The Pitfalls of Group Identities
I was reading news articles online and found myself perusing the HuffPost blog site.[1] I clicked on their menu icon and scrolled. About half a scroll later I came across their “Communities” page. Where, apparently, the voices of the community are. In particular, they list the following. Queer voices; Latino voices; Women’s voices; Asian voices and Black voices. I thought it interesting that they stopped at five community voices listed. It got me thinking about the identity politics that have taken over so much of the political landscape and wondering what truth and meaning, if any, are intrinsic in dividing people into such selected groups.
First it may be fair, (since proponents of identity politics always speak of fairness) that if you have an Asian voice you should have a Native American voice. That if you have a women’s voice you should have a men’s voice, (I'll probably get slammed for that one). If you have a Black and Latino voice, have a White voice, (although I suspect that some white voices over at HuffPost speak on behalf of the Black and Latino voices). And if you have queer voices you should have straight voices. OK. Now that I’ve ruffled some feathers let’s get real. The world is a tough place to spend your life in, but what other choice do we have? Although someday those that are unhappy here may be able to hop on the next interplanetary flight and go to Mars.[2] In the meantime, we have to deal with this blue marbled beauty we call earth. You have to understand that as life progresses so will the pain of unfairness and injustice. We certainly need to figure out the best way to cope with this. My problem is that pointing out the fact that differences in humans exist and that we should treat them as equal is Utopian thinking and misguided. Having people grouped in the manner we did above drives people apart.
In the movie, Fast Five, I love how the team is introduced and put together. You have the Chameleon, the Fast Talker, the Circuit Expert, Utility and Weapons experts and two Precision Drivers.[3] And while that works nice in a movie it’s hard to pick a team in the same way in real life. Think about picking a business team in that way.
“OK people, we are going to put a team together for a particular project, we are going to need one woman, but she can’t be white, she must be Latina or Black. Also, we are going to need a gay man and a lesbian. One Asian man and one white man that we can drop from the team, he needs to learn that we won’t accept white male privilege here.” Think about job ads saying, “seeking Asian man to fill manager position.” What if sports teams had to pick their players in the same way. In basketball the center will have to be a little person because we don’t want to discriminate. Do you see the absurdity in it all? Martin Luther King Jr said it best, “I have a dream, that my four little children, will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” To understand such a statement is to know that to judge anyone on anything other than the content of their character is misguided and wrong. And to exclude people on the same basis is wrong too. And yet that is what we do when we tag people in such a way.
I am an American. I have an American culture. I was raised in Chicago, one of the most diverse cities in America. Furthermore, I am a member of the human race. If you label me, am I supposed to accept to be treated in a particular way? I can get a special scholarship or get the job because I am of Spanish descent and no longer have to earn my keep. I belong to a group and will rave and rant until someone gets me what I want. That is no way to live and it’s an affront to being human.
Human rights are self-evident. The Declaration of Independence written and adopted by flawed men[4] that were seeking to flesh out their belief in human freedom put it this way, “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The word men here is representative of men and women; if you do not see the obvious use of that here then you should read more.[5] The Declaration states that Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are among the unalienable rights that we have. The statement here does not differentiate races or sex or stature. And while we can add other defining words here like justice and to defend the inherent dignity of every human being; it does not allow for further protections on the basis of a person’s color, orientation, ethnicity or any other such definitions.[6] We understand that people are different. But the human race is one. We have to be willing to sacrifice some parts of ourselves in order to contribute to a society desiring to live in harmony.
The HuffPost should have a “Communities” section. But it did not have to go any further than that. The community at large includes us all. Our human value is not in our whiteness, blackness, brownness or anything like that but on the content of our characters. (And not diverse emoji characters and their proponents, whose pathetic attempt at inclusiveness keeps the wrong issue at the forefront).[7] If you have anything to say, say it as a person and not through a branded lens of politically correct categorizing terms.
I understand that in our society we have seen injustices done to people. Some of these injustices were committed by individuals who justified their acts based on unreasonable ideologies of superiority based on false presuppositions. At times this mindset has been poured out onto bigger groups of people whose sole purpose in gathering, is to plot harm to a fellow human being. Some injustices are committed by people who relentlessly hate others regardless of any differences. They have an inward grown hate that manifests itself in mass displays of tragedy. It should be no surprise that in a world that gave us the horrors of the Holocaust and the Gulag that people will commit injustices on one another.
I posit that we endeavor to find truth and meaning where it matters most. At the level of the individual. That we allow ourselves to see our own uniqueness but those of others as well. That this may lead to a better understanding of the whole. Which in turn may produce the right kind of changes, whether in cultural norms or legislative acts. That we defend the most basic dignity of all people without resorting to a game of categories that displays not the best in people but the worst. That we start the journey in our own hearts before we venture out any further and become the ones that will continue to tear apart the fabric of common human values that has been woven together by the very nature that bonded and created us in an image more spectacular that we could ever imagine.
[1] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (see menu options)
[2] https://www.spacex.com/mars “Mission to Mars”
[3] https://www.scripts.com/script.php?id=fast_five_8037&p=7
[4] Thomas Jefferson is accredited with the Authorship, however it was edited and adopted by congress and had 56 signatures.
[5] https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=man (understanding how the word man or its plural is used in reference to both men and woman is important in order to not misread something as vital as the Declaration of Independence or other works written with these type of references)
[6] Please note my statement here is not in ignorance of real problems regarding certain abuses to segments of our population, the US Constitution touches on other Human Right issues ex. 14th and 19th amendments, my point is that as the human race we are to protect the essential aspects of what makes us human and that segmenting us further does not allow for that to happen.
[7] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/good-news/racially-inclusive-sexually-diverse-emojis-to-be-available-in-2019/vp-BBLMdbn
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