Disabled people and the Politics of Identity

I put the article below on social media. Here I would add that for those who practice the Politics of Identity, the purpose, as I understand it, is to support identities under which people are targeted, which is not necessarily their biological race. The identity of people who worship in synagogues, for example, is not their race (biologically Caucasian) but the characteristic which causes them to be targeted by anti-semites.

The identity of the little girl who was targeted in Introduction: Social Attitudes was not her race but the cerebral palsy which caused the commenting and gesturing.

And my identity, although I have Caucasian parents, is not white, but the disability which has its own derogatory catch-phrase, “I don’t care if it [h-words] the Governor.” I feel free to oppose the current tendency of anti-racist ideology to imply that white people are bad (“white privilege,” “white guilt,” “white culture” as below). As Andrew Sullivan has written, people should not be condemned for “immutable conditions.” To put it bluntly, I oppose the “whiteness” concepticle because it is a double standard, because it is inherently wrong, not out of “white fragility,” and because as a member of one of the most targeted minorities of all, cleft palate, I have a heightened passion for justice.

The social media article: “Overcoming racism requires recognizing the capacity of all people to share in the nation’s common life. But there can be no common life of the nation when, from the perspective of scholars of whiteness, that common life is the property of white people.”

Johann N. Neem [immigrated at 3 from India] to Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic: “You probably saw the controversy over the table put out by the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It called things like rationality, hard work, the scientific method, and planning for the future “white culture.”(1) The fact that we’re now in a world were intelligent, educated, well-meaning people see that as a plausible thing to think scares me.”

Neem said the things he wanted to participate in as a naturalized American citizen are now being condemned by anti-racists:

“It was when some scholars on the academic left decided that the primary story to tell about America … was ‘whiteness’ that I first started feeling myself unbecoming American,” he lamented in his Hedgehog Review essay. “Overcoming racism requires recognizing the capacity of all people to share in the nation’s common life. But there can be no common life of the nation when, from the perspective of scholars of whiteness, that common life is the property of white people.”

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(1)[The National Museum of African American History and Culture is part of The Smithsonian, a Federal agency paid for by our taxes. The “white culture” assertions caused an uproar and were quickly removed.]

Here is a critique from a conservative publication: 

“Look at this stunning exhibition from the website of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. This is from its web page about the menace of “Whiteness”. Aside from the anti-white stereotypes here, notice the inadvertently anti-black insanity: things like hard work, being on time, cause and effect, “rational thinking,” respect for authority, politeness — all these things, according 

to the museum, are manifestations of “whiteness.” Did David Duke write this stuff? It’s crazy! If a white man said that black people are lazy, can’t keep to a schedule, have no respect for authority, can’t think straight, are rude, etc. — he would be rightly criticized as racist.”