From the WSJ Opinion Archives
RACE POLITICS
Ideology as Identity
Why doesn't Powell diversify Bush's cabinet?
Liberal criticism of George W. Bush's minority cabinet and staff selections reveals just how much the left has come to rely on the manipulation of group identity in America as a means to political power.
Conspicuously meritorious figures like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice are seen as wanting in the identity department and so score Mr. Bush fewer points with the diversity crowd than their race would seem to warrant. And before Linda Chavez dropped out, her criticism of affirmative action caused her to be seen by many on the left as an anti-minority minority. This designation in identity politics pushed her past even the nether land of the white male, and into that special gulag reserved for the likes of Clarence Thomas, Ward Connerly, and other "conservative" minorities, whose minority identity inflames precisely those who are normally assuaged by identities of color. (I have a place in that gulag, too.)
I believe that the answer to these questions begins in the fact that minority identities, since the 1960s, have become far more defined by ideology than by culture. Especially for blacks, but also for many Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asian-Americans, group identity is now shaped more by a liberal politics in which past victimization is deferred to, and for which redress is sought with preferential treatment, than by a unified culture.
In fact, this politics has gone a long way toward becoming the fundamental culture of these groups. What makes you "black" today is not membership in an apolitical culture but a belief in this politics. Today ideology is identity. Thus, it is not altogether absurd for President Clinton to consider himself black. Nor is it absurd for many blacks to agree with him even as they question Mr. Powell's blackness.
This is true despite the fact that black Americans tilt conservative on many surveys of values and issues. Even the humble black grandmother, who sings in the church choir and struggles to raise a grandchild abandoned to her care, must assert ideological liberalism in order to make others comfortable about her blackness. All blacks are accountable in this way because this is the identity out of which the group bargains with the larger society.
Al Gore got over 90% of the black vote by doing nothing more than echoing this liberalism. Today, blackness is first of all a liberalism of preferential treatment. So by supporting affirmative action Mr. Gore seemed to be supporting the black identity itself--high flattery indeed. Thus, in voting for Mr. Gore--a child of considerable white privilege--blacks were affirming their blackness.
The left also uses a minority identity of liberalism to neutralize the moral authority that conservatives might win from the practice of simple racial fairness. When identity is liberalism, you can say that all minorities who are not liberal are also not minorities at all.
Mr. Powell has struggled with this since coming on the national scene. His profile--military career, Republican Party affiliation, and strong American identity--enables the black and white left to whisper that he is "not really black." The New York Times reported that Ms. Chavez was married to a Jew and that "some" have called her "a traitor to her people." By a fiat of ideological identity the left tries to make conservative minorities into surrogate whites who bring no moral progressiveness to a Bush administration.
I know personally that being a conservative minority is a test of character. Identity, after all, is an integral and cherished part of the self. To have someone say in the New York Times that you are not really black or Hispanic is to be annihilated on some level. It is especially galling when whites--with no experience of minority life--say this, or prod some minority into saying it. So it is tempting for conservative minorities to make that small ideological concession--usually some qualified support of affirmative action--that lets us put at least one foot irrefutably inside our racial identity. Just a little preferential liberalism and you can avoid the "Uncle Tom" label. Not many withstand this. But those who do--Thomas Sowell is everyone's hero in this regard--are great Americans.
The left's last use of identity-as-ideology may be its most effective use, and its most destructive. When preferential liberalism defines blackness or Hispanicness, then personal responsibility, individual initiative, hard work and the entire constellation of "conservative" virtues become a form of racism. These virtues attack the current idea of what it means to be black--the liberal faith that racial victimization makes responsibility a futility unless it is undergirded by preferences. Therefore these virtues seem to attack black people.
There is much talk today about how Mr. Bush can reach out to minorities. But first it must be understood that conservatism--when viewed against the current black identity--is ideological racism. This is what the left has achieved since the 1960s. Blacks rejected Mr. Bush more than other Republican precisely because he tried to make conservatism relevant to their problems. In talking about the "soft bigotry of low expectations," he was advocating high expectations, hard work, and all the "conservative" virtues that come over as racism to the current black identity.
So what can he do?
The short answer is that he should keep doing what he is doing. His most difficult racial mission (and the nation's as well) will be to achieve as much separation as possible of minority identity from a victim-focused ideology of preferential liberalism. That his celebration of responsibility and initiative as the best agents of social change comes across as ideological racism is a good thing. The racism charge is simply the reflex response of an identity clinging to ideology. And it proves that Mr. Bush has been the first presidential candidate since the 1960s to discuss black problems within a framework of traditional American virtues rather than ideology.
And all this is as it should be, or at least must be, given the history that got us here. When John Ashcroft is said to be "racially insensitive," we know that he too is seen as an enemy of ideology. And his struggle may be more socially important than any other cabinet member's, more so even than Mr. Powell's as the first black secretary of state. He has the chance, more than anyone except Mr. Bush himself, to help the nation understand that to be against a group identity mired in bad ideology is not to be against the people who suffer that identity.
Mr. Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author, most recently, of "A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America" (HarperCollins, 1998).
