liberal essentialism

As an internationalist, a socialist, and a pacifist, I'm used to a string of liberal argument that goes something like this. "You can reject the nation/capitalism/war because you're white and privileged! Black people/gay people/women don't hold those positions, it's all white men." Or, as someone put it in the comments here early this year, "I guess what I was getting at before is that the dream you're espousing here is itself a product of your tribal loyalties, or more succinctly, I suspect that the overwhelming majority of people who share your dream are white Westerners, and there are cultural reasons for this."

This is of course liberal essentialism, reducing nonwhite and non-Western people to their presumed roles as liberal voting blocs. It's also not true. I've known dozens of socialists in my life who were black, or gay, or women, or transgendered, certainly in higher proportions than the regular population. That fact is irrelevant to the correctness of the ideas, but it speaks to the sense in which liberal belief in the superior diversity of their ideas has actually compelled them to imagine less diversity that there really is. That there is a tiny number of nonwhite socialists speaks to the fact that there is a tiny number of socialists, period. If not a single black person held a political position I believed to be correct, then I would simply have a bigger job to do in convincing them. That it isn't the case, but is casually believed by liberals, tells you more about the unfortunate space that minorities occupy in the liberal imagination than it does about radical politics.

The immediate aftermath of this last political election was gross for a lot of reasons, but none of them made me wince more than the strutting attitude towards race a lot of Democrats displayed. The self-congratulation itself was just gross. The broader problem is how deeply liberals believe that they own minority populations, and that this ownership not only grants them the electoral advantage of the votes, but the mantle of social liberal righteousness. This essentialism, like all essentialism, robs the people who are supposedly being honored of their agency and choice, and reduces all racial politics to the status of psychodrama.