“I'm not a racist,” Donald Trump proclaimed a year into his presidency. “I am the least racist person.” He was addressing reports that during bipartisan immigration discussions in the Oval Office he had questioned why the United States admits people from “shithole” African and Latin American countries rather than places such as Norway. Trump's comments were condemned in most quarters – the 55-nation African Union was “frankly alarmed” while former Mexican president Vicente Fox tweeted back “your mouth is the foulest shithole in the world” – but echoed the wider concerns of his anxious support base, which is feeling under demographic threat. Population projections have indicated that in 25 years America may no longer be a majority-white nation. As once-marginalised communities mobilise and become more visible in public life, historically dominant groups – white, male, Christian, able-bodied, straight – believe themselves to be increasingly oppressed and outnumbered.
This sense of majority grievance goes some way to explain why nativist populists are gaining support among Western electorates, and the hysterical responses of some public intellectuals to the perceived dominance of identity politics in contemporary discourse. The American political scientist Mark Lilla credits widespread “moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity” with blocking Hillary Clinton's entry to the White House (a view he shares with Jordan Peterson); Francis Fukuyama assures us that identity politics “poses a threat to free speech”; Michael Ignatieff goes as far as saying that it is “pulling modern democracy apart”. These coarse-grained pronouncements have traction this side of the Atlantic – within think tanks, where David Goodhart has been carving British society into artificial but competing tribes for the best part of 15 years (“Anywheres” versus “Somewheres”); and in parliament, where Michael Gove has taken aim and Tim Farron (no “intellectual” but like Ignatieff a failed leader of his country's Liberal party) has described the politics of identity as “insidious, irrational”; a “poison in our national life”.
Facing up to hostility from the Anglosphere establishment, American sociologist Robin DiAngelo argues that in fact all social progress – from women's suffrage to disability rights and gay equality legislation – has been accomplished through identity politics. Her book White Fragility is devoted to better understanding her country's racial divide, exploring how the president's nostalgic call to “Make America Great Again” works powerfully upon the white majority.
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