The identity politics so promiscuously practiced by the Democratic presidential candidates leads to remarkably racialist, if not racist, assumptions. Witness a statement made in the Democratic presidential debate by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.
Gillibrand specifically said that because she is a “white woman of privilege,” she can go to suburban areas and sell them on liberal candidates and priorities in ways that dark-complexioned candidates such as Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris cannot. Seriously. She’s saying candidates like Cory Booker and Kamala Harris can’t compete with white voters.
She didn’t mean it this way, but her statement carried echoes of 1960s segregationists saying that the “negroes” just don’t know how to talk to our good upstanding ladies behind their neighborly white picket fences. Add to that the fact that black candidates have indeed succeeded with such demographics — President Barack Obama, Booker, and Harris among them.
Gillibrand’s statement is morally wrongheaded. It is the sort of assumption that should never be made.
Yet such an assumption is the obvious and almost inevitable end result of leftist identity politics. Rather than support the dream of Martin Luther King Jr. that skin color and ethnicity will no longer matter — rather than supporting color-blindness — today’s leftists emphasize color, ethnicity, and other such physical identifiers as being paramount, of greater importance than character or other traits that result from personal choices.
These candidates may call themselves “progressives,” but this is not progress. This is reactionary. It hearkens back to the 1940s. It is indefensible. And it speaks very ill of Gillibrand’s understanding of human dignity.
