Kendi Says Change Policies

a daring work

In his book How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X Kendi offers a number of critiques of social justice activism. Activists, he says, should fix their failing messaging, stop saying that African Americans can’t be racist, and change their focus. In particular, he emphasizes the importance of changing policy over changing hearts. As he explains, an emphasis on policy change is hardly new, even if it runs counter to today’s mainstream antiracist activism. Kendi says you’re not an activist unless you have a track record of changing policy. This bold framing comes as an indictment of a broad range of social justice action that seems to be aimed more at winning converts rather than at changing laws and regulations. As a liberal who has been surprised and disappointed by impractical rhetoric on the left, I heartily welcome Kendi’s perspective.

For years it has puzzled me why so many social justice messages fail to include a call to action. The documentary 13th has no call to action. The book Caste is the same way. Signs at the MLK march tend to express feelings but not plans or next steps. Activists have told me that it would be “white privilege” if they made practical plans to fight racism. Thomas Sowell suggests that movement leaders focus on feelings rather than on plans because that’s the less risky approach. If you don’t attempt anything, you can’t fail.

A good deal of demonstrations seem meant to declare or promote general support for a movement. Some activists explicitly describe their job as building participation in “Movement” until the population reaches a tipping point. Sometimes this tipping point is pegged at 3.5%, a figure derived from a study that confirmed the value of mass movements of nonviolent protest. For these activists, there’s little point to pursuing electoral victories? Until the population reaches its tipping point (the story goes), electoral efforts are going to be ineffective, and after the tipping point they’ll be a breeze. In Kendi’s formulation, the people marching on MLK Day are merely demonstrating, not really protesting. Until they have changed policy, they don’t even deserve the term “activist”, at least not in Kendi’s perspective. 

Some of the feelings-first rhetoric on the radical left appeals to the New Age imagination. We are enjoined to wake up, heed a new vision of humanity, embrace the spirit of abundance, dismantle civilization, and create a new society founded on equity. It’s sometimes called the Great Turning. Here the focus is on confession, repentance, and zeal rather than policy change. New-Age “visualization” makes an appearance here as “re-imagining” society.

Feelings-oriented antiracist rhetoric also appeals to some people because it tells them what they want to hear. The implicit message is, “Your personal feelings are super important.” Plenty of would-be activists respond warmly to the idea that the work they’re called to do amounts to reading, self-help, introspection, and being emotionally moved.

Kendi, however, calls all this feelings-oriented work into question. To back up his challenge, he cites Martin Luther King, Jr. Activists these days have a love-hate relationship with King. They love to quote him when he agrees with them, such as when he said that riots are the language of the unheard, but they hate it when he gets quoted against them, such as when he condemns riots as self-defeating. In Kendi’s case, he criticizes activists for failing to heed King’s message that it is wise to focus on changing policy rather than on changing hearts. Changes in heart, King said, will follow changes in policy. With 50 years of hindsight, Kendi backs up King’s claim with historical evidence. For example, the Supreme Court ruled that interracial marriages are legal in 1967, which was followed by a steady rise in support for such marriages. If King and Kendi both agree that policy change should come first, who will say otherwise?

If we accept Kendi’s message, what sort of policy change would be considered antiracist? Kendi defines antiracism as anything that improves racial equality, regardless of intent. In that view, any policy that helps Americans who are less well off is, by default, antiracist because it disproportionately helps African Americans. Fixing health insurance, Kendi says, would be antiracist. A do-nothing climate policy, on the other hand, is a racist climate policy. Kendi’s reference to policies that help the poor reminds me of King’s Poor People’s Campaign, now given new life by Rev William Barber II.

How much influence will Kendi’s dissenting take on activism have on social justice movements in the US? To date, I haven’t heard much discussion in social justice circles about Kendi’s challenge to feelings-first rhetoric, but maybe there’s dialog taking place behind the scenes. I’d love to see more focus on policy change because I agree with King and Kendi that it’s more effective. Is it wishful thinking to expect that Kendi’s book will really make a difference?

Cousins and Garbage

one bag for glass, one for aluminum

Some days, I walk half a mile to the Git-and-Go for a six-pack of Goose Island’s Next Coast IPA and maybe a bag of caramel corn. My mom likes caramel corn, and my sister-in-law is collecting beer bottle caps, so everyone gets a little something. Today, here was the exchange with the cashier.

Cashier, a Black woman: Would you like a bag?

Me, a white guy: Yes, thanks, could I get two bags? 

She, unamused: You can have one bag.

Me: I’m going to put my stuff in this backpack*. I want to use the bags to pick up aluminum cans and glass bottles.

She, warmly: Oh, yes, you can have two bags. 

Me: Thanks. The last time I was in here, I was too embarrassed to ask for bags.

She: It’s all right.

Me: We’re all in this together.

She, giving me two bags: That’s right. Here you go. 

Me: I figure if all Black people are brothers and sisters, then you and I are cousins at least.

She: We’re all from Africa. We all have the same DNA.

Me, resisting the urge to show her photos of my beautiful biracial daughter and instead putting my fist up to the anti-COVID plexiglass: That’s right.

She, fist-bumping me through the plastic: Take care.

Me:  See you.

Is this the first time that I have connected with someone different from me across a gas-station counter? No. Am I a dork? Yes, and that’s why I treasure being a Unitarian-Universalist, a community in that embraces dorkiness. Don’t believe me? Just listen to us sing some Sunday, once the pandemic is over.

*If you work for Amazon, you might get ground up, but you might also get a rocking backpack. 

Everway Silver Anniversary Edition

Silver Anniversary edition

Everway is the only roleplaying game that I ever got my late wife to play. We played a lot of Magic: The Gathering and Netrunner, but roleplaying wasn’t her thing. With Everway, I talked her into playing a with two other couples. My original goal with Everway was to make it accessible and attractive to new players, and my late wife’s experience tells me that I more or less succeeded. Everway is also the first game I created after my daughter was born, and it is dedicated to her. I love all my roleplaying games. Like children, each one is special in its own way. But of all of them, Everway means the most to me personally. It’s exciting that this game from 1995 is coming back in a beautiful new Silver Anniversary edition.

 

When I hired on with Wizards of the Coast at the end of 1993, I brought the rough concept for Everway with me, and it was my main project for my first two years there. My thinking was that it had to be something new and different. There wouldn’t be much point in releasing a standard-issue roleplaying game, which would have little chance of competing externally with Dungeons & Dragons or internally with Magic. Everway was an ambitious attempt to reach a broader audience, using a system that would appeal both to experienced gamers and to new fans outside the gamer community. 

For one thing, the game had to be beautiful. The standard roleplaying experience can look to observers like an exercise in sensory deprivation, and Magic had raised expectations for how colorful a hobby game could be. Everway’s imagery was as global and multicultural as we could manage. With my own little biracial daughter at home, I wanted a game that transcended the Eurocentric template set by D&D. After Everway was published, I once got an email from an African American roleplayer who thanked me for the game. He said it had changed the way he roleplayed, inspiring him to create Black characters for the first time, not just in Everway but in other games as well. Have I mentioned how much this game means to me personally?

Colorful images appeal to the
next generation of gamers

The imagery is more than decoration. It inspires people to invent characters, adventures, and lands, drawing stories out of their imaginations. New players are often delighted to find out that they can create characters and backstories with a little prompting from the artwork. Instead of dice, Everway uses a Fortune Deck, modeled after the major arcana cards of tarot decks. The Fortune Deck is a randomizer, but one that uses symbols instead of numbers. The deck has a secret pattern, but keeping the pattern secret was a mistake. Players didn’t notice the hidden pattern, so they couldn’t appreciate it, and in the Silver Anniversary the pattern is explicit. 

While Everway didn’t clear a profit, it inspired a lot of indie RPG designers. It’s fondly remembered by a number of designers who have since made great progress in developing ways to support narrative, free-form practices in roleplaying games. It was meant to show people new ideas about how to play these games that we love, and it did. 

As a project at Wizards, Everway faced a number of systemic challenges, as perhaps all the projects that weren’t trading card games did at that time. For one thing, we didn’t control costs, and the components were prohibitively expensive. Also, it’s packaging showed that the game was different—in fact too different. On game store shelves, the packaging didn’t work. Within months of the game’s release, Wizards cut many teams and product lines and laid off the employees connected to them. Roleplaying games were cut, and the roleplaying staff was laid off. I landed in R&D, working first on Netrunner and on beginner versions of Magic. Thankfully, the company worked to find homes for the games that were cut, and Everway ended up with two big fans, twin brothers Jesse McGatha and Richard Thames Rowan. 

After all these years, Rich and Jesse have formed the Everway Company to publish a new edition of Everway—the Silver Anniversary edition. The game has an all-new format, and it will look great on game store shelves. The new publishers have incorporated art from the Spherewalker supplement by my old friend Greg Stolze, and the new version is all color. It also includes a lot more content, mostly material from Spherewalker and from several published adventures. The original was slim, but the Silver Anniversary edition is grand.

How will the new edition fare? It’s a better offering than the original, and the gaming community is more ready for a free-form game like Everway than it was 25 years ago. The Kickstarter campaign will be an opportunity for us to see just how much love there is out there for Everway, and how well the game might inspire a new generation of roleplayers. Originally, the Rich and Jesse were going to handle the Kickstarter on their own, but their edition is so marvelous that I told them I wanted to be involved myself. I’ll be running the Kickstarter, and I’m excited to see this remarkable game get another shot at finding its audience.

more about the Silver Anniversary edition

Discussing Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

Please read Ibram Kendi’s
How to Be an Antiracist 

tl;dr Racism is a vast, global, perennial injustice that deserves authors who are willing to take risks. In How to be an Antiracist, Ibram Kendi takes risks. Some of his book I agree with, some I disagree with, and some I struggle to come to terms with. With Caste, Isabel Wilkerson risks little. In 2019, an earnest antiracist in my Unitarian church said that her book discussion group had been reading antiracist books for years, and she still had no idea what she could actually do. Caste would fit in with the books that this woman’s discussion group read. Read How to be an Antiracist.

Exploring Caste

If you read Caste, I’d suggest rounding out the experience by considering some of the following questions. Wilkerson’s topic is so big and important that it demands extra thought, research, and information. For these questions, some answers I already knew, some answers I had to look up, and some I still don’t know.

Wilkerson says that the way to address racial injustice today is to understand the “origins of our discontents” and for people to undergo a change of heart. What evidence does she offer that this approach is effective? What schools of political thought are in line with this approach? What alternative approaches do others advocate, such as Martin Luther King or Ibram Kendi? 

Wilkerson makes her case primarily with metaphors, analogies, anecdotes, generalizations, and hypotheticals. Where does this approach originate from? From critical race theory? Counter-storytelling? Journalistic style? A little of each?

What historical social system did Southern plantation owners see themselves as emulating? 

How is racial stratification in the US different from what Wilkerson describes in Nazi Germany and Hindu India? How are the lynchings she describe different from the killings she recounts from Germany and India? How is the historical arc of African Americans different from that of German Jews and Indian Dalits?

Wilkerson cites scholars who have identified the US racial structure as a caste system. If this framing has been suggested before but has never been generally accepted, what is different today? If the nation were to adopt this framing, what benefit could we expect?

Wilkerson describes the racial caste system in North America as originating on American soil in 1619, and she describes anti-Semitism in Germany as resulting from Nazi propaganda. What were the larger historical contexts in which these injustices took place?

Wilkerson cites laws and customs from the South as representative of the caste system. How would her narrative be different if she took the laws and customs of the Yankee North as representative? What major 19th century event in race relations does she mostly elide, and how would including this event change her narrative?

What is the original meaning of the Portuguese word “caste”? 

What is the original meaning of the Sanskrit word “varna”? 

When European scientists identified “Caucasians” and “Negroes” as different taxonomic groups, how close did they come to identifying ancestral groups, as identified by modern genetic research? When early Americans differentiated people by “white” or “black” skin, what difference did they imagine themselves to be identifying? How well could height have served to identify the same difference that early Americans thought they were identifying? 

How well do Latinos and Asians fit together into a “middle caste”? How well does the “model minority” concept fit this American “middle caste” or middle castes in Nazi Germany and Hindu India? How would Wilkerson’s narrative be different if she gave Latinos and Asians more consideration?

Where do Jews fit in Wilkerson’s caste formulation? Are they middle-caste “model minorities”, like Asians supposedly are? What does it mean that Jews are more likely to be victims of hate crimes than African Americans? What caste did Einstein appear to be in? 

Where do Native Americans fit in Wilkerson’s proposed caste system? How would her narrative be different if she gave substantial consideration to Native Americans? 

According to James Henry Hammond, who were the “mud sills” of the North? How did Northerners react to his infamous speech? What alternative view of what makes a nation prosper did Abraham Lincoln offer?

What can we learn from majority-white nations with substantial Black populations that don’t have a caste system? For example, since Canada did not have a hundred years of Jim Crow, what can we learn from the success of the African-Canadian population? More generally, what are some good examples of societies where people of different ancestries live together harmoniously, such as East Asians with Africans or settlers with Indigenous people? What can we learn from those societies? Where in the world today can we find the most successful African-descended population?

Wilkerson recounts the 1990 case of Charles Stuart, who murdered his pregnant wife and blamed the crime on an African-American man. In recent years, what are some famous cases where reports of outrageous interracial crimes turned out to be hoaxes or mistakes? 

As if channeling Jordan Peterson and his infamous lobsters, Wilkerson talks about natural human hierarchies, using wolf packs and their alphas, betas, and omegas as a template. What was the primordial social order system of _Homo sapiens_? What new social orders did our ancestors develop over the last 50,000 years or so, and why?

Wilkerson recounts the tragic, outrageous case of [REDACTED]*. What pertinent details does she leave out? 

Wilkerson points out that, contrary to stereotypes, most African Americans are not poor, and most poor Americans are not Black. If you share this information with antiracist activists, with what emotional tenor might they respond?

Wilkerson points out that being shot by the police is a leading cause of death among young, African American men. What is the leading cause of death for that demographic?

Wilkerson builds her argument about “caste” by describing racial stratification, and she talks little about class. How would her narrative be different if she paid more attention to class?

Wilkerson mentions that white evangelicals predominate in the Republican base but touches lightly on religion. To what extent could opposition to liberal policies and support for Trump relate to religious beliefs? How prominently has Christianity featured in support for Trump compared to race? If the caste system tells whites that they are superior, to what extent do evangelical Christian beliefs tell believers the same thing about them? Would American voters rather vote for an African American Christian or a white atheist?

To what extent does American nationalism tell white Americans that they are special and on top? Toward whom would Trump supporters feel more warmly: an African American waving a US flag or an ethnic Russian waving a Russian flag? 

Only 43% of white voters voted for President Obama in the 2008 election, a low figure that Wilkerson attributes to the caste system. How does that percentage compare to votes earned by previous Democratic candidates? What single demographic trait best predicted whether a voter chose Obama or McCain (also Hillary or Trump, etc)?

As Wilkerson points out, the US military is noteworthy in the way it provides real opportunities for advancement to African Americans. How does the military establish solidarity among soldiers from different ethnicities? What practices did the US Army establish in order to integrate its officer corps? What professional cadre elsewhere in the world, if any, is more racially integrated than the US Army officer corps?

Wilkerson says that African Americans have been denied reparations, while reparations have been granted to other groups that have suffered discrimination. What are some good examples of such reparations.

Wilkerson refers to two aspects of human nature: the universal desire to be free and the putative tendency to form hierarchies like wolves do. What other aspects of human nature, especially our social instincts, might help illuminate racial inequality in the US? 

Wilkerson says that the caste system hurt white America by, for example, distorting the meritocracy and preventing society from taking full advantage of everyone’s abilities. How would ending racism be good or bad for white Americans, and to what degree would it be a net benefit or drawback?

If we substituted the term “status” for “caste”, as in whites being “high-status” and African Americans being “low-status”, what would be lost and what would be gained? The same question goes for Wilkerson referring to gender inequality and age inequality as “caste”.

As we as a nation confront the injustice of racism, what personal and collective actions does Wilkerson advocate that we undertake, and which seem more promising?

If a gifted journalist were to write a parallel book that ignored all the racist history that Wilkerson recounts and recounted all the egalitarian history that Wilkerson ignores, how close could the author come to making it sound like race relations in the US are peachy keen? (This question is hypothetical because I do not advocate that gifted journalists write one-sided accounts of race relations in US history and society.)

* It’s taboo to question accounts of this incident even when the details in the account are questionable, and I’m no Wilfred Reilly. 

Review of Taboo: 10 Facts [You Can't Talk About], by Wilfred Reilly

Read Taboo if you want to get caught up on what gun-toting, center-right African American professors are saying about race, immigration, gender, and the alt-right. I know I wanted to get caught up. Wilfred Reilly is on the right, so he challenges our liberal views, but he’s not so far right that we can dismiss him as a crank or a hater. As liberals, we can appreciate the challenging facts and the perspectives that Reilly brings to issues even when we don’t agree with his subjective opinions or conclusions. Based my own research, Reilly gets his facts right. Thankfully, he writes informally and with a touch of humor. Reilly’s writing doesn’t drive me away the way I’m turned off by conservative writers like Heather Mac Donald, the author of The War on Cops.

With this book, Reilly enjoys a certain amount of good fortune based simply on the current nature of political discourse. By 2021, we’ve all became familiar with how bad the mainstream media are at covering contentious issues and how much worse social media are at doing so. The nation’s political rhetoric has gotten so extreme that an author like Reilly can make a splash and gain an audience just by saying things that come as surprises but that are backed up by statistics. For example, some of the rhetoric around police shootings implies that the police are intentionally and systematically targeting innocent Black men for murder, but Reilly points out that nearly all the Black men killed by police are armed. Can we liberals still pin these disparities on racism? Yes, we can, but it’s more about racism built into the structure of society than about cops shooting young men for the “crime” of being Black.

Most of the book is about how statistics reveal a more complicated and nuanced story than you are likely to see in a political meme. Differences between the white population and African American population extend far beyond skin color, so different outcomes can hardly be pinned strictly on people being treated differently from each other based on their skin. For example, younger people get killed by the police at a higher rate than older people, and the while population is significantly older than the African American population. If your goal is political mobilization, you might not value nuance, but if you want to understand where conservatives are coming from, Reilly is a big help. 

Reilly poses fair questions even if liberals don’t agree with his answers. Whereas radicals look back to 1619 for the source of today’s racial disparities, Reilly looks at the loss of fathers in the Black community starting around 1970. Contemporary sociologists have confirmed Reilly’s contention that a lack of fathers weighs on boys and young men, although they have found that it’s the proportion of fathers in the community that’s the major factor rather than a boy having a father in his own home or not [link]. As a conservative, Reilly is satisfied pointing to welfare as the reason that marriage rates dropped. As a liberal, I’d rather find an answer in the other demographic changes taking place at that time. A lot was changing in our society around 1970, and a lot has changed since then. Reilly’s statistics show that African American communities historically had a higher proportion of fathers in the home when racism was worse, so it can’t simply be “racism” that has led to this issue. Can Reilly be sure that welfare is really the culprit here? If so, he hasn’t backed up that claim by showing that other changes are not to blame. You can learn from this book, but be skeptical.

On immigration, Reilly argues from the perspective that our nation’s immigration policies should help our nation, while liberals often put the needs of would-be immigrants first. From his perspective, for example, Reilly questions birthright citizenship, which was written into our Constitution in order to address a totally different situation from the one we face today. On this topic, statistics can’t prove that we should or shouldn’t put our own nation’s needs first, but Reilly’s take on the topic at least gives us liberals a relatively reasonable conservative position to think about and argue against. He’s no friend of the alt-right, and we can’t simply dismiss his views on immigration as racist. (Obviously, of course, we can of course dismiss his views in just this way, but doing so is a missed opportunity to engage honestly with our fellow Americans who disagree with us.)

Reilly concludes by taking down the Alt-Right. This chapter doesn’t perfectly fit the theme of the book because there’s no taboo against trashing the Alt-Right, but it serves the purpose of helping us liberals remember that conservatives can disagree with us even while they also disagree with the nutters on the right. 

Are the “obvious facts” that Reilly cites really taboo? Yes and no. The “taboo” label applies only to the touchiest topics, such as police violence or gaps in outcomes between groups. They’re taboo enough that I’m not going to go into much detail with this review. Reilly pushes some hot buttons, and it’s not feasible to address them properly in this review. I can talk about birthright citizenship, but I’m not going to bring up… certain other topics.

If you’d like to get a sample of Reilly’s position, this Spiked article is a good start.

“Michael Brown: the founding myth of Black Lives Matter”

Compared to What? 

If you’re looking for a grander, more historical and global view from a perspective similar to Reilly’s, read Thomas Sowell’s Race and Culture: A Worldview. That book delivers such a strong challenge to the left’s take on inequality that I rarely recommend it. Race and Culture is from 1995, and Taboo is better for current events. 

If you’re looking for someone to use statistics to assess rhetoric in the field of gender politics, Debra Soh’s book The End of Gender is the same sort of book as Taboo, albeit from a liberal perspective. Like Reilly, Soh shocks the reader with taboo information that’s readily available but rarely sought out. 

Reilly on Twitter

I follow him on Twitter, and based on his tweets I figured I’d give his book a try. If, like me, you make a point of following people you disagree with, he’s worth a try. He’s @wil_da_beast630.

2020

violence peaks in early adulthood

Genetics and Life Outcomes

The doctor has news for a pregnant couple. Their child has a genetic and hormonal condition that has serious consequences. People of this profile are ten times as likely to kill, ten times as likely to be murdered, ten times as likely to be incarcerated, and ten times as likely to be killed by the police. Also more likely to be institutionalized, addicted, or homeless. Way more likely to be a sexual predator, even from a young age. 

The parents say that biology is not destiny, and the doctor agrees. These outcomes are the result of the interaction of biology and society. That said, it’s this society that the child will grow up in, and researchers see roughly the same pattern repeated in societies all over the globe. 

The parents ask what the odds are and what life is like for these people. The doctor says that most of them can be brought up to have quite successful lives, especially in terms of worldly success. On some occasions they lead lives of astounding achievement. Even if they avoid lives of crime, destitution, or isolation, however, their connections to their own children will probably be weaker, possibly connections to friends as well. 

Hearing the description of this profile, the parents talk it over. How would they would feel if they carried this pregnancy to term and then the child grew up to kill or rape someone? Would they be partly responsible? For my part, if my late wife and I had gotten this news, we would have had the kid. What do you think?

And have folks heard of the condition I’m describing? It’s quite common. 

It's a boy.

Group Instincts and Modern Politics

Identity without biology

tl:dr Some aspects of our identities activate in-group social instincts, and it’s easy for people to organize politically along those lines. Other aspects of our identities relate more to distinctions within the in-group or within a family structure, and it’s difficult to organize politically along such lines. 

Why is it so much easier to organize African Americans around fighting racism than it is to organize poor people around fighting poverty? Why is it easier to convince poor, white Americans that Muslims are a threat than to convince them that the rich are taking more than their share? Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King tried to unite poor whites and Blacks, but that dream died with him. Why the big difference? Maybe the difference derives from humans’ in-group and out-group instincts.  

Our tribal instincts organize our brains to respond to tribe-versus-tribe conflicts with much stronger emotions than when they respond to conflicts within the tribe. As a result, Christians and Muslims are primed for conflict, while poor people don’t find it natural to organize as a class or group. Below I’ll offer a basic take on nine aspects of identity, pointing out how some of them activate the brain’s tribal programming pretty well while others fail to do so. 

Nine Aspects of Identity

This list comes from the “ADRESSING” model of identity and oppression (see end of post).

Age

All human societies recognize age categories within the group, and these are grounded in biology. Nobody identifies as, say, a “teenager” the way people identify as “Germans” or “Catholics”. 

Tribal Politics: It’s an in-group distinction, and it has low political salience. 

Disability

Disability is a biological reality with broad social implications. Disabled people organize politically, but disability is not a source of identity the way language or religion can be. 

Tribal Politics: In-group, low politics. 

Religion

Religion uses symbolism and ritual to unite people, and before modern times it was the only way to unite different tribes or nations. It’s a breeze to re-orient religious enthusiasm and convert it into hostility toward outsiders. Today, we see hostility across religions lines all over the globe. 

Tribal Politics: Religion distinguishes between “us” and “them”, and it has high political salience.

Ethnicity

Ethnic identity traditionally determined one’s nation, language, religion, and homeland. Armenians, for example, belonged to Armenian culture, and a Navajos belonged to Navajo culture. Today, of course, everything is more complicated, as it was, for instance, in the Roman Empire. Still, even today it’s easy to get most people to identify emotionally with their ethnic groups, especially when there are conflicts with other groups. 

Tribal Politics: Between-group, high politics.

Social Class/Culture

People commonly admire the successful people in their own “tribes.” My daughter loves Beyoncé because Beyoncé is a boss. Like chimpanzees and bonobos, humans defer to high-status individuals within the group. How easy is it for the rich to keep the poor divided by race and nationality? Way too easy. In some societies, class and ethnicity align more or less well, especially when class definitions are explicit and legally enforced. When not linked to ethnicity, class still comes with some of ethnicity’s trappings, such as distinctive dress or accents. 

Tribal Politics: In-group or between-group, middling political salience.

Sexual Orientation

Sexual desire operates on its own agenda, cutting across lines of social identity, and often at odds with a conservative religious identity. Oppression and hostility give the LGBTQ+ crowd good reason to organize politically, but “tribe-style” identities seem powerful compared to sexual orientation. 

Tribal Politics: In-group, middling politics.

Indigenous Background

This category is a special case of the more general tendency to form exclusive groups based on ethnicity and nationality (especially in the broad sense). 

Tribal Politics: Between-group, high politics. 

National Origin

Humans are unusual among social animals in that we can tell which strangers are in our society and which are not. A nation is a level of social organization above the tribe, historically allowing tribes to work together and allowing strangers to trust each other. Traditionally, nations have been defined by shared language, religion, lifestyle, and ethnicity. Consider Armenians, Navajos, Danes, etc. Largely, the point of a nation is to get people within it to treat each other better than they treat outsiders. Nearly all Americans, for example, would say that our federal government should concern itself more with our well-being than with the well-being of Argentinians. Politically, it’s easy to get people riled up about their nation, and something like a massive terrorist attack can get even liberal intellectuals to put flag stickers in their car windows. 

Tribal Politics: Between-group, high politics. 

Gender

Traditionally, men and woman have often had single-sex social groups, but our tribal instincts are organized to unite men and women in the tribe with each other and against the enemy rather than to unite women against men or vice versa. Gender may be an important part of one’s personal identity, but it’s not typically a political identity. In fact, filling a man’s role often means competing with other men for status, and the same goes for women.  

Tribal Politics: In-group, low politics. 

The Nonbiological ADRESSING Model

Leticia Nieto’s model of identity and oppression treats these nine aspects of identity as if they are all analogous to each other, with no real sense that humans are flesh-and-blood animals. Being Black, in this model, is essentially like being disabled. My late wife was both Black and disabled, and I can tell you that these two aspects of one’s identity are not essentially the same. In college I studied 20th century social sciences, and half of what I learned was well-meaning bogus stuff that I later had to unlearn. Nieto’s ADRESSING model fits the pattern of 20th century social science because it’s formulaic and nonbiological.

Missing Aspects of Identity

Three biologically potent aspects of identity are missing from the ADRESSING model. 

Language is a primal indicator of who is “us” and who is “them”, as people with thick accents can tell you. Little children seem to intuit identities based on language at an earlier age than identities based on race. The high political salience of language aligns with that of ethnicity, nation, and religion. Say yes to the Oxford comma, or else let’s fight!

Family is a primal source of personal identity, especially perhaps the mother-child connection. It has low political salience in general. The conflict of “young versus old” gets some traction, but that isn’t exactly a conflict between offspring and parents. 

Individual flesh-and-blood reality—the “crazy diamond” of one’s own unique phenotype—can be a major aspect of one’s personal identity, especially for those of us who diverge from the average in mental or physical terms. Political salience is low.

See Also

My review of The Human Swarm by Mark Moffett, which explains the unusual human penchant for identifying not just with clans of people we know but also with larger societies of people who are “us” even though they’re strangers.

What Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind means to me and resources for learning about it.