There’s a Good Identity Politics—and Then There’s Karine Jean-Pierre

But Jean-Pierre’s comments fit into an important discourse happening in the Democratic Party and the broader left about how liberals should deal with gender, sexual orientation, race, and other such fraught issues. It is vital that liberals continue to forcefully address and defend causes such as transgender and abortion rights. At the same time, they should move on from the kind of narrow, elite politics that Jean-Pierre is practicing. 

We need less focus on the plight of a few people from marginalized groups getting or staying in very prestigious, elite jobs. This is a tricky issue because I do think representation in high places matters. It’s almost certainly the case that female politicians as a group push harder for policies such as family leave and gender pay equity than their male counterparts. Prominent Black journalists like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones have played essential roles in reminding the nation that racial inequality in America remains deep and harms African Americans in a myriad of ways. We celebrate Barack Obama becoming president, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris winning presidential nominations, and Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson joining the Supreme Court because people with those identities faced such strong discrimination for much of American history that they previously couldn’t serve in those positions. 

But the fame, power, and sometimes financial windfall from these jobs goes to those individuals, not the broader communities that they come from. Because of the Great Recession and the slow recovery, many Black Americans were worse off economically after Obama left office than when he entered the White House. And these individuals are not required to, and in some ways have incentives not to, advance the interests of the groups they purportedly represent. For example, the Black Lives Matter movement emerged in part because of a feeling that Obama, trying to represent the entire country and not get tagged as the “Black president,” was even more constrained in addressing racial issues than a white Democratic president may have been. Likewise there is tension between Representative Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender member of Congress, and transgender activists, and that’s not surprising. The congresswoman is representing Delaware residents and the Democratic Party in a way that transgender activists are not.