Searching for Character in Identity
The following is a condensed version of "Searching for Character in Identity" by Robert C. Thornett, published at Law & Liberty.
A few years ago, during lunch at our school’s all-day DEI training, teachers were asked to fill in sheets with words about our identities. I penciled in roles, relationships, activities, and interests. A teacher next to me shared that he wrote “son” and “brother.” He was close with his Italian family, and they had recently helped his brother through chemotherapy.
Suddenly the 20-something workshop leader stood and shouted “I am a black queer woman!” My 28-year-old history department head then stood up from his chicken cutlet and yelled “I am a white cisgender male!” The auditorium was silent. Then everyone went back to their mashed potatoes. What went unmentioned in the larger discussion were the identities most teachers had written.
Rewind to 1985. I was 12. My baseball coach and his two sons on the team were black. The other players, including me, were white. Coach had played in the minors and made everything look easy. After we won the league, he and I gave each other a bear hug. Race never came up, on the field or at home.
Back to the Future was the number one movie in 1985. “We are the World” was the number one song. The latter was written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and produced by Quincy Jones. All three were black, but that was never the story. It was just a great song.
What changed since 1985? How did the America that taught students not to stereotype others go back to the future, obsessing on “the color of their skin” while ignoring “the content of their character”?
A big part of the answer is a dynamic identified by Tocqueville in Democracy in America: As a society moves closer to social equality, citizens become more aware of and more uncomfortable with the inequalities that remain. Wrote Tocqueville:
When inequality is the general law of society, the most blatant inequalities do not strike the eye; when everything is nearly on the same level, the slightest variations are marked enough to hurt it. Hence the desire for equality always becomes more insatiable in proportion as equality extends to all.
Democracy levels the playing field, but this clogs up the field with competitors, so citizens eye their differences more closely. And Tocqueville observes that “universal competition” in democracy creates “permanent struggle.” But Tocqueville also believed these same forces unleash the energies of all citizens, creating a dynamism and industry that no aristocratic society can match. This, he believed, is the source of America’s greatness:
Democracy does not give its nation the most skillful administration but it ensures what the most skillful administration is often too powerless to create, namely to spread through the whole social community a restless activity, an overabundant force, an energy which never exists without it and which, however unfavorable the circumstances, can perform wonders. Therein lie its real advantages.
Amid universal competition, citizens of democracies are therefore torn by the simultaneous pursuit of both social equality and social distinction, i.e., being unequal.
Wokeism is a misguided attempt to achieve these twin aims. Rather than helping citizens gain distinction for contributions to society, it changes the criteria for distinction to unearned group markers, “oppressed” races and genders. Wokeism co-opts the trophies of competition but discards the criteria that ensured that competition is productive. And wokeism contradicts itself, pursuing equality through inequality, designating “oppressors” like “patriarchy” as unequal. As Joshua Mitchell observes, wokeism preaches that we can scapegoat and purge our way to social justice.
In short, wokeism undermines and wastes what Tocqueville believed is America’s greatest strength. Rather than unleashing citizens’ energies, it shuts down the pursuit of earning distinction by awarding distinction for unearned traits, leaving society incompetent and unproductive.
Wokeism started as a call to be “radically aware… of the rot pervading the power structures,” as David Brooks describes it, a rot blocking the attainment of equality. But it has become an irrational wild goose chase after equality ad absurdum, as I explored in a recent article.
Wokeism offers effortless distinction to those possessing certain unearned group markers. Hence what the two educators were really shouting at the DEI training were not their identities but their woke “oppressed” and “ally” status.
I recently reached out to my baseball coach from 1985. He replied that at 83, he is a school athletic director in Florida. Coach was born during segregation. Through his ascent to the minor leagues during desegregation, he must have experienced acutely both sides of what Tocqueville observed: democracy’s “permanent struggle” amid universal competition and its ability to unleash citizens’ energies by removing barriers to the playing field. The world needs more people like Coach, who stand out not for shouting their unearned race and gender, but for contributing their energies to change lives, like he changed mine.
Robert Thornett is a college and secondary social sciences instructor and a graduate of the Master's program in Great Books at St. John's College. His writing has appeared in The Diplomat, The American Mind, American Affairs, Front Porch Republic, Quillette, and others.
