On his
HBO show “Real Time,” comedian Bill Maher recently went after
Democrats for “pandering” to minority groups for votes. Poking holes in political posturing is right on brand for Maher, who turns sarcasm into an art form. That’s why I watch him sometimes when I feel my sunny optimism needs a dose of tough realities. Besides, even when I disagree with him, sometimes he’s right. In this case, he was plunging into a controversy that more Americans need to talk about: How well do our racial agendas and remedies keep up with changing times? Among his examples of how “outdated” race issues have become, Maher cited statistics that show a “276%” increase in Americans who identify as multiracial and how “1 in 5” newlyweds are in interracial marriages. “My point is, look, you’re still building your politics around slicing and dicing people into these fixed categories,” he said. “Democrats need to get the memo that you can’t win
elections anymore by automatically assuming you’re going to get every voter who’s not these guys,” Maher said while showing a photo of white men in suits from the “Mad Men” era. “The more you obsess over identity, the more you ignore the bread-and-butter issues that win and lose elections,” he said. “The real issue is class, not race. And the real gap is the diploma divide. And the real future of the party and maybe democracy depends on Democrats figuring that out.” I nodded my agreement, mostly because I’ve been making the same point for years. As an African
American — here come those labels again — I don’t want to obsess about race, but I don’t want to ignore real
racism either. Neither does the government, one hopes. That’s why — speaking of “slicing and dicing” — less than a week after Maher’s monologue the Census Bureau announced that the next national nose count in 2030, as well as other future federal government forms, will offer some additional boxes for us to check. For example, new choices for “Middle Eastern or North African” and a “Hispanic or Latino” box will appear under a reformatted question: “What is your race and/or ethnicity?” It’s important to note here that the census forms change with every census because Americans change a lot, including in the ways we categorize ourselves. In 1790, our nation’s first national census, the choices were understandably few: male, female, free and slaves. In my lifetime, I have seem my racial self-descriptor change in common usage from “Negro” and “colored” to African American and, most recently, back to “people of color.” Going from “colored people” to “people of color,” as I have noted over the years, doesn’t sound like as much progress as I have seen Black Americans actually make. Still, even as we have progressed enough to witness the
election of this nation’s first Black president, race continues to be a social and political tinderbox, the number of Americans who identify as multiple races has risen dramatically, as Maher mentioned. As a result, identity politics have changed, but they haven’t gone away. In fact, let’s face it: In a dynamic society as diverse as ours, all politics — at one time or another — are identity politics. In the era of former — and possibly future — President
Donald Trump, I increasingly seem to hear comparisons of Trump’s MAGA politics and rally speeches to the old-school populists, union movements and civil rights
protests of America’s past, except expressed this time by working-class and middle-class whites who feel they don’t get a fair shake. I sympathize with their sense of being passed by or even exploited by elites. But I also think Trump’s leadership of many of them into paranoid resentment politics is about as promising as the self-defeating Black nationalism of the 1960s. Yes, African Americans scored advances. But we made more advances marching alongside allies of other races than we did fighting against them for the real progress we were trying to make. As the Census Bureau tries to keep up with the ways we Americans see ourselves, the boxes they offer us to check can seem silly, cumbersome and even out of touch. But we all need to look in a mirror sometimes, even if only to find out who we are — and how much we have changed.