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Wops, Blacks, And Girls

Christopher Hitchens has a wonderful column today in the Wall Street Journal on ?The Perils of Identity Politics.? He criticizes both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for purposefully keeping us mired in the politics of race and gender, arguing with great force that people

who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it.

Hitchens longs for a world where race and gender are such irrelevant measures of people that they are as ignored as most ethnicities are today.

Let us give hearty thanks and credit to Rudy Giuliani, who has never by word or gesture implied that we would fracture any kind of ?ceiling? if we elected as chief executive a man whose surname ends in a vowel.

Yet actually, it would be unprecedented if someone of Italian descent became the president of the United States and there was a time -- not long ago at that -- when the very idea would have aroused considerable passion. Now that it doesn?t, is it not possible to think that that very indifference is the real ?change??

I recall thinking, when Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman on a major-party ticket in 1984, that she would also, if elected, be the first vowel-ending Veep. Indeed, in San Francisco for the Democratic convention that year, I listened to the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti muse over drinks on the possibility of a future Cuomo-Ferraro ?all wop? ticket.
The fact that these were now joking words and not fighting words struck me as happily suggestive....

The core of Hitchens? argument is this:

If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of ?race? or ?gender? alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason.

That principle is identical to the one underlying Lincoln?s famous, succinct explanation of his anti-slavery views:

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

It is the formerly fundamental ?without regard? principle of colorblind equality. The fact that that principle was ignored in practice through much of American history is a great shame, and in some respects it is an even greater shame that modern American liberalism has rejected even the principle.

Full post as published by Discriminations on January 18, 2008 (boomark / email).