Over the past few months, I’ve been routinely shocked by the GOP’s seemingly desperate search for an African American figurehead. It seems crazy, superficial, and, yes, racist to assume that blacks will vote for a black candidate because he’s black. When John McCain introduced the world to Sarah Palin in 2008, seemingly thinking she would soak up Hilary Clinton supporters bummed out with Obama, I couldn’t believe the audacity (and sexism and truly small-mindedness); when the GOP trotted out Michael Steele, it just seemed like a bad joke. I guess I should stop being shocked.
Republican leadership really thinks Americans just vote their identity. Besides reflecting an immensely shallow readings of both American politics and American citizens, I think the GOP’s take on “identity politics” shows exactly how little they understand the political, social, and cultural revolutions of the 1960s and their ripple effects through the present day. It’s like they really think African Americans just banded together and bent the American electorate to their will for their own political greed (and, I guess Reagan might assume, food stamps?). There is no sense of racial segregation, racial labor exploitation, or racial disenfranchisement—you know, the history of white people wielding such immense power over black and brown people that only through a racial collectivity could black and brown people hope to achieve a fraction of the rights and guarantees promised them as American citizens. Having zero sense of American history might also explain some Republicans and conservatives’ growing sense of victimization; these folks really do feel put-upon, if not tread-upon, by the rise of “identity politics” that, to them, reflects some amorphous and magical fulcrum by which liberals aim to implement their socialization of U.S. society (and their absconding of the nation’s gun supply). This lack of historical knowledge may also explain how white people understand their own banding together in the Republican party in the 1970s and 80s; it wasn’t racist, just a natural, white-identity response to the development of identity politics.
But what is so weird about this reading of American politics (then and now) is that white Americans invented “identity politics” long ago. “Anglo-Saxons” conceived racialized slavery and immigration quotas, locked Indians on reservations, and created a white republic. White people invented white privilege and racial discrimination. The fact that people of color only recently figured out some strategies for circumventing it (using American ideals as forged in declarations, constitutions, and laws, no less) does not mean that white power brokers are under attack all of the sudden. It means that they’re bullshit has been called for what it is.
The “Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy” that so worried Lothrop Stoddard has taken a century to break on North American shores, though non-whites these days are not particularly interested in enveloping and drowning out the “white race.” But growing immigration and expanding political rights among Americans does threaten to topple U.S. race relations as we know it. And yet, the GOP just thinks it needs to find the right black conservative to act as their dike in holding back changes over time.
