Here’s my take on “identity politics for white people.”

Every person subscribes, with different degrees of intensity, to many groups. I’m an American, a native of England (and of Northampton), a Long Islander, a Derbyshire, a Knowles (i.e my mother’s family), a lapsed Episcopalian, a writer, a mathematician, a Yankee supporter, an opera fan, a white person, a Gentile, and so on.

Depending on one’s immediate circumstances, one or other (or none) of one’s identities might be to the fore–might be “salient.” In a room full of Nigerian mathematicians, my mathematician identity would be salient. Hurrying along a street in Bedford-Stuyvesant at 2 a.m., on the other hand, my white-guy identity would be salient. This is basic psychology.

Very few white Americans have their whiteness at the front of their minds when marking up their preferences in a voting booth. So “identity politics for white people” is not politically significant.

The interesting question to ask is: Might this change? Might white Americans, in electorally significant numbers, one day have their whiteness at the front of their minds in the voting booth?

The point Jonah’s reader was making, one very commonly made, is: Yes, this will change if white Americans come to feel that they are one group among many, fighting in a zero-sum game for a slice of the national pie.

What might cause white Americans to feel that way in large numbers? Jonah’s reader supplies one answer: The sight of other racial blocs approaching politics in that spirit. Now, since other racial blocs in this country have in fact been doing just that for decades without triggering “identity politics for white people,” it is plainly the case that, while this spectacle may be necessary to bring about the result (i.e. racial voting by white Americans), it is not sufficient.

What extra condition would be needed to get from “necessary but not sufficient” to “necessary and sufficient”? I would suggest the fact of white Americans being in an actual minority. After all, racial voting by our other minorities arises because they are… minorities.

I don’t believe, as a lot of liberals apparently do, that white Americans are morally superior to nonwhite Americans in their refusal to vote racially. I think we refuse to vote racially because we are smugly confident in our overwhelming numerical superiority. Basically, we don’t give a thought to our identities as white people when voting, not because we are too morally lofty to think about it at all (you’ll think about it, believe me, on that Bed-Stuy street at 2 a.m.), but because there aren’t enough people of other races to make the topic interesting or important to us when we are thinking about the nation at large, as I hope we are in the voting booth.

If that changes–President Clinton, if memory serves, promised us that it will change by mid-century–then so will our voting behavior.

I don’t look forward to that any more than Jonah does; but if you put current demographic trends together with basic human psychology, that’s the way we’re headed… Unless we can somehow bring about a transformation of human nature so that never, under any circumstances at all, is race our salient identity.

But when did the transformation of human nature become a conservative project?