I heard on the radio today that Nicky Haley will run against identity politics in her 2024 presidential campaign. I doubt that she will oppose the most pernicious and dangerous form of identity politics: white supremacy. It seems that people who self-identify as "white"--I certainly don't--believe that their lighter skin tones entitle them to special treatment compared to everyone else. Haley was governor of South Carolina, which is one of the strongest bastions of white supremacy anywhere. I once went to a barbecue in Columbia with my cousin when she was living there. She cautioned me not to talk politics there since it could be dangerous.
I hope Haley will be confronted about this issue. The false notion of white identity, which was created by English settlers to create and maintain majority control and to justify brutal oppression of everyone not included, is one of the cornerstones of our very sick society. People of Irish or Italian descent, for example, were not originally classified as white. None of us comes from Whiteland. There is no such thing as white ethnicity or nationality. White culture is an absurd notion. It is long past time to completely scrap the notion of whiteness along with white skin privilege.
The absurdity of the idea of whiteness was very clear in Apartheid South Africa. I used to receive a publication summarizing the South African press from the African National Congress of South Africa. One article has stuck in my memory for decades. There was an annual report on racial classifications in South Africa, which defined many races. For example, Asian was a race, though Japanese were honorary whites for economic reasons. The key sentences from the report gave the number of people classified white from colored, colored from white, black from colored and colored from black. However, the number classified from white to black or black to white was zero. Sometimes, two siblings with the same parents were classified in different races.
The notion of race is scientific nonsense, of course. All humans originated in Africa, and nothing in our DNA corresponds with racial distinctions in use. However, it derives its power precisely from its use in deciding who gets privileges and who does not. I learned a lot about race from South African scholar Fred Dube. He explained that racial definitions are completely arbitrary, as the previous paragraph illustrates. In apartheid Israel, race is defined by whether you are Jewish or not.
An otherwise progressive rabbi once told me that I could not be Jewish because I don't believe in the existence of a supreme being or practice the religion. That definition makes about 85 percent of Jewish people not Jews. Indeed Jews are not a coherent grouping in any way. We speak different languages, live in different countries, and have very little in common. I used to know a Moroccan Jew who had come to study at UC Berkeley. We used to joke that the only things we had in common were that both of us spoke English and both of supported Palestinians.
When I describe myself as Jewish, I mean that my ancestors were eastern European Jews. Three of my grandparents spoke Yiddish, though one did not. Only one of my grandparents believed in a god, and she died before I was born. When I asked my mother in my teens why I had been sent for religious training and bar mitzvah, she replied that she wanted me to know what I would be rejecting. That was an excellent strategy.
