I have often had to remind people I am discussing with on the internet that I am an individual first; they should stop approximating me as a sum of my sexual, racial identity.
I have always found this practice to be grossly offensive as it is a crime against individual distinction to the point of invalidity.
If someone looks at me and pays priority to the racial group I belong to, they cease to see my actions as mine but an extension of my race. In this way, the actions of a few become the burden of many.
The individual is the most important and the supreme unit of every society. Social quality is determined by individual quality as autonomous units, and social changes start fundamentally by personal improvements.
The most disturbing part of identity politics is that it erodes individuality. Every person is treated as an approximation of their group instead of a single, autonomous individual with personal agency and liberty. By lumping every individual as an approximation of their group, they become trapped in an unfair estimation that presents a grossly distorted view of reality.
Take, for example, the subject of income inequality. When you want to solve the problem of income inequality, it would be the ultimate flaw of your mathematics to lump everyone together according to race – this wouldn’t solve the problem. It rather falsely exaggerates it.
To truthfully study income inequality, you have to quantify your subjects according to skill level, career experience, educational background, position in a given field, hours of job, since these are the possible determinants of income.
When you get two or more subjects (An African American and A Caucasian) with identical qualities as described above and they have significant income disparity even though they have identical qualifications and levels. Then you have uncovered an inequality that can be every account be shown to be unfair.
But when your argument is based solely on racial or gender difference other than the significant qualities that affects income, you make the flawed variation of assuming a person of greater career standing has an unfair earning potentials to someone with significantly lower career standing.
Other than the overly exaggerated, distorted, and divisive nature of Identity politics, it is the source of unfair profiling. It takes a police officer who treats every African American as an approximation of their group to profile an African America unfairly. Because to this officer, any African American he meets fits the description of a criminal, he most likely has nothing other than skin color in common.
Identity politics erodes individual dignity. It erodes individual agency. Everyone is assumed culpable for the actions of a few within their group, whether they have anything to do with it or not. Ironically, we see a so-called “progressive” politics whose fundamental modus is hinged on ‘identity politics’. The assumption that more discrimination and racism will defeat racism. It does nothing more than replacing one evil with another.
The only effective way to significantly fight any discrimination is to treat each person as an individual and not the summation of their group.
No one should have to bear the taint of another’s actions. Everyone must assume complete and absolute responsibility for their action.
In this way, the very foundation of stereotype is strangled. To end racism, start by ending identity politics.
In this, a black man does not get blamed for the actions of another man and assumed a criminal even while completely innocent. And in the reverse, you don’t assume people to be inherently racist because of the colors of their skins, the actions of another that looks like them or what their ancestors must have at some point, done.
