Against the New Politics of Identity by Ronald A. Lindsay
By Timothy Sandefur
Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2023
280 pp. $19.95
The irrationality of some parties in today’s political and cultural disputes—especially those involving race—is now so overwhelming that anyone trying to make sense of their arguments might feel paralyzed. In fact, the very idea of “making sense” is considered racist in certain circles: In 2020, the Smithsonian Institution published a document asserting that “objective, rational linear thinking” is a manifestation of “white supremacy” (21). And physicist Chand Prescod-Weinstein has condemned “white empiricism” as a form of “epistemic oppression” (23).
Many of America’s major institutions, from colleges to corporations to government agencies, have likewise embraced the premise that the United States is “systemically racist” and that all good people should direct their energies to “disrupting” the alleged “oppression” of “white society”—which, of course, means the remaining elements of capitalism in today’s mixed economy. To question this orthodoxy—or even, in some cases, to agree with it—is grounds for termination, humiliation, and “cancellation.”
Amid such intellectual gloom, it’s refreshing to find a clear light of reason in Ronald Lindsay’s Against the New Politics of Identity. Nonsense is an old foe for Lindsay, a lawyer and philosopher who served for eight years as president of the Center for Inquiry, an organization devoted to refuting claims about UFOs, psychic phenomena, creationism, and other balderdash. But although the Center’s secular humanism has long been associated with the political “left,” the “politics of identity” against which Lindsay levels his attacks is primarily leftist doctrines—and it’s admirable that Lindsay is unswayed by the tribalism that leads many people to stifle criticisms of those on “their own side.” Lindsay’s “side” is that of the truth, wherever it may be found.
He begins by dividing identity politics—often called “wokeness,” although Lindsay shuns this term as too vague—into three philosophical categories. The first is its epistemological element, known as “standpoint theory,” which holds that one’s knowledge—even personal identity—is a product of one’s race or sex; and that people who experience some (vaguely conceptualized) form of oppression automatically have clearer insight into the truth than do those who enjoy social “privilege.” This, according to its adherents, means that the opinions of women, black people, gay people, and members of other “marginalized groups” must be accepted without question, because to doubt their assertions is a form of “epistemic violence.”
Somehow this does not apply to the views of, say, Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell, and standpoint theorists have never coherently explained why. “The suggestion,” Lindsay writes, “seems to be that one’s consciousness becomes sufficiently raised if and only if one sees things the same way that the advocates of standpoint theory see things” (50).
In any event, Lindsay observes that the proposition that an “oppressed” person’s views are inherently more reliable than those of white, straight males is a form of mysticism, in which that person’s “lived experience” substitutes for supernatural revelation (226). One pernicious—if rhetorically convenient—consequence of this theory is that it encourages advocates of identity politics to wave away all criticism: “those who take issue with your claims are not simply disagreeing with you; they are continuing an injustice” (36).
Another malign consequence is that this idea implicitly concedes that members of a minority group—or, in the lingo of identity politics, people who have been “historically minoritized”—cannot hold their own in any debate governed by logic, evidence, and objectivity (155). But standpoint theory also rejects the possibility of objective truth—which leads to another fatal weakness in identity politics: “if knowledge claims can never be truly impartial, then the standpoint theorist’s claim that the marginalized have an epistemic advantage that enables them to acquire knowledge better than the dominant group is itself ‘partial,’ that is, infected by an ineradicable bias” (46).
Standpoint theory’s premise that the content of one’s character is generated by the color of one’s skin also dictates that white people are inherently and unavoidably racist. Yet by recasting racism as something one is rather than something one does, standpoint theory seeks to insulate its charges of racism from any need to provide evidence. For a white person to deny being a racist is, according to this doctrine, just another racist act—and grounds for punishment. Thus in 2021, when a white teacher named Kari McRae objected to teaching identity-politics doctrines in a Hanover, Massachusetts, high school, she was fired.1 But, of course, admitting that one is a racist is also racism—and grounds for punishment. So, when, in November 2022, a white teacher (whose name was never disclosed) in a Pflugerville, Texas, middle school was video-recorded confessing to his students that, as a white man, he is inherently racist, he, too, was fired.2 In the new mysticism of identity politics, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
The second of Lindsay’s categories is metaphysical: specifically, the claim that the United States is a “structurally racist” society. This does not mean that America is home to some racist people, whose bigoted choices have political and economic consequences, but rather that America’s legal, economic, and educational institutions are designed in such a way as to benefit whites and oppress disfavored minorities. This is a remarkably audacious thesis—and, as Lindsay shows, there’s no evidence to support it. For one thing, racial discrimination is illegal under federal law and the laws of all states; is considered grounds for termination by almost all employers in the country; is treated as socially unacceptable by all the country’s significant cultural institutions; and is the focus of nearly universal condemnation in films, television shows, novels, and other artistic expressions. These are not features one would expect to find in a racist “system.”
At times, Lindsay’s detailed dissection of the “systematic racism” claim causes the book to drag—as when he spends nine pages debunking the assertion that federal housing and lending policies in the early 20th century are the cause of racial wealth disparities today. But few other writers have taken the time to analyze such claims so carefully (probably because identity-politics militants have taken to mau-mauing anyone who asks for evidence), and such painstaking refutation is necessary to the ultimate vindication of truth and reason.
Finally, there’s the ethical dimension of identity politics, which hangs primarily on the notion of “equity.” Starting from the proposition that any difference in outcomes between groups constitutes an injustice, equity’s proponents conclude that these inequalities must be eradicated by purposeful exclusion of “privilege”—which in practice means granting unmerited benefits to some and imposing undeserved penalties on others. Building on the assertion of “antiracism” guru Ibram Kendi that “the only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” government and private industry have recently implemented egregious (and illegal) forms of discrimination against white people. During the COVID pandemic, for example, several companies announced that white employees would be laid off before black employees, and the Biden administration offered emergency loans to businesses while trying to block white-owned businesses from receiving them (160).
Even more remarkable are efforts to discriminate against whites in health care. In 2021, a Boston hospital announced a policy whereby heart attack patients would be promptly given a hospital bed if they “self-identify as Black or Latinx [sic],” whereas if the patient was white, no such assignment would be made absent “a compelling rationale” (157). Two doctors at the hospital even published a paper explaining that the policy’s aim “is corrective, and therefore mandated” (156). As the italicized word indicates, the goal of such race-based policies is not to improve health outcomes for all but to penalize whites today for the faults, real or imagined, of past generations.
Laying aside the perversity of such attitudes, the goal of this “correction”—total equality of outcome—is unattainable, and efforts to accomplish it require the destruction of individualism. “No one has offered a convincing argument for the proposition that equal outcomes among identity groups is an overriding ethical imperative,” writes Lindsay—and seriously pursuing it would require “a totalitarian dystopia in which the government exercised complete control over the economic and personal lives of everyone and directs everyone to be satisfied—or else” (167).
Lindsay concludes with an argument that the left’s identity politics has provoked conservative imitations, particularly a resurgence of enthusiasm for Christian nationalism, many advocates of which claim that the United States was originally designed as a Christian political order; and that a cabal of secular liberal intellectuals, particularly on the U.S. Supreme Court, has severed America’s politics from that founding vision. Christian nationalism has always existed on the fringes of American politics, but the left’s focus on racial identity and “equity” recently has inspired prominent Republican politicians to openly endorse it.
Lindsay is certainly right that “both the identity Left and the Christian/authoritarian Right threaten the Enlightenment values that have provided people in the United States, specifically, and the West, in general, with more political and religious freedom, protections against discrimination, personal autonomy, and prosperity, than anywhere else in the world” (228–29). And his well-researched refutation of their doctrines is a rare treasure. Still, there’s one respect in which his argument could have been improved: by applying the insights of public-choice theory to the claim that America is “systemically racist.”
Public choice is a school of political analysis that focuses on the ways incentives help generate and perpetuate government policies, and it helps explain why government sometimes imposes unjust burdens that apply differently along racial lines in a manner that might plausibly be called “systemically racist.” Public choice, in fact, provides a far more rigorous and rational explanation for such disparities than does the dogma of identity politics.
Consider, for example, the case of San Diego entrepreneur JoAnne Cornwell, who in the 1990s tried to start a business braiding customers’ hair using traditional African techniques. She was quickly shut down by California bureaucrats under a law that prohibited the braiding of hair for money by anyone who did not have a cosmetology license. Getting a cosmetology license is not only expensive but exceptionally time-consuming: It requires years of training to even qualify to take the licensing exam. Yet virtually none of the required training had anything to do with African hair braiding.
Students were required to learn how to use tools and chemicals that hair braiders don’t use and to study hairstyling techniques that are physically impossible to perform on the hair of black customers. In short, California’s barber-licensing rules had been written more than half a century before with white customers in mind and had remained on the books because no constituency ever found it worthwhile to lobby for a change in the law. For decades, license holders exploited these laws to block potential competition, and black entrepreneurs either gave up or simply broke the law and practiced hair braiding without a license—until, that is, Cornwell went to court and got it declared unconstitutional due to its irrationality.
Cornwell’s case is an extreme example of a phenomenon well known to public-choice economists: Legal restrictions on economic freedom often are profitable to pressure groups that devote resources accordingly to protect and expand those restrictions. These pressure groups become “old boy’s networks,” able to persuade politicians to grant them economic favors and, thanks to their political influence, to perpetuate those favors, sometimes for generations. Not surprisingly, these networks more often are comprised of whites than of members of minorities, who typically have fewer resources to devote to lobbying. The result is a regulatory system with racially disproportionate effects, even if none of those responsible intended that outcome.
Of course, this example hardly proves that America is systemically racist. On the contrary, Cornwell prevailed in her lawsuit, and many states have revamped their regulations of hair braiding in the years since to eliminate these disparities—again, not an outcome one would expect in a systemically racist society. Moreover, this example shows that it is not capitalism—the system of individual rights—but government interventions in the economy that often result in disparate outcomes for minorities, and that such interventions can persist even when most voters acknowledge their unfairness. In this and other ways, a discussion of public-choice theory would have provided additional clarity regarding the causes of and solutions to racial disparities.
This, however, is a relatively minor omission in a book that is striking for its thorough analysis, its calm rationality, and its commitment to the modern sin of “objective, rational linear thinking.” If American culture is to survive the onslaught of identity politics, it will only be through the efforts of such reasonable and courageous thinkers as Ronald Lindsay.