“Identity politics defines peoples’ identities according to the groups they occupy, whether those groups are based on gender, race, class, religion, sexual orientation, or something else. It is a way of thinking which the democratic West learned at least in part through the twentieth-century women’s rights and civil right’s movements.”
This race conversation in America today is hard. So hard. This is not only true outside the church, but inside the church.
The conversation is hard because it is a deeply and inevitably political one. By this I mean it involves the structure and shape of our relationships inside the American body politic, and these structures define our identities and our opportunities in relation to one another. The conversation is hard because it touches on people’s understanding of justice, and our ideas about justice differ. And it is hard because it is filled with emotionally-freighted and hard-to-pin-down terms like “narrative of oppression” and “white privilege” and “micro-aggressions.”
Yet the contemporary American conversation about race is especially perplexing for us as Christians, whether we’re Black, White, Asian, or Hispanic, because it is motivated by one of two brands of politics: identity politics or a gospel politics.
The first is a politics of power. The second is a politics of love. The first is a worldly ideology, which careens back and forth between utopian and nihilistic. The second is not of this world, rooting instead in the vicarious righteousness of Christ. It leaves no room for boasting. You might find shadows and simulacrums of it outside the church, but it belongs especially to the church.
What’s perplexing is, identity politics and gospel politics will sometimes say the same things, like a false friend who mimics a true friend often enough that you begin to mistake the false friend for the true. Identity politics will say right things. But it is a false savior. Or rather, it is no savior. It offers no salvation, no redemption. If anything, it can exacerbate the divisions between groups of people.
But in gospel politics—oh, here we find hope!
IDENTITY POLITICS
Identity politics defines peoples’ identities according to the groups they occupy, whether those groups are based on gender, race, class, religion, sexual orientation, or something else. It is a way of thinking which the democratic West learned at least in part through the twentieth-century women’s rights and civil right’s movements. At the level of public conversation, identity politics aims to give a voice to the oppressed and to raise the public’s consciousness of that oppression. This is what we hear in campaign speeches, television talk shows, and workplace speech codes. And to a Christian way of thinking, all this can sound reasonable. How many times do we hear the God of the Prophets inveigh, “Woe to him who judges unjustly!”
At a deeper, more philosophical level, however, identity politics is one of the few species of belief left on the desolate and post-apocalyptic landscape of postmodernism. Truth has died. The individual self is extinct. All that’s left is tribal power. People live and identify with their tribes, which themselves persist in a perpetual state of war, like a Mad Max movie. In the more radical, post-structuralist view, our very sense of self is the ephemeral cold-morning breath of our conversations and language groups. There is no “I.” What we think of as “I” or “myself” is a composite of all the tribes we inhabit: the values and words we learned from this family, that ethnic identity, that nation, that high school, that professional group, and so forth. Just as you are physically what you eat, so your social and psychological “self” is nothing more than the words you have heard and swallowed.
To be invited into a “conversation,” in this way of thinking, is to be invited into re-forming the self, since language completely defines our tribes and ourselves.
For instance, think of how evangelicals get breathy when they pray and overuse the word “just.” “Lord, we just ask that…” What might that breathy earnestness reveal about our concept of God and ourselves? The structuralist and post-structuralist would explore these kinds of clues to find the evangelical community’s sense of identity, power, and source of personal inner coherence for all its members.
Or think of all the attention given to “sounding Black” or “sounding White” in America today. On one occasion in an upper-level English class in college (circa 1993), I remember the lone African-American in the classroom said the word “ask,” and then corrected himself: “. . . ask, I mean, aks . . .” At the time, I probably quietly condemned his self-correction. But what was he doing? I assume he was asserting his independence and identity over and against the White majority, and such assertions are not always a bad thing.
So in the world of identity politics, inviting someone into a conversation is often a political maneuver: I’m not happy about the status quo, and so I want to speak to you about who you think “you” are as well as who “I” am. Behind that language, remember, is nothing else—no shared essence, no absolute substance. Or so would say a fully secular identity politics. Our entire social and psychological lives are socially constructed: our selves, our laws, our whole social and moral universe.
WHY WHITES BALK
Whites tend to divide over America’s race conversation. In my very limited view of things, Whites in the political center and on the left will acknowledge the phenomenon of “White privilege” and the larger structural injustices from which they benefit. When news events like the episode in Ferguson, Missouri, occur, the progressive blogger enjoins, “Now is a time for us Whites not to speak, but to listen.”
Such counsel is well-meaning and probably pastorally astute, but Whites further to the political right interpret such invitations as a power move. The political subtext is, “Here, in this major area of social struggle and upheaval, where profound questions of justice are at play, our skin color makes our thinking on this matter suspect. Instead, we must be told what to think!” And so arises on the political right dismissive complaints about “White guilt.”
Faced with what feel like a levitical administration of political correctness and all the rules of race speech, these Whites back away from the conversation and refuse to acknowledge what they really think for fear of being called a racist and cast outside the sacred public square. Ultimately, the final state of the race conversation just might be more divided than its beginning. The majority suspects the minority of trying to control the conversation and them; the minority deepens in suspicion toward the majority for avoiding the conversation. And so the culture war deepens, each side trusting the other slightly less than before.
WHY MINORITIES ARE FRUSTRATED
In response to all this, minorities and progressive Whites observe that White America’s refusal to join the conversation, even if it is only to listen, is itself a power move. Note especially: a White can walk away from the conversation and ignore it because—on the whole—power still rests in White hands, if nothing else by virtue of being in the statistical majority but also because historical patterns of structural inequities (like, what neighborhood do you live in and how are the schools there?) possess significant inertia. Minorities cannot walk away from the conversation. They live in it. To step outside of their house every day is to sign up for yet another race seminar.
It appears then that a White’s refusal to listen to what the other side has to say is less about justice than it is about self-interest. Whites don’t want to renegotiate the power structures because they presently work in their favor. They are like the parent who, instead of negotiating with a petitioning child, simply shuts down the conversation because he or she can.