The contradictions in leftist identity politics
The seeming stupidity of Elizabeth Warren claiming Native American status on the basis of her paltry DNA results points to some deep problems in the leftist identity politics narrative. It goes something like this:
(1) For some identities, leftism dictates that they are self-defined and ignore physical biology. The person creates his or her own reality, and this is most readily apparent with the transgender movement. In fact, once a person has formally identified as a man or a woman, regardless of his or her birth gender, then the world is required to address that person by the preferred gender pronouns whether that new gender seems to fit the person’s appearance or not, and whether or not that person has had sex reassignment surgery. This has already caused some problems in sports (see this, for example).
(2) The history of the assignment of racial identity is fraught with difficult decisions to be made about the governing rules. This is true whether the purpose is discrimination (apartheid, Jim Crow South, Nazis) or the conferring of benefits (affirmative action in the present-day US). Warren tried to take advantage of a minority status in order to gain such advantage in the hiring process (although she denies that motivation). Whatever her reasons, the real question is at what point it becomes ridiculous to claim such racial ties. Warren definitely went far beyond that point; she is no more Native American than most Americans of European descent who wouldn’t even think of claiming it, and a good deal less than some.
(3) Same for Rachel Dolezal, who appears to have had a different motive for her identification with black people although she’s white, probably an emotional one. At any rate, her case highlighted the conflict between the leftist rules about gender identity and the ones about racial identity.
(4) Warren’s case also makes it clear that if she meets the criteria for being a minority, then virtually all of us do, because most people have traces of other races (and often even other species, for example Neanderthals). Once it is accepted that a small amount of a race is enough to confer membership in that race, then the entire edifice collapses because almost anyone could claim membership in any race.
(5) That brings us right back to the more basic question: what is race, how can it be determined, and what is the purpose of such categorization? Why at this point do we have affirmative action or quotas? Why are some races favored and others not? Harvard is having to deal with this question right now regarding their treatment of Asian applicants, and I eagerly await the results of that lawsuit.
[NOTE: It occurs to me that I should point out that the left doesn’t care about the contradictions, although it’s inconvenient for them to have them pointed out. But since the left will say that 2+2=5 if necessary, contradictions are really no big problem for them.]
The whole system of dividing people up by “race” collapses under its own weight, and Warren has show the utter ludicrousness of the whole concept.
One one-thousandth of your genetic make-up assigns you to a “race”, but the presence or absence of an etire chromosome (the Y chromosome) is completely irrelevant when determining your sex.
The logical contradiction hits you in the face with the force of a false gang-rape accusation. I think a lot of people will start to realize this, but I expect nothing will change on the left.
Race is part of our biological identity, no matter what some say about “skin deep.” Black males have a higher risk of prostate cancer. Blacks of both sexes have a higher risk of high blood pressure. I have had a theory, unsupported by evidence, that western hemisphere blacks with a history of slavery in ancestors, may have a greater risk because salt conservation was an evolutionary factor in surviving the Middle Passage. The only way this could be studied is with blood pressure studies in black Africans. There is almost no evidence.
There has been one lawsuit complaining that Hawaiians were not warned about side effects on the basis or race.
Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and Sanofi were accused in a lawsuit by Hawaii of failing to disclose that the blood-thinning drug Plavix has little effect on 30 percent of the population and puts patients at risk for gastrointestinal bleeding.
From 38 percent to 79 percent of Pacific-Islanders and 40 percent to 50 percent of East Asians may respond poorly to Plavix because of a genetic predisposition to inadequately metabolize the drug, Hawaii Attorney General David Louie said in an e-mailed statement. The companies failed to disclose the information to protect their profit from Plavix prescriptions, he said in a complaint today in state court in Honolulu.
Political correctness is preventing a lot of research. How about kids raised in same sex marriages? And so on.
On a tangential but related issue Pamela Paresky discusses tribalism and moral pollution in a recent review of Lukianoff’s and Haidt’s book The Coddling of the American Mind. She discusses characteristic leftist “argumentation” and eventually (see the subheading “Taboo and Moral Pollution”) discusses the need and use of moral prohibitions and taboos.
She concentrates on concepts and does not write an anti-progressive screed, but the parallels to the Progressivise movement are are very clear and relate to Neo’s points with regard to Warren above.
It’s a little lengthy but IMO a good read.
The Link:
https://quillette.com/2018/10/14/moral-pollution-in-place-of-reasoned-critique/
Diversity or color judgments a.k.a. “identity politics” including racism, sexism, ageism, etc.
Sex is binary: male and female, dictated through genotype. Gender is binary: masculine and feminine, a spectrum of physical and mental (e.g. sexual orientation) attributes established through phenotype. The transgender spectrum encompasses individuals who exhibit a significant divergence between their sex and gender, including: homosexuals, bisexuals, neo-males/females, transvestites, etc.
Race refers to a combination of biological, jurisdictional, and character alignments.
I don’t know if my lengthy comment ended up in moderation or was deleted.
MikeK:
Your comment went into the spam folder for mysterious reasons. The spam folder has been a little overactive lately, also for mysterious reasons.
I took it out of spam and it now appears here. Thanks for letting me know.
‘Gender is binary: masculine and feminine, a spectrum of physical and mental (e.g. sexual orientation) attributes established through phenotype.”
When I was living in Germany I learned from my German teacher that gender is masculine, feminine and neuter. Even worse, some of those nouns were transgender and would switch genders on you when you weren’t expecting it. I asked my German teacher how to avoid this gender confusion and she said to ignore it, it even confuses the Germans.
“Sex is binary: male and female, dictated through genotype. Gender is binary: masculine and feminine. . . .” [n.n. @ 2:41 pm]
I offer that you’re painting with too broad a brush. Gender is a linguistic construction and it is not binary; at the very least it is tertiary. Many non-English languages use different genders for different nouns; the noun “moon” is usually feminine (Die Mond, La lune) while the noun “land” is usually masculine (Das Land, le pays). While it is formalized in non-English languages, even in English we have three genders (masculine “he”, feminine “she”, and neuter “it”). Futhermore, again even in English, we colloquially refer to certain nouns by gender-specific pronouns (e.g., ships and sometimes automobiles = “she”).
The mistake that’s made, IMO, is that the linguistic construction “gender” (a fabrication) is substituted for the sexual distinction “male/female” (a reality).
Even in the biological sense, although physical sexual differentiation is basically binary it is not 100% binary. For example, in the animal kingdom, hermaphrodism exists not just as a rare individual anomaly but as the default position in some species (granted, not a lot of species, but a fair number):
In humans, hermaphrodism (and intersex births, a more popular term these days and one that includes more categories than classic hermaphrodism but does NOT include people who identify as transgender but don’t have physical syndromes and anomalies) is more of an individual event that is relatively rare:
If you want to know about prevalence, see this. The gist of it is that true prevalence figures are hard to come by, but in terms of percentages of the human population these events are rare, but nevertheless because the human population is so large they affect pretty large numbers of people.
Some people who are intersex, such as some of those with androgen insensitivity syndrome, outwardly appear completely female or male, frequently without realizing they are intersex.
One such is a major Hollywood actress well known for appearing at rallies and giving far left speeches. I like her acting in several films. She is an example of what is now called “Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome,” and used to be called “Testicular Feminization Syndrome.”
Read “The Pathology of Identity Politics” by Nicholas Capaldi in the current issue of Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars.
https://www.nas.org/articles/identity_politics
This is a bait-and-switch operation. She’s trying to use evidence of (unspecified, undifferentiated, negligible) native American ancestry as vindication of her claim of membership or blood relation to one or more particular tribes.
That’s like me saying “oh, I’m related to the British royal family” and then showing my 77% English DNA result as the “proof”.
Also, it’s darkly amusing to watch Indian advocates I’ve known for years turn on a dime and abandon their long-standing position that the tribes get to decide who’s a member and who isn’t. Suddenly, it’s “well, they only had to set those rules because the white government forced them to.” Sure, whatever you say.
“Warren’s case also makes it clear that if she meets the criteria for being a minority, then virtually all of us do, because most people have traces of other races ” – Neo
https://static.pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/warrenivory-600×530.jpg