When a member of the House of Representatives was accused recently of making anti-Semitic remarks, some of her accusers supported their accusations by saying that her remarks were “hurtful.” What an odd thing to say. Anti-Semitism is odious, unjust, and wrong. Why not use those words to describe it? Why call it “hurtful?”
The answer becomes clear if we consider this exchange between a professor and a student that took place at Evergreen State College in Washington, as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education. When the self-described progressive professor objected to the plans of certain students and faculty on his campus, he defended himself by saying, “I am talking about terms that serve the truth.” The student responded, “We don’t care what terms you want to speak on. We are not speaking on terms of white privilege.”
What the student meant was that the most important fact about the professor’s words was not whether they were logically consistent or based on evidence, and thus true or false. The important thing was that they were spoken by a white man, and therefore the student chose to deem them worthless.
Another Evergreen professor reportedly remarked about his colleague’s objections that it was “unintentionally racist, but racist nonetheless” for a white person [the professor] to question the wisdom of [students] who “know the experiences of exclusion and oppression.” This professor was pointing to the inevitable result of privileging, as people now say, identity over truth.
When truth gives way to identity, logic, and evidence inevitably give way to mere experience and the feelings that accompany that experience. What else is left? Thus, the proof that a statement is anti-Semitic is that it hurt someone’s feelings.
Certainly anti-Semitism does hurt feelings, but to object to it only on that ground is trivializing. But the harmful effects of replacing truth with identity go well beyond trivializing anti-Semitism and other forms of prejudice.
Those who see identity as fundamental also tell us that it is changeable or fluid. Gender, for example, is held not to be natural, but rather assigned and subject to change according to the feelings or will of each individual. Gender and other forms of identity have no basis, therefore, other than the will of the individual who asserts an identity.
But if identity is the source of truth, and identity is a matter of will, then truth — and all claims of oppression and injustice — are also only matters of will. This is the point where identity politics produces its greatest harm.
If issues of justice and oppression must be decided on identity or mere willfulness, then no one can appeal to facts and evidence to bridge the gap between opposing views. Politics can only be about asserting power, as in the confrontation between the student and the professor described above. The student was in effect telling the professor, “You’re wrong because you’re white. Shut up and obey.”
Identity politics leaves no room for civil discussion. It inevitably leads to power politics, a modern euphemism for tyranny.
There is a terrible irony here. Those who decry injustice and oppression on the basis of their identity make the same argument that antebellum slave owners made when they claimed the right to rule, indeed, to own, others solely on the basis of race.
Fortunately for all of us, the slave owners met their match in Abraham Lincoln. Politics being what it is, Lincoln needed armies to destroy the institution of slavery, but Lincoln and all who supported him knew his armies marched in the cause of right and justice because of the irrefutable logic of Lincoln’s words.
It is to those words, inspired by the claim of human equality in the Declaration of Independence, that all who today care about justice and freedom may still turn.
David Tucker, Ph.D. is the Director of Teacher Programs at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, Ashland, Ohio, and General Editor of Ashbrook’s “Core Document Collections.”
