In a year filled with debates about racism in law enforcement, attacks on women’s reproductive rights, and even fights over equal access to clean water, I’ve grown increasingly weary of election post-mortems that attribute Donald Trump’s victory to so-called “identity politics.”
For example, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment remains twice as high for black people as it does for their white counterparts. The disproportionate rate of black unemployment has held true for decades, recession or not. And in Illinois, recent analysis from the Economic Policy Institute suggests that the state has the highest black unemployment rate in the country, at 14.2 percent.
So when people like University of Illinois at Chicago professor Walter Benn Michaels, who, in an interview with the Reader suggested that we do away with being “committed to a vision of inequality anchored to identity,” I have to call that logic what it is: Bull.
