Democrats Embrace White Identity Politics

Plus, teachers unions try to torpedo Shapiro; press bias boosts Harris; Trump meets Netanyahu

A “White Dudes for Harris” Zoom event is scheduled for Monday, following a “white women” event that happened Thursday and raised a reported $8.5 million. 

Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown listened in on the white women event and found it concerning:

There’s nothing wrong with organizing folks who share certain affinities in order to discuss and act on political goals. But convening a group as broad as white women based solely on the basis that they are white women feels like losing the plot. It assumes white women by and large are more similar than they are different, just by virtue of being white and women. It is collectivist to its core. It laughs in the face of individuality.

There’s an element of ends-justify-the means here. Some people find it okay to organize white affinity groups if the goal is organizing and raising money to elect a woman presidential candidate of black and south Asian background, but the same people would find “White Dudes for Trump-Vance,” or “White Dudes Against Affirmative Action and Against Gun Control, but for Stricter Abortion Laws,” repugnant.

To me, it’s ideologically revealing. Some people think the Republicans are the racist party. Yet the Democrats are so habituated, from the diversity-equity-and-inclusion ideology, to identifying everyone as part of a racial category that in some ways the Democrats are more deeply committed to racial and even gender identity than the Republicans are. President Biden, on Tuesday night, recapping his accomplishments as president while explaining his decision to drop out of the reelection race, said, “I kept my commitment to appoint the first Black woman to the Supreme Court of the United States of America.” He didn’t mention anything else about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson other than her race and gender.

That approach is wearing thin even at Harvard, and even among black women. Here is Harvard professor Danielle Allen, in an interview with the university’s central-administration-published publication the Harvard Gazette:

Harris would be the first Black woman to be a party nominee for president, and the first with Jamaican and South Asian immigrant parents. She also has a chance to be the first woman president. How do you see these biographical facts affecting the race?

I think it’s time for us to stop counting firsts. We’re at the point in the life of this country where everybody’s going to be a first in some kind of way on some kind of dimension, and it’s time to really focus on the question of the person’s vision and what are they going to bring to the table to deliver on that vision? And that’s where we should put the focus of our analysis and our attention. That’s what people generally want. I think we are struggling to break out of a world where we start by analyzing everything in identity boxes. I think a lot of people are tired of that and are ready to break out of it.

It’s not clear how formally the Harris campaign is pushing these “white women” and “white dudes” groups, though they are certainly accepting the money that is raised and providing senior campaign surrogates as speakers for the events. 

Anyway, “white” is embraced as an identity these days mainly by two extremes. Far-right racists see immigrants as diluting American culture. And left-leaning “progressives,” with their talk of racial privilege, their focus on the lasting effects of slavery, and their defense of race-conscious policies from reparations to racial preferences in college admissions, wind up as almost the mirror image of the far-right in their racial determinism and racial essentialism. If you are a white person looking to whiteness as a source of community or belonging or meaning or purpose, it could be a sign that that sense of community or belonging or meaning or purpose is absent elsewhere.

Biden also said in his Tuesday night speech, “America is going to have to choose between moving forward or backward, between hope and hate, between unity and division.” It’s not exactly clear that “White Dudes for Harris” falls in the “unity” basket.

Teacher unions aim at Shapiro: A letter to Vice President Harris from “public education advocacy organizations”—many with backing from public employee unions—is asking Harris not to pick the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, as her running mate. 

Shapiro “has supported education policies mirroring Project 2025,” the letter says, invoking a Heritage Foundation policy blueprint that even Trump has denounced as extreme. 

“This playbook has been pushed by Betsy DeVos’ American Federation for Children, the Kochs, the Heritage Foundation, and a wide range of well-funded billionaires who do not have the interests of our children or a multi-racial, thriving democracy at heart,” the letter says. 

“We urge you to select a nominee for Vice President who unabashedly supports and defends public education. For example, nominees such as Governors Roy Cooper (North Carolina), Andy Beshear (Kentucky), and Tim Walz (Minnesota) have been vocal champions for public education in their states,” the letter says. “We find it incumbent upon us to note that Governor Josh Shapiro (Pennsylvania) has not, and instead has supported voucher schemes pushed by well-funded billionaires from Pennsylvania like Jeffrey Yass.”

By picking Shapiro, Harris could send a message that she’s not captive to the teacher unions or to the anti-Israel interest groups that also oppose him. By avoiding Shapiro, she could avoid picking a fight with those activists.

Al Gore faced a similar situation when he picked school-choice supporter Senator Joseph Lieberman as his running mate in 2000. 

Press bias: Sometimes the media bias is so blatant it’s funny.

That was my reaction to the Sunday New York Times headline “A Global Reputation for a Steely Resolve and Deft Diplomacy,” over a news article reporting that “the consensus among foreign officials and diplomats is that Ms. Harris has a firm grip on international affairs.”

This is funny on so many levels.