Posted on 12/16/2015 3:58:52 PM PST by Altura Ct.
It’s time for Republicans to stop telling people to ignore their racial identities.
David Marcus’s call for a conservative anti-racism platform is long overdue. As the United States becomes more diverse, it would be better for both America and Republicans if voting were less racially polarized. The current situation can change if conservatives recognize that minorities experience America in ways that non-minorities often do not. Marcus proposes a good first step: for conservatives to accept that racism exists and that it is a problem.
But as important as an anti-racism agenda is, conservatives should understand that their problems with minorities extend beyond racism. Put another way, Republicans would probably win few minority voters even if racism disappeared.
For many minorities, their race matters to them—they have a racial identity. Effective outreach must account for that identity. Conservatives should thus take Marcus’s advice one step further: they should acknowledge not just racism, but racial identity. The fact that conservatives do not acknowledge it partly explains why so many minorities feel unwelcome in the Republican Party.
Our Race Is Part of Our Identity
Consider this column by Victor David Hanson in early November: “The Republican field is far more diverse [than the Democratic], although the candidates see their ethnicity as incidental rather than essential, in bumper sticker fashion, to their personas.†This sentence epitomizes so much of what is wrong with how Republicans view race. Hanson gives the impression that it is a good thing Sen. Ted Cruz’s Hispanic heritage seems to not be important to him. Many minorities read things like that and conclude they would have to minimize or eliminate their ethnic identity to be a Republican. Even I sometimes feel that way—and I lean conservative! My Indian heritage is not ‘incidental’ to me. It’s a big part of who I am.
My Indian heritage is not “incidental†to me. It’s a big part of who I am. I grew up attending Indian cultural events, watching Bollywood movies, and listening to Hindi songs. In college I was a member of the Indian Students’ Association, attended my fair share of ethnic parties, and performed a group dance at a Diwali show. Hindi songs are still well represented on my playlists. To this day I often feel a connection with my fellow South Asians that I don’t feel elsewhere.
I get that everyone is not like me. Many South Asians are like Federalist contributor Jennifer Doverspike, who does not strongly identify with her race. But I promise you most racial minorities are closer to my end of the spectrum.
Granted, my ethnicity is also not essential, and you will miss a lot about me if you focus only on my race. But just as Marcus wrote about race, people of color often find ourselves between a Left that exaggerates racial identity and a Right that pretends it doesn’t exist. Given these two choices, most of us can’t be blamed for choosing the former. Don’t Treat Race Like Secularists Treat Christians
It might be helpful to consider how strikingly similar Hanson’s—and many conservatives’—attitude on race is to secular liberals’ response to religious faith. Secular liberals would love it if Christians viewed Christianity as incidental, as something to be trotted out briefly during the holidays. Secular liberals would prefer that religious faith, and especially Christian religious faith, not influence people’s worldviews, their actions, the communities they form, the movies they watch. So not only do secular liberals try to ignore Christians’ faith, once they learn about it they see nothing else.
Confronted by people with a strong identity in Christ, secular liberals often simply pretend their faith doesn’t exist. Mollie Hemingway has documented how the mainstream media ignores the faith element, and particularly Christianity, in major stories. The secular Left’s neglect of faith is well-known.
Secular liberals also commit another, often underappreciated, mistake: they reduce Christians to nothing but their faith. Secular liberals can’t imagine that evangelical Protestants may be able to order South Indian food like a native, intelligently debate the relative greatness of Lebron James versus Michael Jordan, or reflect on the morality in “The Walking Dead†(these are people I actually know).
In short, many secular liberals can’t imagine that they might have much in common with evangelicals. So not only do secular liberals try to ignore Christians’ faith, once they learn about it they see nothing else. Accept Us for Who We Are
Given a Left that either trivializes or over-emphasizes a key part of their identity, many Christians understandably gravitate to the Right. Of course, liberal attitudes on faith alone do not explain how Christians vote. But it surely contributes. I suspect this line of reasoning makes sense to many readers. So it should also make sense why conservatives’ incidental versus essential framing on race contributes to how minorities vote. Race and faith should neither be ignored nor over-acknowledged. Both approaches foster polarization.
Race and faith should neither be ignored nor over-acknowledged.
When discussing race, a useful framework could be: if substituting faith for race makes you pause, you probably shouldn’t discuss race in those terms. To return to Hanson: would evangelicals would be okay if a president’s faith were described as incidental to his persona? If not, why shouldn’t many minorities feel the same way about race?
Ultimately, Republicans may win the White House in 2016 without much of the minority vote. But it would be much easier with it. Following Marcus’s advice by accepting and responding to racism would be a good way to start. Also accepting racial identity would be even better.
I accept that community agitation exists.
Race, sex, and faith are NONE of the feds constitutional business. PERIOD.
Get the feds out and keep them out of areas where they don’t constitutionally belong. PERSIOD
threw up in my mouth after first few paragraphs.
Absolutely right. Besides, do we really want republicans to try to out pander the libs?
Reason and free will belong to the individual not to some collective. The rational individual is responsible for his own decisions and is not a deterministic puppet of his race or ethnicity.
Minorities vote for free stuff.
ONLT ONE political party in the USA is the party of free stuff.
“Free stuff” BTW—DOES NOT WORK (long term).
So—get rid of minorities, OR free stuff, or the USA. Your choice.
Prajwal may have his own agenda, like trying to get the caste system back.
Race tells you nothing important about what a person does or what they believe. The color of a person’s skin is a “part of their identify” in the same wat that shoe size or being bald is. What style of shoe, or clothing worn, what is done about baldness (combover, toupe, Shatner Turbo 2000, whatever), actually says more about a person than the color of their skin.
Drat ... “way” ... not “wat” ... I hate typos!
No, no, no, and NO
does E. Pluribus Unum mean anything to this nitwit?
I disagree with his thesis. When the US Constitution was written, its writers strove to be different in an important way from Europe. Specifically the kings and princes of Europe.
All of them, at some point in their nation’s history claimed that God endowed them and their families with a right to rule, thus the laws they created were written in Heaven, and others could not legitimately change them. And if they broke them, they didn’t just break the king’s law, but heaven’s law.
So our founding fathers made it particularly clear that our constitution and laws might be inspired by heaven, but they are written by men and can be changed by men, based on the will of the people, not Heaven.
On the surface, this seems to set up a conflict with religion, but not really. What it does conflict with is the idea of one religion claiming supremacy, supported by the government.
This idea is very widespread among the American people, and this is what I am leading to. Though the dictionary doesn’t make much of a distinction, the typical American does, between “ethics” and “morality”.
When a politician says that he is “ethical”, it is interpreted as meaning that he obeys the written law of men. So in most circumstances anyone, no matter their religion, or lack of religion, can be ethical.
However, when a politician says that he is “moral”, the average American is somewhat confused, because morality is derived from one of many faiths, and can even vary based on a particular church in a particular sect. Thus there is no standard definition of morality. So what is that politician saying he is? Thus Americans tend to be distrustful of politicians who say they are moral.
Now all of that is background to explain why I disagree with the columnist. Because a politician who runs on his ethnicity or nation of origin, also creates this apprehension. A politician may claim to be “hyphenated”, for example, “Irish-American”, and they may even revel in their ethnicity, but only for a local audience that appreciates it.
For example, say a politician is giving a speech to a meeting of African-American businessmen. They do not care about his being Irish-American, because it is incidental to what he is talking about.
Ask Bobby Jindahl or Nikki R. Haley, and they are both proud of their origins and familial culture. But ask them if it has *anything* to do with being elected, or running a government, and they will likely laugh at you.
Absolutely true. Well put.
There seems to be a considerable amount of confusion these days over that, which accounts for the disconnect between a wealthy black American and a poor Masai tribesman. The one, like it or not, is the heir to a culture formed from Beethoven as well as Louis Armstrong. The latter is not. I thought we had finally come to realize this in America before the incessant, melanin-based drum pounding began again in this country with the death of King and the accession to public consciousness of such wretches as Farrakhan, Jackson, Wright, and the current President.
What we have now is a weird sort of progressive voodoo in White Privilege in which absolutely nothing but skin color matters at all, a strange magical force that is impalpable but omnipresent. This is a slide into ignorance and its adherents show it.
And so I categorically reject the author's principal thesis. "Race" - he keeps using that word but I don't think it means what he thinks it means.
...and if you are white, learn to say, “sir, can I have another one”
Good grief. Such a false premise. Unless you worship your race, which some people do, then race and religion are not comparable.
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