A Great Insight Into Overly Racialized Politics And Culture

8/14/17

Great point by Glenn Loury: actually it's an amazing point, something I cop to never having thought through as he has.

I wrote this to a friend after sending him the statement:

....What Loury says, embedded in a basic truth about our common humanity, that bedrock notion underlying an essential premise and promise of liberal democracy and underlying such notions as equality, justice, equal protection and the rule of law, is the best concise account I've ever come across on the terrible reductive logic of extreme identity/racial  politics and race as a cultural imperative as they show themselves these days. Content of character not color or skin idea. It's not that there ought be no identity politics. Politics will always be interest groups vying for their interests. But when the balance  between that and some notion of the common good rooted in our common humanity is so disjointed as it now is, Loury's statement is a big, incisive point of wise light...



The statement itself:

I recently spoke with the social scientist Glenn Loury, who teaches at Brown University. As he sees it, if race becomes an irreducible category in politics, rather than being incorporated into universal claims of justice, it’s a weapon that can be picked up and used by anyone. “Better watch out,” he said. “I don’t know how you live by the identity-politics sword and don’t die by it.” Its logic lumps everyone—including soon-to-be-minority whites—into an interest group. One person’s nationalism intensifies tribal feelings in others, in what feels like a zero-sum game. “I really don’t know how you ask white people not to be white in the world we’re creating,” Loury said. “How are there not white interests in a world where there are these other interests?” He continued, “My answer is that we not lose sight of the goal of racially transcendent humanism being the American bedrock. It’s the abandonment of this goal that I’m objecting to.”






Sent from my iPad