Identity politics is harmful to democracy, unless you're a white male

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Chad Rubel

Playing the "victim" card works a lot easier when you actually are the victim.

Watching some evangelical Christians claim that they are the victims in this country, when they hold more power than they deserve, is laughable. And as a white male, watching Newt Gingrich, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh claim reverse racism on the Sonia Sotomayor nomination would be funny if it weren't so sad.

If you think white males are privileged, try being a conservative white male who is part of the establishment. They have privilege on top of privilege.

Gingrich had the gall to ask Sotomayor to withdraw her nomination because he quoted -- grossly out of context - a whole paragraph from an October 2001 lecture Sotomayor delivered at UC-Berkeley.

Since Gingrich claims to work from history, let's dazzle him with a historical context. There have been 110 Supreme Court justices in the history of the court: of those 110, 106 of them have been white males. In case Gingrich isn't good at math, that is a healthy 96.4%. That is privilege.

There have been two women on the court for 1.8% of the court. Given that make up slightly more than half of the population, that mark falls a little short.

By contrast, on Canada's Supreme Court, 7 of the 80 justices (8.7%) have been women. Of the current court, 4 of the 9 are women, including Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, who has presided over the court since January 2000. So if Sotomayor gets approved, the United States will have one fewer woman in the history of the court as Canada has in its current court.

Watching Gingrich, Limbaugh and the other social Luddites freak out isn't just about being a white male. It's about the loss of identity -- they grew up sheltered in an era where role models in a wide range of fields were white males, just like them.

They are afraid of change of any kind, whether it be gay marriage or immigrants of a different color from themselves or women in powerful roles lording over them. The chagrin of having a Latina woman sitting on the highest court of the land is almost more than they could stand.

Years ago, this reporter wrote a column on how marketers were targeting the "angry white male" in the mid-1990s, not long after the Gingrich revolution had started its damage trail. The letter writers in response (back in the days of letters) were not happy with the topic or me. But their main issue was why marketers wanted the attention of the angry white males.

The answer is that once you've had privilege, it can be difficult to give that up. And if you have privilege based in part on discrimination, you might feel like any sort of "loss" is due to reverse discrimination.

What has kept the dinosaurs going for much longer than they should have is that their fear tactics worked very well on their audience. Not counting the 2008 election, white males by and large have voted conservative and Republican for a long time.

The change they fear isn't nearly as bad as they make it out to be, ironically, because opportunities to diversify don't involve revenge. People just want the opportunity to show that if you work hard enough -- let's say #2 in your college graduation class (Sotomayor) or be the president of the Harvard Law Review (Obama) -- you can make it, even if you aren't a white male.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

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