Structural Racism, Identity Politics, and Re-tribalization
For those interested in the flourishing of the United States in a historically recognizable form, despite adverse criticisms under the headings of “structural racism” and “identity politics”; and despite an implied imperative for a “re-tribalization of society”; a single page from the Opinions section of a recent day’s print edition of the Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, September 7, 2021) is of considerable interest.
William McGurn remarks in his article, The Real Structural Racism, that if ever there were a structure impairing the success of African-American students, then it would be the public schools in major cities of the U.S. In the most recent results (2019) of the National Assessment of Educational Progress for 27 U.S. urban school districts - - from Boston to Los Angeles - - none of these school districts can say that a majority of its black eighth graders are proficient in either math or reading. Detroit’s results are worst of all, showing a 4% proficiency in math and a 5% proficiency in reading. The highest proficiency in math (24%) was achieved in Charlotte, while the highest proficiency in reading (20%) was achieved in Boston. Meanwhile, the most richly supported public schools spent from $16,543 per student (Seattle) to $28,004 per student (New York City).
There is no mention of cinematography in McGurn’s article, but we note in passing that a recent popular film, Hidden Figures, chronicled a very talented trio of high-achieving black female workers in the highly technical NASA programs (“Space Race”) of the 1960’s. (The filmmaker took some liberties with historical facts, but those liberties seem not to invalidate the focus of the film.) This trio of technical workers was doubly blessed, being not only talented but also coming from solid family backgrounds. Seeing the universal in the particular, as we are wont to do whenever appropriate, there is no good reason not to expect high scores in math and reading among contemporary black eighth graders who live in solid family backgrounds conducive to the completion of homework.
McGurn notes that some progressives, embarrassed by the meager educational results for black eighth graders, have shifted their focus to getting rid of the achievement tests that expose this failure. Once free of irksome tests for eighth and twelfth graders, it is proposed that future reliance on race-based college admissions can disguise academic deficiencies. As various courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, consider suits stemming from race-based college admissions, McGurn suggests that the key question to consider is: Do school failures at the eighth (and subsequent) grade levels justify rigging college admissions to exclude some high-achieving students in favor of other applicants whose acceptance, due to “social-promotion,” will devalue college degrees?
By “identity politics,” the current reviewer understands any process that privileges or penalizes certain individuals in society on some basis other than objective merit, including the property rights that express the wills of meritorious individuals. Non-meritocratic factors include ethnicity, race, culture, religion, and language. Any full-scale program of identity politics includes the destruction of the notion of objective merit, leaving one to wonder whether an identity-politics enthusiast would really prefer that the pilot of his next flight be chosen from an ethnic lottery rather than from a pool of competent and tested individuals.
Discussions of identity politics often employ, confusingly, the problematic terms “tribe” and “tribalism.” A tribe in the ancient Roman Republic (509 to 27 B.C.) was one of the 35 geographically-determined voting blocs of the Roman plebeians in their Council of the Plebs. However, the plebs defined themselves in opposition to the patricians. If “identity politics” is to be read into the ancient Roman world, then this reading would seem to be based upon the struggle between plebs and patricians; and not upon any difficulties between tribes, all of whom were plebeian. Nevertheless, we will take “tribe” to refer to be any grouping of people according to ethnicity, race, culture, language, or religion.
The entire project of reading “identity politics” back into ancient Roman history is problematic: When the armies of Rome first confronted Germanic tribes in the Cimbrian War (113-101 B.C.), the Romans certainly disdained what they saw as the Germans’ inferior culture, religion, and language. But the (relatively brown) Romans did not disdain the (relatively white) Germans based on skin color; because, as the classical philologist V. D. Hanson has written in his article, Classical patricide, “Whiteness itself was a concept completely unknown to the Greeks and Romans. No such word exists in the classical vocabularies of the ancient world, the supposed font of endemic Western racism.”
In his article, Identity Politics Goes Global, Walter Russell Mead surveys some political trends of the past century or so that reveal identity politics to be destructive in the sense of reducing a nation’s domestic prosperity and stability, as well as its international influence and security.
Mead notes that many modern African nations inherited geographical boundaries from colonial times, irrespective of historical tribal boundaries. The post-World War II presupposition among professional diplomats was that tribalism was primitive, atavistic, and ethically tacky. Modern diplomacy then assumed that any tribe member assigned to a certain, modern-day nation would automatically be pleased to vote alongside the members of all other tribes within that nation. Hence, there was a wide-spread expectation that tribalism would wane even while allegiance to the rulers within newly defined national boundaries would flourish.
In defiance of the expectation for the straightforward development of African nations, some of those new nations broke up due to cultural, religious, and language factors. The citizens of some failed states saw no good reason to be co-governed by members of cultural, religious, and language groupings other than their own. In Nigeria, the central government has not been able to suppress Christian-Muslim conflict that has led to tens of thousands of deaths. In South Africa, Zulus have staged a recent insurrection (or at least a quasi-insurrection) in support of a former national leader. Similar conflicts have arisen in the regions near Ethiopia and Sudan. Sudan spun off South Sudan in 2011; South Sudan may further split. English-speakers and French-speakers are battling each other in Cameroon. Economic development has not overcome tribal differences in these cases.
Mead sees other historical examples of identity politics as well: In Eastern and Central Europe before World War I, increasing education and self-awareness led to nationalistic aspirations among groups within the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires. The assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist precipitated World War I. Today, fierce fighting exists within such countries as Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon; and this fighting can be viewed as the result of identity politics.
Mead likewise observes that “many Americans wonder whether a common U.S. identity is strong enough to contain the forces that threaten to splinter the country permanently into hostile racial, religious, and ideological camps.”
The current reviewer observes that “civic religion” and economic development in the U.S. helped to create a melting pot of people who agreed to pursue economic interests; to promote abstract notions of international justice; and to ignore traditionally contentious issues in the realms of culture, religion, and language. Thus, the U.S. is the unique, centuries-long experiment of creating and maintaining a non-tribal society based on merit. The current effect of identity politics is to reverse the melting-pot process, to drive wedges between ethnic groups, to override evaluations based on merit, to instill doubt about the results of one’s next airplane trip or surgical procedure, and to re-tribalize society under new bureaucratic leadership.