The Vicious Cycle of Identity Politics | 5-Minute Videos

We think of identity politics as a modern idea, something that emerged from academia in recent decades. But it isn’t new at all. It’s one of the oldest ideas in history: the instinct to divide people by tribe instead of judging them as individuals. America was founded to reject this idea. So why has it come roaring back, and where does it lead? Associate professor of philosophy Andre Archie explains.

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Transcript:
The Vicious Cycle of Identity Politics
Presented by Andre Archie

We think of identity politics — defining a group based on its race, religion, or sexual orientation — as a new development, something that recently emerged out of academia.

The truth is, identity politics has a long history in the United States. You could fairly say it was the basis of the Civil War.

Ultimately, this obsession with group identity was rejected. It is fundamentally a primitive concept and not an American one. The American ideal, as stated in the Declaration of Independence and later reaffirmed in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, has always been a colorblind society in which people are judged based on merit and character.

But toxic ideas have a way of resurfacing. Identity politics is one of those ideas.

The overriding question for those who embrace identity politics seems to be, “Who am I?” On its own, the question is perfectly legitimate. But it easily becomes destructive when it demands that one’s group-based identity be recognized in law, corporate hiring and other areas of public policy.

Once government begins handing out benefits, protections, or status on the basis of group identity, politics becomes a competition among tribes. Every group is encouraged to see itself not as a collection of individuals, but as a bloc with claims on the state.

This is not a recipe for national unity. It is a recipe for endless conflict.

In the 19th century, the country was torn apart by a racial ideology that claimed white people were inherently superior and therefore entitled to rule over others. That belief helped justify slavery and the denial of basic human dignity. Even after the Civil War and the 13th Amendment ended slavery, it took a century of hard-fought struggle to challenge that lie and bring the nation closer to its founding principles.

Yet, starting in the 1970s and accelerating through the 1990s, a new identity politics took root in American universities. It sorted people into racial, ethnic, and gender categories, assigning each group a place in a hierarchy of victimhood. It argued that—as Howard University professor Ibram X. Kendi put it—”the remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” Just with a different set of winners and losers.

At first, this remained largely confined to college campuses. But within a generation, this ideology had migrated from the academy into newsrooms, corporations, government agencies, and school curricula. Group identity became the lens through which seemingly every policy debate, every hiring decision, and every cultural controversy was filtered.

The competition never ends, and the grievances never resolve, because the game isn’t really about fairness—it’s about power.

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