice guys will no longer be content to finish last, but will begin to craft themselves a new social script as neither cretins nor milquetoast. Arguments about a history of oppression will not fly with newer generations who have not seen, and feel no responsibility for, "the sins of the fathers."

The peculiar dialectic can unfold in any number of ways. Recently, Europe witnessed the atrocities of a self-styled Christian Crusader, who clearly saw himself as the inverse of a Muslim Jihadist. A heightened Muslim corporate identity begets a heightened Western corporate identity, at least among a few (at first). Yet a heightened Western corporate identity need not manifest itself in violence. It can also manifest itself as a stronger, more cohesive society, willing to deal with other societies on the basis of mutual respect. On an individual level, a person aware of, and proud of who he/she is - whether this identity is biologically or socially constructed - need not hate who other people are. After all, who other people are helps define who we are, and vice versa.