Pandora's Box

Some years ago, when "identity politics" first raised its contentious, snappish little head, the furor seemed almost entirely focused on African-Americans. The true complexity and importance of that debate, deemed largely academic at first, is perhaps increasingly clear. In recent times the world has shuddered with violent realignments unleashed by global challenges to line up with "them" or with "us," or with "truth" or with "treason." Identity is battered by varied appeals to conformity: Say it! prove it! swear allegiance to this or that nation, party, religion, bloodline of the moment--good or bad, for or against, red or blue, blue or gray, black or white, or many shades of other.

A deep planetary insecurity has fostered a rush to build boundaries around ourselves--psychic green zones, mental walls, panic rooms, little protective groupings--no matter how irrational. There's a Boondocks cartoon that captures the absurd tension of this moment, where young Huey excitedly tells his grandfather that there's good news abroad in the land. African-Americans are now only the third most hated group in America, he says, right after Muslims and the French. It is a bizarre phenomenon, this free-floating sense of well-being that derives comfort from being less hated rather than more loved.

As recent riots around the globe have made so clear, identities and their attendant prejudice are essentially malleable; they vary with time, trauma, culture and economics. In Australia Lebanese seem to have overtaken Aborigines as the hated minority du jour. In America Lebanese are still gilded with a stereotype of heroic middle classness--I heard someone say that "they're Arab but, um, more Christianized, you know?" In France Algerians used to be the most disfavored, now less so than Senegalese and Malians. In England it was always the Irish, but now that the Irish have become prosperous, Afro-Caribbeans and South Asians are, as one commentator put it, "the new Irish."

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