Identity wars: from presidential politics to foreign policymaking
My personal journey on identity, and what it tells me about the immorality and dangers of essentialism.
One aspect of “identity politics” that fascinates me is the question of who claims the right to define a person’s identity. Is it the person themselves? Or those in positions of authority or influence? Or society as a whole?
Is identity a social construct or something essential and fixed to our being?
These questions are prominent in our current political moment:
Kamala Harris claims both African American (from her father) and South Asian (from her mother) heritage. Donald Trump says that she can’t be both.
Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, identifies as Jewish. Trump agreed to say he is a “crappy Jew” and said any Jewish person who votes for Harris “needs to have his head examined.”[1] American Jews who have questioned the Israeli military’s campaign in Gaza are called “bad Jews.”[2]
Reactionaries insist that gender identity is unalterable and unescapably binary (biological and social science conclusions to the contrary), going so far as to use the power of the state to tell people what gender they must be and which bathroom to use.
And yet those who would deny others the agency to choose their own identity have no problem with the fact that Donald Trump’s grandfather changed his name from Drumpf. Or that JD Vance grants himself the liberty to change his own last name and religion, and has children who, like Harris, have a mother of South Asian heritage.
When ruminating on these questions, I conduct a thought experiment. What if a human were to appear out of nowhere with no idea of their name or where they came from.[3] How would they identify themselves? How would they seek out identity and who would they seek it from?
Conveniently, I am my own experiment.
I was adopted. It was a closed adoption, which means I don’t know the backgrounds of my biological parents. I have no idea what I “am,” other than by appearance generally European.
I acquired the identities of my adoptive parents. My father’s family were Jews who immigrated from a Fiddler-on-the-Roof-ish village in the Pale of Settlement in what was then the Russian Empire. My mother’s family was white bread, English, Methodist. I gravitated toward my dad’s side because it was more colorful. That, and because my maternal grandmother was cringe racist.
I told people I was Russian. I made it part of my identity. I took Russian language and history courses in college.
But … as I learned and read more, I realized that Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews are not the same as Russian-speaking Slavs. One community did not identify with the other, even if they lived next door. Certainly, those committing the pogroms did not think so.
(Adding to the geographical complexity, the town of my ancestors would today be located in Belarus if it hadn’t been wiped off the map during one of the world wars.)
So it didn’t feel right to identify as Russian. And with a Methodist mother, it didn’t feel right to identify as Jewish either. Plus, many of my relatives who considered themselves Jews were not actively religious, showing how Jewish identity exists in the liminal space between ethnicity and religion.[4]
The question reemerged when my kids had their World Family Day at school, where kids make flags of their country of heritage. Rather than try explain the complexities to a 7-year old, I told them just to make Russian flags.
By the time I explained things when they were older, it came out as a story not an edict. I didn’t say, “You Are This.” It was more like: here are the identities I took from my adoptive parents and all their complexities. Kids, take these and those from your mother, and figure out what it means to you and how you see yourself in the world.
What would be the alternative? Let some patriarchal politician tell them who they are? Tell them they have to choose between Russian and English because they can’t be both? Or that they need find out who their biological paternal grandparents were, because only bloodlines determine identity?
My own life experience answers for me the question whether identity is a construct or an essence. I’ve had to construct my identity, even adapt it. And pass it on to my kids and let them figure it out. So if some chud commands me to identify a certain way because of blood or skin color or nose size, I will tell them to fuck off.
OK, why am I writing about this in a foreign policy blog? Because this question of identity is relevant to international relations as it is to interpersonal ones.
Case in point: Team Trump’s policy approach on China for a second Administration is outlined in Project 2025. As I analyzed in a recent post, the plan portrays the Chinese people, due to their history and culture, as incapable of governing themselves as a “normative nation.” Project 2025 says their essence makes the Chinese naturally aggressive – an aggression that can only be fixed by “external pressure.”
Well, friends, that’s race essentialism. Which is racism. With a bit of White Man’s Burden imperialism tacked on.
Just as Trump sees his opponents through what he perceives as their essence (Black, Jewish), his foreign policy planners see their adversaries though their essence (Chinese as aggressors).
So too with Israel/Palestine, where the essentialists feel entitled to tell American Jews they’re not “real Jews” if they dare to question the Israeli military’s conduct in Gaza. And those who believe that all Palestinians, even children, are legitimate targets because of some inborn quality that makes them all terrorists.
(And I note that essentialism nurtures antisemitism. The “rootless cosmopolitan” trope is based on a belief that Jews, because of their migratory or marginal existence in Russia, were not a legitimate people because they lacked roots in a land.)
I find essentialism immoral and dangerous. Not only does it foster dehumanization of individuals and peoples, and all the resultant tragedies, but also tends to limit policymakers’ options and forces them toward maximalist choices. If you think that the other country’s people are congenitally aggressive or inherently terrorist, it leads to non-peaceful responses.
Essentialist thought conforms to a political philosophy that values hierarchy and power over equality and justice. This is not a mindset in which human rights can flourish. Essentialism constrains the space that allows people to express their identity, whether through religion, ethnicity, gender, etc.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights holds that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” and provides the framework by which individuals can claim and express (or decline to express) their identity. A society in which presidential candidates, church patriarchs, thinktankers and shitposters assign people’s identities for them is antithetical to the principle of the universality of human rights.
[1] Does anyone else hear “Jews need to have their heads examined” from Trump and detect echoes of calipers and eugenics?
[2] Strong recommendation for Emily Tamkin’s book, “Bad Jews,” about the complexity of Jewish-American identity
[3] This is the setting of many amnesia-related mysteries and science fiction stories, such as the Smith character in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, which was influenced by Mowgli in Kipling’s The Jungle Book.
[4] I am inclined to answer “American” to a query about heritage, which simultaneously feels right and wrong – right because it echoes the noble concept of America as founded on an idea rather than a connection of ethnicity to land, and wrong because it evokes the assimilationist creed that, in service of a traditionalist white, male, Christian hierarchy, denies people of diverse backgrounds space to assert their own identity.