Recent controversies involving two women of color, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and conservative activist Candace Owens, reveal once again the identity politics in America’s public debate and private discourse. This ideology, along with the intolerance and political correctness it spawns, plagues both the Left and the Right and infects almost everyone — except President Trump.
When Trump tweeted a video juxtaposing Omar’s “Some people did something” quote with footage of the World Trade Towers in flames on Sept. 11, the Left predictably cried racism and sexism. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., described the linking of Omar’s remarks with the tragedy of Sept. 11 as “an incitement of violence against progressive women of color.”
Charles Blow, a New York Times columnist, accused Trump of continuing a white supremacist tradition of routinely painting minority women, “particularly those strong and vocal, as pathological and reprobate.”
Never mind that Omar has a pattern of making incendiary, anti-Semitic remarks. Never mind that the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the organization she addressed, was once named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal conspiracy to funnel money to Hamas, a terrorist organization. Never mind that in the context of Omar’s past comments and current associations, her critics have every reason to say that it is not okay for her to glibly dismiss the worst attacks on America in modern history as merely “some people did something.”
Yet in a world where members of the political Left see identity politics as their highest calling, crying racism and sexism is naturally their first response.
Alas, the Right cowers before identity politics just as well. This was on full display last week on Capitol Hill at the House Judiciary Committee hearing on “Hate Crimes and the Rise of White Nationalism.”
Republican members in the committee chose Owens, the communications director of conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA, as their witness. In her remarks, she accused Democrats on the committee of hyping white nationalism to send a message that “brown people need to be scared” before the 2020 elections.
Naturally, Democrats attacked her viciously for undermining their political agenda. The point of the hearing, after all, was to pin the rise in hate crimes and white nationalism on Trump. Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., spelled it out in his opening statement: “Unfortunately … the president’s rhetoric fans the flames with language that, whether intentional or not, may motivate and embolden white supremacist movements.”
Owens, a poised, articulate black woman who supports Trump, did not fit the Democrats’ narrative, especially not when she pointed out that her grandfather, sitting behind her at the hearing, “grew up in an America where words like ‘racism’ and ‘white nationalism’ held real meaning under the Democratic Party’s Jim Crow laws.”
Yet Republicans on the committee played a cynical game of identity politics in their own way. It was no accident that they chose a black woman to say what many of them felt was too racially risky to say on their own. While Owens was correct that black America has far more serious problems (such as the absence of black fathers) than the national epidemic of white nationalism that Democrats hope to conjure up, Republicans turned her into their version of tokenism.
In fact, the most straightforward answer to the Left’s unrelenting charge that the president is fanning white nationalism is that there is a difference between not observing the rules of political correctness and being racist. The president is no racist, he just doesn’t play by the rules, and thinking people ought to be able to distinguish the two.
Yet this is something House Republicans are too afraid to say themselves. Instead, they found a black woman to talk about how much Trump has done for black employment and how little Democrats have done for the black community in the modern era.
As much as Republicans claim to detest identity politics, they bend to it. Then again, they are merely doing what they often do: grabbing onto black conservatives when it is necessary to say something serious and difficult about race.
In the end, the only person who turned out to be the true enemy of identity politics was Trump. He did not ask a Muslim supporter to criticize Ilhan Omar; he went after Omar himself. He has never had to ask a Hispanic conservative to attack Omar’s ally and fierce Trump critic Ocasio-Cortez. Trump regularly attacks Ocasio-Cortez himself too.
It is not always pretty, but it is not racism or sexism. Perhaps through President Trump’s utter disregard for the conventions of political correctness, people can finally begin to cast aside this corrosive ideology.
Ying Ma is the author of “Chinese Girl in the Ghetto,” which was released in audiobook in 2018. During the 2016 election, she served as the deputy director of the Committee for American Sovereignty, a pro-Trump super PAC, and the deputy policy director and deputy communications director of the Ben Carson presidential campaign. Follow her on Twitter: @GZtoGhetto.
