Friday, November 7, 2008

Proposition 8 and the New Racism

The backlash on the left over the passage of California's Proposition 8 reveals just how nasty Democratic Party identity politics can get sometimes.

It turns out that gay rights activists, in looking for scapegoats for their denial of same-sex marriage at the polls, are attacking blacks for helping to put the intitative over the top.

Pam Spaulding's got the background, but this quote really captures things:

The backlash is upon us, and it's going to get uglier unless our organizations step forward and say something. The desire to scapegoat blacks for Prop 8's defeat has exposed the now not-so-latent racism in our movement.
Spaulding then goes on with a discussion about how she's "three-times" marginalized (apparently as a black woman who's lesbian).

But what she doesn't do is address the inherent pathologies of lefist identity politics itself. She sees herself pulled into the maelsrom of race, rights, and identity, but it's all a misunderstanding, and not an inherent perversion of the left's obsession with race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and on and on, until each side's not getting enough of the spoils, and no coalition can last amid the division.

The fact is, with 70 percent of California's blacks voting in favor of Prop 8, the black community was shedding identity politics to enter into a traditional bloc of voters interested in preserving a valued institution.

For all the cries of GOP racism at the Palin rallies, and so forth, the genuinely wicked attack politics we've seen this year has been on the Democratic-left. As Jammie Wearing Fool notes, "Raw, unexpurgated liberal hate on display. Just imagine if these weren't two protected classes. We'd never hear the end of it."

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