Identity Politics: A Zero-Sum Game

The current hard times have been harder on some people than on others, harder on the poor—obviously—than on the rich; but harder also on blacks and Hispanics than on whites. As of this writing, the unemployment rate for blacks is at 15.6 percent, and for Hispanics it's at 12.7 percent. For white people, it's 9.3 percent.¹ Of course, the vast majority of the unemployed are white. But it's the disparity in rates, not in absolute numbers, that tends to get foregrounded, since that disparity functions not only as a measure of suffering but also, in William A. Garity's concise summary, as "an index of discrimination in our society."² And it's the ongoing fact of discrimination that motivates our ongoing interest in identity politics. As long as inequality is apportioned by identity, we will be concerned with identity.

This is obviously both inevitable and appropriate. But it is also—and almost as obviously—irrelevant to a left politics, or even to the goal of reducing unemployment, as we can see just by imagining what it would be like if we finally did manage to get rid of discrimination. Suppose, for example, that unemployment for whites and for Asian-Americans were to rise to 10 percent while for blacks and Hispanics it fell to 10 percent. Or suppose that unemployment for everyone went to 15 percent. In both cases, we would have eliminated the racial disparity in unemployment rates, but in neither case would we have eliminated any unemployment. And we don't even need hypotheticals to make the point. About three quarters of the job losers in the current recession have been men, which means that the numbers of men and women in the workforce are now roughly equal. So, from the standpoint of gender equity, the recession has actually been a good thing. It's as if, unable to create more jobs for women, we'd hit upon the strategy of eliminating lots of the jobs for men—another victory for feminism and for anti-discrimination since, from the standpoint of anti-discrimination, the question of how many people are unemployed is completely irrelevant. What matters is only that, however many there are, their unemployment is properly proportioned.

This is, in part, a logical point: there's no contradiction between inequality of class and equality of race and gender. It is also, however, a political point. The influential Think Progress blogger, Matt Yglesias, has recently written that, although "straight white intellectuals" might tend to think of the increasing economic inequality of the last thirty years "as a period of relentless defeat for left-wing politics," we ought to remember that the same period has also seen "enormous advances in the practical opportunities available to women, a major decline in the level of racism paired with a major increase in the level of actual racial and ethnic diversity," and "wildly more public and legal acceptance of gays and lesbians."³ "These aren't just incidental add-ons to a program that's 'really' about comparing income-percentile ratios," he goes on to say, because "it all fundamentally goes back to the same core belief in human equality."

But it doesn't. In fact, the belief in human equality that has cheered on anti-racism and anti-sexism has not only been compatible with—it's been supported by—a belief in human inequality that has been happy to accept the fact that 10 percent of the U.S. population now earns just under 50 percent of total U.S. income. This is what it means for the most eminent of the living Chicago economists (Gary Becker, whose first book was The Economics of Discrimination) to praise globalization and "the increasing market orientation of different economies" by noting that, although they may "raise rather than lower income inequality," they also make that inequality "more dependent on differences in human and other capital, and less directly on skin color, gender, religion, caste, and other roots of discrimination."⁴ Why? Because discrimination is costly to the employer: you have...