Stayin' Alive

There are buzzwords that float around political journalism, magazine articles and government classes. We pick them up for a few months, use them, talk about them, wait for William Safire to tell us where they came from, and move on. "Identity politics" is one of these phrases. But unlike political correctness, identity politics refuses to kick the bucket just yet.

These phrases are important to us because they name some feature of the current political landscape. They tend to stop being useful after a month or two when people realize that they have been caught acting in some readily identifiable, even cliched manner. Think about the whole political correctness debate. As soon as the term caught on, and people could be accused of being politically correct, political correctness quieted down. Soon after, people stopped using the term as often. It seems like the best way to win a fight is to label your opponent's behavior and get everyone talking about it.

There are reasons to believe that identity politics should be suffering the same fate as political correctness. Just this past month, a group of students at Syracuse University unsuccessfully called for the national boycott of Denny's, the fast-food restaurant. They claim that they were mistreated a year ago for being Asian. The local authorities disagree. There does not seem to be any evidence, and no one, except some federal officials, seem to care.

Some commentators have also seen Giuliani-style government as a sign that the age of identity politics is over. Jim Sleeper, for instance, writes in Newsday, that "Giuliani's victory is part of a national political realignment based on an emerging consensus: Liberal Democrats' `Rainbow' racial and sexual identity politics and their obsession with `root cause' explanations for social decay made them thunderously wrong about how to fight crime, stimulate employment, provide welfare, and improve public education."

Professor of Law Martha L. Minow, on the other hand, thinks that identity politics is still an important issue. Her new book looks at identity politics with an eye toward some practical concerns, such as peremptory strikes in jury selection and racial categories in the census. Minow explained in a lecture at Hillel the other day that one must take a moderate position on group rights. Quoting a saying of the Jewish sage Hillel, Minow quipped that if we are not for ourselves, who will be for us? But it we are only for ourselves, who are we? In other words, Minow believes that it is important to take the claims of identity politics seriously, but not to exaggerate them beyond all common sense and the requirements of the common good.

Minow's lecture was remarkably sensible for a Harvard speech. She stayed very close to her issue, using legal cases to illustrate her point. This is a winning strategy for a subject that tends to get silly very quickly. For instance, it is difficult to believe the claim of the League of United Latin American Citizens that Dinky, Taco Bell's Chihuahua, "is definitely a hate crime that leads to the type of immigrant bashing that His-panics are now up against. "The silliness here is not so much in the sentiment of the complaint, as in the overheated rhetoric. By speaking about the issues in a more hard-headed way, Minow may extend the life of identity politics for a while.

This may not be such a bad thing after all. Certainly identity politics as we know it deserves to go away in a hurry, but a Minow-style concern for group rights is a subject that ought to stick around. The New Republic ran a piece this summer about the Latino-Jewish alliance. Needless to say, there did not turn out to be all that much of an alliance, just a coincidence of voting preferences. However, what came through is that the United States is going to be majority non-white sooner than later, and that it is going to be a mess of different groups with different languages, histories, and, yes, different voting preferences.

Silliness aside, we need to think long and hard about how active a role government should take in all of this politics.

Noah I. Dauber '98 is a special concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.