In a talk he gave soon after leaving the Bush 43 White House, David Frum made an interesting and, as it turns out, ominous observation. He noted that Bush advisor Karen Hughes wanted to address all Americans as Americans, while Karl Rove believed in segmenting Americans into groups and trying to satisfy each group with some sort of policy or initiative.
Was this the genesis of the Republican version that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan singled out recently as the single most pernicious political development of our times, that is, “identity politics.” Ryan claimed that identity politics — separating Americans into groups and appealing to them not as Americans but according to their group interests–is being practiced now by both Democrats and Republicans. The groups have to be addressed separately because, supposedly, the majority, however defined, is neglectful of or oppressive toward them.
This whole idea comes courtesy of academia, of course. It is the Marxist conception of reality and although discredited wherever it has been tried as a governing philosophy, it’s been given a second life in the mindless multicultural diversity obsession of the West.
This may be why Trump has had such success. He does indeed address Americans as Americans and expects that members of all the groups have many things in common, such as love of the country and desire to see it flourish as a whole, not just for their own particular “tribe.” And he does the intelligent members of the various groups the honor of expecting them to see that America’s flourishing means their flourishing as well. He is also in a perfect position to counter Hillary’s feminism because he doesn’t seem to feel the piety and obeisance toward it that is now expected of men and usually displayed by them.
This came to mind as I perused some examples of the microagressions that we are told plague the lives of various groups today. I found these in a chart from Derald Wing Sue’s book, Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender and Sexual Orientation, and in an article on BuzzFeed, “21 Racial Microaggressions You Hear On A Daily Basis”.
First of all, I’d really like to know what fossilized pedagogues are still saying things like “You are a credit to your race,” or “You’re a girl; you don’t have to be good at math.” They could be recorded for inclusion in the Smithsonian.
Second, many of the remarks would be avoided if people simply learned some common courtesy (taking off a woman‘s hat and asking, “So what does your hair look like today?”) or maybe even the Golden Rule (“So, like, what are you?”). But that would mean acceding to the wisdom of the tradition and its universal application, rather than bowing to the bureaucratic oversight of diversicrats.
But the strategy of the progressives has been to break down every vestige of the tradition (as oppressive of course) and then to build up an intricate bureaucracy in order to control the inevitable unpleasantness that arises from untrammeled human behavior.
Third, it seems one can offend either way. Some microaggressions come when people acknowledge the race or ethnicity of the minority (“The limited representation of my race in your classroom does not make me the voice of all black people” goes one counter to an unstated microaggression in which someone was probably asked to give his opinion as a black person); and some come when they don’t acknowledge race (“I don’t see you as black” is a microaggression all by itself). Either way, it is some kind of offense, if the minority person chooses to take it that way.
One microaggression is using “he” as the generic pronoun. The offense is that it assumes “Male experience is universal.” No, it does not. In these instances the masculine pronoun stands for universal human nature, and the human mind is capable of expanding to this second, impersonal meaning of the masculine pronoun because this meaning points to something real — the nature we all partake in that transcends group categories and even gender. This nature can include gender but cannot be reduced to it or divided by it, so that those who would manipulate our gender to gain control over us lose their hold on that particular lever.