Identity Politics on Steroids

Identity politics is on steroids today. In MLK's America one would be not known by the color of his skin but by the content of his character. Now we are so bombarded by race (our library of all possible subjects has a weekly lecture on "Questions on Race and White Privilege")---all this makes me a little suspicious that such a divide is accented for ulterior motives. And such a proliferation of these identity politics has occurred since Mr. Trump has been in office. The suggestion of course is that Mr. Trump has singlehandedly transformed (wasn't this Mr. Obama's term?) America into a KKK compound. I just don't see it. I actually see the opposite. I just don't trust the Jussie Smollets reporting what I must call the racial news. I prefer rather to watch our President at say, the Prayer Breakfast he gave for Black Evangelical Inner City Pastors (available on YouTube) and how he genuinely received their dilemmas as his own, and their praise with humility.

I think we err when we start to determine everything with quotas---the need of having representatives of race and gender solely on their "oppressed minority status" rather than the content of character as Martin Luther King had envisioned. After all to take a rather mundane example of sports: does one look at the local city team, the Boston Celtics, and say, "Where's the white guy on the team?" No, I trust that the GM got the best he could and simply enjoy the basketball player swish the ball. For his skill is in swishing the ball. That is how to enjoy the game. I don't think you enjoy the game if you constantly get hung up on how many of this or that is on the team.