Xu Jilin, "Political Correctness and Identity Politics"​

Xu Jilin, “Looking at American Political Correctness and Identity Politics through the Lens of the Anti-Racist Movement”[1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby

Xu Jilin (b. 1957) is professor of history at East China Normal University, a well-known liberal and public intellectual whose work features prominently on this site.  The text translated here, however, illustrates the limits of his “liberalism.”  My point is not to call him out.  Xu often refers to himself as a “bat,” a flying mammal that doesn’t quite fit in (we would say “neither fish nor fowl”), because in terms of economics, he prefers the equality of socialism, in terms of politics, the constitutional protections and human rights of Western democracies, and in terms of culture, the cohesiveness of the (past) Confucian order.  This ideological eclecticism is part of the charm of his work.
 
The text translated here, a reflection on political correctness and identity politics in the United States, was published last year in response to the Charlottesville incident, where white supremacists protested the decision of the city to remove a prominent statue of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee, leading to considerable violence and one death.  Xu recycled it on his WeChat channel on June 12, 2020 in response to the protests that have arisen following the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police on May 25, because both incidents involve issues of racism, white supremacy, and identity politics—all of which have been at the center of American politics for some years.
 
What struck me about Xu’s essay is that most of it could have been written by a “reasonable Republican,” say David Frum, who publishes frequently in The Atlantic, or David Brooks, a writer for the New York Times.  Xu understands the logic of political correctness and identity politics and the danger of the “melting pot,” where the dominant “flavor” inevitably winds up being that of the majority.  Yet he is less impressed by the possibility of righting historical injustices for individuals and members of vulnerable groups, than preoccupied by the prospect of American decline due to the loss of cultural and political consensus. 

He is concerned that identity politics are inevitably selfish, “now it’s my turn” politics with no claims to any greater good or broader principle, and that the logic of identity politics is invariably to encourage the creation of more identities claiming their inviolable rights simply because they have been excluded—which is precisely the claim of white supremacist groups.  The logic also inflates the difference between groups rather than bringing them together.
 
Readers will be struck immediately by Xu’s use of the term “white liberals" (or leftists baizuo 白左), which one encounters frequently in China.[2]   The expression first gained currency during the refugee crisis in Europe, and is used in China to refer to pie-in-the-sky utopian do-gooders with no sense of national interest.  If you criticize China’s policies toward the Uighurs in Xinjiang, for instance, there’s a considerable risk your Chinese friend will snarl a baizuo under her breath.  To my ear, it is the Chinese equivalent of the American term “social justice warrior,” or any of the myriad terms used to condemn the politically correct.  Why the Chinese racialize their insult is an interesting—and disturbing—question.  That Xu Jilin, a moderate’s moderate, uses the term suggests that it has already been normalized in sophisticated Chinese discourse.
 
I was equally surprised to see Xu give a favorable nod to Samuel Huntington in one of his most conservative moments—the 2004 publication of his Who Are We? where he blamed Latino immigration for the loss of American cultural cohesion and consensus.  Xu also talks about “Muslim terrorism” and the "crimes committed by Mexican immigrants" in ways that are...politically incorrect in the eyes of many Americans.  Discussions of the faded glory of traditional American Anglo-Saxon culture reminded me of the Japanese discourse—in the 1980s, when Japan was more or less where China is now in terms of an Asian “threat” to the United States—on the advantages of racial homogeneity in pursuing social harmony.  Xu of course makes no such claim for China, but I doubt that a Tibetan or a Uighur intellectual would have written this essay in the same way.
 
Readers will make up their own minds; my personal judgement of Xu’s thoughts on identity politics is not particularly relevant.  To me, the value of Xu’s essay is to remind us that even Chinese admirers of Western liberal democracy may not see Western liberals as we would like to be seen.  That Chinese liberal intellectuals prefer order to disorder, consensus to conflict, makes sense in the light of their recent historical experience and cultural roots.
 
Translation
 
When Donald Trump was officially elected president, Time magazine put him on the cover as Person of the Year, with the caption “President of the Divided States of America.”  Trump’s election was the result of the antagonism and the polarization between left and right, and since coming to power, the divisions within the United States have only intensified.  The bloody incident that occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August of 2017 made apparent the conflict between white liberals 白左 and Americans of non-European descent, and white rightists 白人中的右派 (white supremacists), all of which revealed that the harmonious coexistence that marked American racial and ethnic relations since the 1960s has once again been ripped apart, and the politically correct consensus has been seriously challenged.
 
During his presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly proclaimed that “We can’t afford to be politically correct any more!”  The question now is:  Are the principles of political correctness that have sustained the harmonious coexistence between the races in America still correct?  Should ideas of identity politics, which have flourished in the United States in recent decades, be revisited?  If American cannot find a new consensus on these issues, the divide between left and right will continue to grow until it finally splits America apart.

Is Political Correctness Correct?

Political correctness is a kind of limitation on free speech, which asks that the public, and particularly powerful members of the public, not to use discriminatory or demeaning language in referring to the people they are discussing, especially in cases involving vulnerable groups, ethnic minorities, or those from non-mainstream religions or cultures, so as to avoid harming their interests and dignity.  For example, African-Americans should not be referred to with the N-word, the intellectually challenged should not be referred to as “retarded,” those with mental illness should not be referred to as “crazy,” and Native Americans should not be referred to as “savages.”  Since the 20th century American equal rights movement, political correctness has become the number one principle in American and European public opinion, and many politicians, university presidents, talk show hosts, and masters of ceremony have been forced to leave office, resign or apologize after making remarks deemed prejudicial to minorities or vulnerable groups.  
 
The original goal of political correctness was to protect the collective rights of minorities and the cultural distinctiveness of socially marginal groups, appropriately limiting the freedom of speech of majority groups and mainstream culture so that different ethnitic, religious and cultural groups could accept one another and live together in peace.  Yet political correctness has been controversial from the outset, and with the rise of terrorist activities in the context of extreme Islamic fundamentalism, and the increase in the crime rates among foreign-born Muslims and Mexican immigrants, many whites have become concerned and dissatisfied, feeling that their opinions are being suppressed and that they have lost the right to freely criticize.  When the brash Trump appeared out of nowhere, openly making fun of Muslims and criticizing Mexican immigrants, many white people quietly cheered, thinking that he was saying what they dared not to. 

The origins of the bloody Charlottesville incident are also related to political correctness.  Political correctness is a principle that white liberals and most Americans of non-European heritage believe in, and in recent years, political correctness has not only been applied to the current social order, but has begun to be applied to American history as well, with the goal of rewriting this history.  In early American history, many Founding Fathers, such as Washington and Jefferson, were also important slave owners, and supported the slave system. 

Some white liberals hence felt the need to carry out “transformational justice,” to revisit the image of those Founding Fathers and arrive at a new judgement of early American history—to the point of removing statues of those historical figures who had supported slavery.  The origin of the Charlottesville incident was the decision by the local municipal government to remove the statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee from the city center, which led to the dissastisfaction of white supremacists, and lit the fuse to this violent event.  Political correctness at the outset was a means of mediating the battles of the gods of a pluralistic, secular society, the goal being to avoid cultural conflicts erupting out of discriminatory speech.  But now it has become overbearing and aggressive 咄咄逼人, and has evolved from maintaining order to purging history, provoking even deeper conflicts between ethnic groups.     
 
Is political correctness itself correct?  What is at stake here is are deeper questions of identity:  What is the United States?  What is Europe?  Historically, Europe and North America were the world of Christian 基督教[3]civilization, and modern civilization, which developed out of Christianity, formed the basis on which the United States and Europe were founded.  The United States and Europe were once proud to be “cultural melting pots,” in which immigrants from any ethnicity or cultural background would accept the more advanced civilization and values of the United States or Europe. 

After the 1960s, however, multi-culturalism swept through Europe and the United States, becoming mainstream, and the theory of the “melting pot” was rejected as “politically incorrect.”  America was no longer Anglo-Saxon America, and Europe was no longer Christian Europe, and both became the shared abode of different ethnicities, religions, and cultures.  This decline of American and European values, however, greatly disturbed cultural conservatives.  In his Who Are We?  The Challenges to America’s National Identity, published at the end of the last century, Samuel Huntington exclaimed:  In today’s new world, I can’t find America!...meaning the America of the Anglo-Saxon spirit.  In his view, multiculturalism was destroying America’s soul, creating an ambiguity in America’s national identity so that America was no longer America, and with the invasion of successive waves of “alien religion,” America would eventually follow the path of Rome and disappear because it had lost its own unique spirit.

In Huntington’s view, the clash of civilizations occurs not only in international society, it is also rooted in American domestic society.  In Christianity’s clash with other axial civilizations, the invasion of “barbarian peoples” will not only change the composition of the population, it will also change America’s soul.  Huntington has passed away, but his jeremiad continues to strike a chord, and Trump is merely a popular or vulgar version of Huntington.

In October of 2017, ten European conservative intellectuals published a jointly-signed statement entitled “A Europe We Can Believe In,” taking aim at the wave of multi-culturalism that was overwhelming Europe, championing the creation of what the conservatives called a “false Europe,” driven by the pipe dream that Muslim immigrants would happily accept secularism and a plural society.  The result of this multi-cultural campaign was that “Muslims live with an informal autonomy from local laws, as if they were colonialists rather than fellow members of our nations.”[4]  These Europeans conservatives proclaimed that “We are [meant] to affirm the very colonization of our homelands and the demise of our culture as Europe’s great twenty-first century glory.” 

What they cherish and call for is the return of the “true Europe,” the old Europe grounded in Christianity, because Europe’s best cultural tradition is the one that developed out of Christianity.  These cultural conservatives are also staunch nationalists, who believe that cultural pluralism was the tradition of ancient empires, but that in modern Europe, nation-states have become the standard bearers of European civilization, a political context that merged nationalism with sovereignty, meaning that the sovereignty of the nation-states should be upheld and the “true Europe,” with its Christian core, defended.

Christian-centrism or multiculturalism?  Behind the debate over political correctness are ever sharper divergences in national identities.  Many Americans and Europeans, especially lower-class whites, are unhappy with surging immigration, stubbornly high crime rates and frightening terrorist attacks, and hope to return to the original United States, the original Europe, the Christian world with its unique culture.

The Self-Limitation of Identity Politics
 
The principal contradictions in the United States today are embodied in the tensions between various forms of identity politics, with multiculturalism on one side and white supremacy on the other.  Identity politics emphasizes the cultural identity of the individual participant in the political process, an identity that provides the legitimacy of his claims to rights.  Identity politics emphasizes the identity of the participants, and its goal is to fight for freedom and rights for members of society who are marginalized by their identity, such as blacks, women, homosexuals, the intellectually disabled, the physically disabled, and other non-mainstream minority groups.

The essence of identity politics is a kind of rights politics, in which vulnerable groups seek to enjoy the same rights as mainstream groups.  Movements seeking to obtain rights in the West have followed an evolutionary process from civic politics 公民政治, to class politics, to identity politics.  The 19th century democracy movement began as a movement for universal citizenship, emphasizing that all individuals—men, women, rich, and poor—were equal citizens, and possessed equal political, economic, and social rights. 

However, the rights emphasized by civic politics are formal rights to equality, and when different classes find themselves in disparate economic situations, there are clear differences in the freedom and rights they actually enjoy.  Thus under the banner of civic politics, in fact, only the wealthy and the educated assume political responsibility.  Then in the 20th century, responding to the call of Marxist ideology, the proletariat’s resistance to the class politics of the bourgeoisie became the main wave of the era.  Yet at the end of the century, following the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of ideology, class politics as a whole went the way of civic politics and lost influence, and social protest movements lost a common utopian prospect. 

The universalist left-wing movement began to split apart, becoming one that emphasized the identity politics of cultural identity:  the women’s rights movement, the gay rights movement, racial equality, etc.  The American political sociologist Michael Hechter points out that the political core of the democratic system lies in competing for the voters in the middle. The interests of minority groups are always distant from these middle voters, which leads political power to ignore the political status and rights of those at the margins, and these minority groups in turn seek their political rights under the slogan of cultural diversity.

If we say that civic politics emphasizes our common status as citizens, despite our different backgrounds, then identity politics focuses on our different cultural backgrounds, despite our common identity as citizens.  For this reason, identity politics is also a politics of difference, and in emphasizing the particular identity of a particular culture is not only a claim to self-identity but also a demand that others acknowledge this identity so as to receive equal treatment and respect. 

The Canadian political philosopher Charles Taylor (b. 1931) also talks about a politics of recognition:  “with the politics of difference, what we are asked to recognize is the unique identity of this individual or group, their distinctness from everyone else. The idea is that it is precisely this distinctness that has been ignored, glossed over, assimilated to a dominant or majority identity. And this assimilation is the cardinal sin against the ideal of authenticity.”[5]  In Taylor’s view, modern people all possess a unique, unproven authenticity, and the value-neutral principles of non-discrimination employed by civic politics are in fact the reflection of the cultural hegemony of the mainstream group, which is not only against human nature, but it is highly discriminatory in itself.  A truly free society is characterized by the way it treats minorities, especially those who refuse to agree with the public definition of a good life.  A truly free society will possess enough tolerance to accord these people the same rights as all other members of society.

The social basis of identity politics is multi-culturalism, the idea that America is in fact a political community composed of many races, ethnicities, religions and cultures, which exists in a post-modern, fragmented way, with no cultural center—and in fact it needs no center.  All of the different religions, cultures, and identities are equal, and possess the same level of value.  The surge in identity politics has diminished the Eurocentrism present since America’s founding, especially the Anglo-Saxon historical tradition symbolized by the Mayflower.  This has in turn provoked a fierce reaction from the white right. 

When the rise of identity politics, and especially that of minority identity politics, received the support of the highly educated white left, the white right at the bottom of society felt that it was discriminated against and thus became a vulnerable group.   They argued that they were excluded because they were white, that they were oppressed by political correctness, and had lost the right to criticize other groups, as even the white history of nation-building was being challenged.  Hence the Charlottesville incident provoked a strong mood of white supremacy, which spread throughout the country as resistance to multi-culturalism.

We might well say that white supremacy is another identity politics, building its own sense of cultural superiority and political priority out of its white identity; it exists in a strange and paradoxical relationship with mainstream identity politics.  Whether as resistance or as imitation, they ground the legitimacy of their search for their own rights in their ethnic or cultural identity.  Special cultural identity is seen to possess a natural legitimacy, not requiring further arguments or proof.  Hence, in various public debates, discussions of the nature of truth have been replaced by the priority accorded to identity and by the fact that identity itself is untouchable.

The American political scientist Mark Lilla (b. 1956) is extremely worried about this, and has noted that because of the proliferation of identity politics, Americans “are stumbling through a divided, zero-sum life full of identity politics, losing the consciousness that could make us a nation.”  He has criticized post-1960s liberals from a position of civic republicanism for having “overly focused on issues of identity politics such as recognition of the individual and authenticity, overly stressing the difference of the self, and ignoring building a common American identity.”

The rise of identity politics has to a certain extent increased the divisions among American ethnic and cultural groups, and the overall political community has become fragile and contentious.  In a political community there exists not only a plural cultural politics built out of different ethnic and cultural identities, because if that community hopes to continue to exist, it also needs to have a common political culture.  The cultural politics and the political culture of early America was homogenous and unified.  The unique Anglo-Saxon cultural tradition forged the spirit of nation-building in the United States, becoming the political culture at the core of the constitution. 

America’s Puritan culture had two aspects:  a cultural politics that originated from a specific ethnic group, as well as a universalistic culture directed toward mankind as a whole.  With the arrival of immigrants from other ethnic groups, America changed from an exclusively Anglo-Saxon country to a multi-ethnic country, and in the process cultural politics split apart from political culture.  The question today is:  does the political culture based on the constitution ultimately have priority over the cultural politics based on identity, or is cultural politics more important that the nation’s political culture?  How does a political community of plural cultures, religions, and identities sustain a unified political community?

Mark Lilla is worried that America’s foundation is cracking, as the contention produced by identity politics finally rends asunder the cultural unity of the American political community, and for this reason he proposes balancing multiculturalism with civic republicanism.  Cultural politics is rooted in plural cultural identities, but appeals to political power, while the origins of political culture lie in political traditions, which ultimately take the form of cultural unity.  There is no clear dividing line between culture and politics, and they exist in a relationship of “pluralism within unity.”  The pluralism refers to the different cultural identities of the citizens, and the unity is the common political culture enjoyed by citizens of different ethnic, religious, and cultural identities. 

At present, the unity of America’s political culture still exists, and is acknowledged by the various contentious cultural politics, but what if the contention continues?  Will America split apart one day?  Today, at least, there is a competitive rivalry around the principle of “different expressions of one set of values.”  Clearly, identity politics requires a necessary self-restraint, which is to not destroy the common political culture.  Reassuringly, judging from the reactions of the parties to the Charlottesville incident, this consensus still exists, although it is hanging by a thread. 
 
Notes
 
[1] 许纪霖, “从反种族主义运动看美国的政治正确和身份政治,” originally published last year (2019) in 知识分子论丛, no. 15, both in print and online.  Republished on Xu’s WeChat channel on June 12, 2020.  
 
[2] Translator’s note:  For an interesting discussion of the use of the term, see  https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/digitaliberties/curious-rise-of-white-left-as-chinese-internet-insult/ .
 
[3] Translator’s note:  基督教 technically means Protestantism rather than Christianity, but the two are used interchangeably in many contexts.
 
[4] Translator’s note:  Translation taken from https://thetrueeurope.eu/a-europe-we-can-believe-in/ .
 
[5] Translation taken from Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” available online at http://elplandehiram.org/documentos/JoustingNYC/Politics_of_Recognition.pdf , p. 38.