Identity: It's Complicated

I got thinking about one of our age's main obsessions the other day: The obsession of identity.

We're constantly talking about identity: racial, sexual, economic, cultural. As the cult of identity grows, the concern for individualism recedes. People are no longer judged on their unique character, but on their demographic.

I deplore this, and I fear it presages the dawn of a new dark age. But how to argue against it? The obsession has become gospel; the perspective, hardened into stone. But a chance discussion the other night gave me some hope.

My daughter's friend was over for a playdate when her father showed up to drive her home. Dwayne is, since we're talking identity, "black." I am "white."

I use these quotation marks to underline the crudity of such identity pigeonholes. For, as Dwayne was about to remind me, there's a whole lot more to it.

Somehow, Dwayne and I got onto the topic of origins. Where we came from. Dwayne had always thought of himself as a Trinidadian with Spanish and African ancestry. Yet, thanks to 23 and Me, he was recently educated as to just how complicated the question of identity was.

Dwayne explained that his genetic profile told a very interesting story. He had a collection of genes from Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America. His background included both slaves, and slave catchers. Dwayne pointed out to me that this made the prospect of "reparations" a rather confusing one. Is he the villain, or the victim?

I suspect that Dwayne's story is not an unusual one. Remember that the human race, in its present form, has been roaming, conquering, trading, and interbreeding for hundreds of thousands of years. This makes things a bit more complicated than our initial categories of "black" and "white," doesn't it?

That got me thinking about one of the most appealing, yet completely misguided ideals of the American Left: slavery reparations. There are a number of problems with this emotionally appealing idea, but Dwayne's story blows open the most obvious one: Who is the victim, and who is the villain? Who pays, and who is paid?

In Dwayne's case, this question would be almost unreasonably complex. His background incorporates both European and African slave traders, as well as slaves themselves. Does he cut the cheque, or cash it? Consider Barak Obama, half white and half black: Does he deposit or withdraw?

When you consider the targets of reparations, the allegedly guilty whites, it gets even more interesting. I read recently that only 5% of the US Caucasian population had ancestors in the country prior to 1865. Subsequent to this, massive waves of European immigration between 1880 and 1914 expanded the American population. What guilt do the Del Mastris and Goldbergs bear for slavery? They weren't even here.

And is it just whites who bear the guilt for slavery? If I might borrow a dog whistle from the left, that's racist. Consider the case of Native American tribes allied with the Confederacy. They kept, took, and traded slaves, as their ancestors had done long before Europeans arrived on their shores. Victims, or villains?

The more one considers the question of identity, the more it looks like trying to right 150-year-old wrongs by picking out victims and villains today is a completely unworkable and inherently unfair effort. But if one has no real ideas to solve the problems of today and tomorrow, solving the problems of yesterday is perhaps the next best thing.

Maybe this explains the current obsession with apologizing, tearing down statues, and renaming things. It's easier than actually securing a better future for our hopelessly mixed-up, complicated human race.