Political Tribes

by Amy Chua

  “three out of four”: Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 6–7.

  “target African Americans with”: Jason Hanna, John Newsome, and Ariane de Vogue, “North Carolina Voter ID Law Overturned on Appeal,” CNN, July 29, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/29/politics/north-carolina-voter-id.

  “so dirty” . . . followed around: Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D. “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” And Other Conversations About Race (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 36, 96.

  Whites do not have to: Ibid., 77–79, 85–86; Hayes, A Colony in a Nation, 37–38, 197–98.

  “They went to Taipei”: Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give (New York: Balzer + Bray, 2017), 77.

  “We felt in”: Omer Aziz, “What President Donald Trump Means for Muslims,” New Republic, November 10, 2016.

  Reports abound of: See, e.g., Arelis R. Hernández, Wesley Lowery, and Abigail Hauslohner, “Federal Immigration Raids Net Many Without Criminal Records, Sowing Fear,” Washington Post, February 16, 2016.

  Women in America: See, e.g., Gillian Chadwick, “Predator in Chief: President Trump and the Glorification of Sexual Violence,” Huffington Post, November 30, 2016.

  Gay and transgender: Liam Stack, “Trump Victory Alarms Gay and Transgender Groups,” New York Times, November 10, 2016.

  “Citizens can be afraid” . . . “I saw a YouTube”: Colleen Culbertson, “Elites, Identity Politics and Islamophobia: A Snapshot of Eastern Washington State,” May 15, 2017 (on file with author).

  “I feel like”: Sabrina Tavernise, “Are Liberals Helping Trump?,” New York Times, February 18, 2017.

  the WASP elites: Geoffrey Kabaservice, The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 65, 174, 259–60, 264, 267, 271; Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 364–67, 379, 392; Dan A. Oren, Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 183–84, 272–77.

  “This is one country”: John F. Kennedy, radio and television report to the American people on civil rights, June 11, 1963, https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/Civil-Rights-Radio-and-Television-Report_19630611.aspx.

  “When the architects of our republic”: Martin Luther King Jr., “I have a dream” speech, Washington, DC, August 28, 1963, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm (internal quotation marks omitted).

  in an “original position” . . . “veil of ignorance”: John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 11.

  “race, gender, religious”: “Original Position,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (first published February 27, 1996; last substantive revision September 9, 2014), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position.

  “Rather than protecting”: Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 2–3.

  with many calling: See, e.g., Martha C. Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” Boston Review, October 1, 1994, http://bostonreview.net/martha-nussbaum-patriotism-and-cosmopolitanism.

  “city upon a hill” . . . free markets: Ronald Reagan, “Farewell Address to American People,” New York Times, January 12, 1989, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/12/news/transcript-of-reagan-s-farewell-address-to-american-people.html.

  “We are committed”: “Reagan Quotes King Speech in Opposing Minority Quotas,” New York Times, January 19, 1986.

  “welfare queens” as a term: Rachel Black and Aleta Sprague, “The ‘Welfare Queen’ is a Lie,” Atlantic, September 28, 2016,

  “Race-Baiter in Chief”: Jillian Rayfield, “Fox News Host: Obama Is ‘Race-Baiter in Chief,’” Salon, July 19, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/07/19/fox_news_host_obama_is_race_baiter_in_chief.

  called the speech “disgraceful”: Aliyah Shaid, “Conservatives Blast President Obama’s Remarks on Trayvon Martin: He’s Race Baiting!,” New York Daily News, March 24, 2012.

  “politics of recognition”: See Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age,” New Left Review 1, no. 212 (July–August 1995): 68–93, https://newleftreview.org/I/212/nancy-fraser-from-redistribution-to-recognition-dilemmas-of-justice-in-a-post-socialist-age.

  “[W]hat makes identity”: Sonia Kruks, Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 85.

  “If black people”: Jamelle Bouie, “The Democratic Party’s Racial Reckoning,” Slate, October 2, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/10/hillary_clinton_s_reverse_sister_souljah_moment.html (quoting Sister Souljah).

  “There’s not a”: Barack Obama, keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Boston, July 27, 2004, transcript available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19751-2004Jul27.html.

  “America has always”: Essay by Catherine Crooke, February 5, 2017 (on file with author).

  “confront rather than”: Ibid.

  “‘Hey, I’m a Latina’”: Eliza Collins, “Sanders: Not Enough to Say, ‘I’m a Woman, Vote for Me’,” USA Today, November 21, 2016.

  “comments regarding identity”: Robby Soave, “White Identity Politics Gave Us Trump. But Did the Left Give Us White Identity Politics?,” Reason, http://reason.com/blog/2016/11/29/white-identity-politics-gave-us-trump-bu, November 29, 2016; see also Quentin James, “The Left Has a White Supremacy Problem, Too,” Medium, November 22, 2016, https://medium.com/@quentinjames/the-left-has-a-white-supremacy-problem-too-2071ebd1022.

  or “black experience”: Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (1989): 140; see also Laura Flanders, “No Single-Issue Politics, Only Intersectionality: An Interview with Kimberlé Crenshaw,” Truthout, May 8, 2017, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/40498-no-single-issue-politics-only-intersectionality-an-interview-with-kimberle-crenshaw.

  “look at the ratio”: Farah Stockman, “Women’s March on Washington Opens Contentious Dialogues About Race,” New York Times, January 9, 2017.

  “identity politics on steroids”: Flanders, “No Single-Issue Politics, Only Intersectionality” (quoting Kimberlé Crenshaw). In a keynote speech at the 2016 Women of the World Festival, Crenshaw said, “Some colleagues in Germany undertook to count how many intersections there are. Last count there were like seventeen or something. It was an attempt to map them all. That’s not my articulation of intersectionality. Intersectionality is not primarily about identity, it’s about how structures make certain identities the consequence of and the vehicle for vulnerability.” Kimberlé Crenshaw, “On Intersectionality-Keynote-WOW 2016, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DW4HLgYPlA.

  the acronym LGBTQ: “Is it LGBT? GLBT? TBLG? LGBTQQ? Behind the Acronym Controversy,” My Castro News, April 8, 2014. Many thanks to Aislinn Klos and Taonga Leslie for their insights on intersectionality and identity politics.

  an “Oppression Olympics”: Shannon Ridgway, “Oppression Olympics: The Games We Shouldn’t Be Playing,” Everyday Feminism, November 4, 2012, http://everydayfeminism.com/2012/11/oppression-olympics; see also Michelle Goldberg, “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars,” Nation, January 29, 2014, https://www.thenation.com/article/feminisms-toxic-twitter-wars.

  a staggering 4.2 million: Sarah Frostenson, “The Women’s Marches May Have Been the Largest Demonstration in U.S. History,” Vox, January 31, 2017, http://www.vox.com/2017/1/22/14350808/womens-marches-largest-demonstration-us-history-map; Tim Wallace and Alicia Parlapiano, “Crowd Scientists Say Women’s March in Washington Had 3 Times as Many People as Trump’s Inauguration,” New York Times, J
anuary 22, 2017.

  a stupendous success: Emily Kalah Gade, “Why the Women’s March May Be the Start of a Serious Social Movement,” Washington Post, January 30, 2017.

  “crowds on Saturday”: Jia Tolentino, “The Radical Possibility of the Women’s March,” New Yorker, January 22, 2017.

  “Million Woman March”: Jia Tolentino, “The Somehow Controversial Women’s March on Washington,” New Yorker, January 18, 2017.

  “I take issue”: Ashley Dejean, “‘Million Women March’ protest was appropriating black activism so organizers did this,” Splinter News, November 12, 2016, http://splinternews.com/million-women-march-protest-was-appropriating-black-act-1793863713.

  “This is the perfect”: Brittany T. Oliver, “Why I do not support the Women’s March on Washington,” Brittany T. Oliver (blog), November 16, 2016, accessed August 17, 2017, http://www.brittanytoliver.com/blog/2016/11/16/why-i-do-not-support-the-one-million-women-march-on-washington.

  nonwhite activists as cochairs: Tolentino, “The Somehow Controversial Women’s March on Washington.”

  But tensions continued: Candice Huber, “The Problem with the Women’s March on Washington and White Feminism,” Nerdy-But-Flirty (blog), December 2, 2016, accessed August 17, 2017, https://nerdybutflirty.com/2016/12/02/the-problem-with-the-womens-march-on-washington-and-white-feminism.

  53 percent of: Phoebe Lett, “White Women Voted Trump. Now What?,” New York Times, November 10, 2016.

  “they didn’t want to be”: ShiShi Rose, “After March, a Letter to White Women” (blog), January 23, 2017, accessed August 17, 2017, http://www.shishirose.com/blog.

  “I was born scared” . . . “Now is the time”: Stockman, “Women’s March on Washington Opens Contentious Dialogues About Race.”

  “to feel not very welcome”: Ibid.

  “This is a women’s march”: Ibid.

  “understand their privilege” . . . “Fuck You”: Tolentino, “The Somehow Controversial Women’s March on Washington.”

  “this is a black and brown”: Todd Starnes, “Black DNC Protest Tells Crowd: ‘White People to the Back,’” Fox News video, 1:28, July 27, 2016, http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/07/27/black-dnc-protest-tells-crowd-white-people-to-back.html.

  Beyoncé was criticized: Reneysh Vittal, “How I Fell In and Out of Love with Cultural Appropriation,” Vice, November 2, 2016, http://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-fine-line-between-celebrating-and-appropriating-foreign-culture.

  Amy Schumer, in turn: Ibid.

  Students at Oberlin: Conor Friedersdorf, “A Food Fight at Oberlin College,” Atlantic, December 21, 2015.

  “a lot of ethnic women”: Quoted in Katherine Timpf, “Student Op-Ed: Some Eyebrows Are Cultural Appropriation,” National Review, January 27, 2017.

  “If we allowed ourselves”: Giovanni Sanchez, “Crying Wolf: How Elite Liberal Outrage Is Undermining the Left’s Goals,” February 7, 2017 (on file with author).

  Samuel P. Huntington was: See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 209–18; Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 59, 316–24.

  “a total and complete shutdown”: Jenna Johnson, “Trump Calls for ‘Total and Complete Shutdown of Muslims Entering the United States,’” Washington Post, December 7, 2015.

  “rapists” . . . “an inherent conflict”: Jia Tolentino, “Trump and the Truth: The ‘Mexican’ Judge,” New Yorker, September 20, 2016.

  “is a vicious cancer”: Andrew Kaczynski, “Michael Flynn in August: Islamism a ‘Vicious Cancer’ in Body of All Muslims That ‘Has to Be Excised,’” CNN, November 22, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/22/politics/kfile-michael-flynn-august-speech/index.html.

  war with Islam: Ishaan Tharoor, “U.S. Republicans See a Clash of Civilizations. French President Says No,” Washington Post, November 16, 2015.

  Even moderate Republicans: Steve Benen, “Jeb Bush Would Back Refugees Who ‘Prove’ They’re Christian,” MSNBC, November 18, 2015, http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/jeb-bush-would-back-refugees-who-prove-theyre-christian.

  “Unite the Right”: “Unite the Right: David Duke and Mike Enoch Speak Out at the Rally at Charlottesville, Virginia,” video, 6:20, August 14, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDizQPZMEhI&feature=youtu.be&t=6m17s; see Emma Green, “Why the Charlottesville Marchers Were Obsessed with Jews,” Atlantic, August 15, 2017.

  “[e]ngineering schools” . . . “can’t get a job”: Philip Bump, “Steve Bannon Once Complained That 20 Percent of the Country Is Made Up of Immigrants. It Isn’t,” Washington Post, February 1, 2017.

  “[T]wo-thirds . . . civic society”: Willa Frej, “Steve Bannon Suggests There Are Too Many Asian CEOs in Silicon Valley,” Huffington Post, November 23, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-bannon-disgusted-asian-ceos-silicon-valley_us_582c5d19e4b0e39c1fa71e48.

  a wild exaggeration: Maya Kosoff, “Steve Bannon’s Racist Comments About Silicon Valley Are Also Wildly Inaccurate,” Vanity Fair, November 17, 2016; Buck Gee, Denise Peck, and Janet Wong, Hidden in Plain Sight: Asian American Leaders in Silicon Valley (The Ascend Foundation, 2015), 2–3, 8.

  “maybe I’m just”: Chris Bodenner, “If You Want Identity Politics, Identity Politics Is What You Get,” Atlantic, November 11, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/11/if-you-want-identity-politics-identity-politics-is-what-you-will-get/507437.

  “The Democratic party”: Quoted in Ian Schwartz, “Maher: People Fed Up with ‘Fake Outrage,’ ‘Politically Correct Bullshit’ and Response to Islam from Democrats,” Real Clear Politics, November 12, 2016, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/11/12/maher_people_fed_up_with_fake_outrage_politically_correct_bullshit_and_response_to_islam_from_democrats.html.

  “I’m a white guy”: Rod Dreher, “Creating the White Tribe,” American Conservative, January 25, 2017, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/creating-the-white-tribe (quoting “Reader Zapollo”).

  “Most on the right”: Joe Chatham, “Group Identity on the Right,” November 13, 2016 (on file with author).

  “I get it”: Hsu, “The End of White America?” (quoting Christian Lander).

  “result is a racial pride”: Ibid.

  “The GOP Is”: Max Boot, “The GOP Is America’s Party of White Nationalism,” Foreign Policy, March 14, 2017.

  an “ethno-nationalist president”: Jonathan S. Blake, “How Ethno-Nationalism Explains Trump’s Early Presidency,” Vice, February 27, 2017, http://www.vice.com/en_us/article/53qnxx/how-etho-nationalism-explains-trumps-early-presidency.

  “White Nationalism is”: Jamelle Bouie, “Government by White Nationalism Is Upon Us,” Slate, February 6, 2017, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2017/02/government_by_white_nationalism_is_upon_us.html.

  “fashy” . . . “ethno-state”: John Woodrow Cox, “‘Let’s Party Like It’s 1933’: Inside the Alt-Right World of Richard Spencer,” Washington Post, November 22, 2016.

  “ethnic cleansing” . . . “peaceful”: Chris Graham, “Nazi Salutes and White Supremacism: Who Is Richard Spencer, the ‘Racist Academic’ Behind the ‘Alt-Right’ Movement?,” Telegraph (UK), November 22, 2016.

  “Look, maybe it”: Cox, “‘Let’s Party Like It’s 1933.’”

  Many hear echoes: Josh Harkinson, “The Dark History of the White House Aides Who Crafted Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban,’” Mother Jones, January 30, 2017, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/stephen-bannon-miller-trump-refugee-ban-islamophobia-white-nationalist; Chauncey DeVega, “A White Nationalist Fantasy: Donald Trump’s America Is Not ‘Made for You and Me,’” Salon, February 12, 2017, http://www.salon.com/2017/02/12/a-white-nationalist-fantasy-donald-trumps-america-is-not-made-for-you-and-me.”

  two Indian American engineers: Mark Berman and
Samantha Schmidt, “He Yelled ‘Get Out of My Country,’ Witnesses Say, and Then Shot 2 Men from India, Killing One,” Washington Post, February 24, 2017.

  right outside his home: “Indian-Origin Businessman Shot Dead in the US,” Times of India, March 5, 2017, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/nri/us-canada-news/indian-origin-businessman-shot-dead-in-the-us/articleshow/57462656.cms.

  “Go back to your country, terrorist”: Cleve R. Wootson Jr., “‘Go Back to Your Country, Terrorist’: Man Accused of Attacking Restaurant Employee with a Pipe,” Washington Post, March 12, 2017.

  In May 2017: Matthew Haag and Jacey Fortin, “Two Killed in Portland While Trying to Stop Anti-Muslim Rant, Police Say,” New York Times, May 27, 2017.

  “targets of threats, vandalism, or arson”: Doug Criss, “This Map Shows How Many Mosques Have Been Targeted Just This Year,” CNN, March 20, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/20/us/mosques-targeted-2017-trnd/index.html.

  August 2017 NPR/PBS Marist poll: NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist Poll, August 14–15, 2017, http://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/misc/usapolls/us170814_PBS/NPR_PBS%20NewsHour_Marist%20Poll_National%20Nature%20of%20the%20Sample%20and%20Tables_August%2017,%202017.pdf#page=3, 13.

  “neither good nor bad”: Bradley Jones and Jocelyn Kiley, “More ‘Warmth’ for Trump Among GOP Voters Concerned by Immigrants, Diversity,” Pew Research Center, June 2, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/02/more-warmth-for-trump-among-gop-voters-concerned-by-immigrants-diversity.

  “Colin, I support”: Video and as quoted in part at Jake Hancock, “Tomi Lahren Blitzes Kaepernick’s Backfield,” The Blaze, August 30, 2016, http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/08/30/tomi-lahren-blitzes-kaeper nicks-backfield.

  66 million people: Mike Wendling, “Tomi Lahren: The Young Republican Who’s Bigger Than Trump on Facebook,” BBC News, November 30, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38021995.

  “Do you know”: Tomi Lahren, Facebook video, June 28, 2016, accessed May 26, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/TomiLahren/videos/1017506241675896.