My maternal grandmother lived by herself in an old home in rural North Carolina. She was raised by her grandparents, who had been children during the Civil War. She was conservative to her core. She carried a handgun in her purse. She dressed with the class of Jackie Kennedy when she went to church, and had Confederate battle flags tucked into drawers in her parlor.
She was also a dues-paying member of her local Black church and close to her many Black neighbors — but she viewed the world through a lens of interethnic conflict (though she would never have used words like this).
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
She looked at the conflicts in the Middle East and around the world: “people are tribal honey,” she’d tell me, “like sticks with like. Look at me, I’ve never forgiven the North for what they did to us. It was the War of Northern Aggression and don’t let anyone tell you differently.”
I reflected on her worldview a good deal when I ran for Congress as a Democrat in Georgia’s 7th Congressional District, one of the most diverse districts in the country and one with more “tribes” than she could possibly have dreamed of.
I have observed there is great pride and solidarity that comes out of belonging to a particular ethnic group or having a certain “identity.” I’ve been to churches, mosques, temples and synagogues. I have eaten the dates at the iftar dinners breaking the fast, leaned on my left elbow and broken the matzo at Passovers, been blessed at Hindu temples and taken the wafer and sipped the wine at many different types of Christian churches. I have visited with the Black fraternities and sororities, the ethnic Chambers of Commerce, the Rotary Clubs and Kiwanis Clubs. I have had the privilege to experience the diversity of this country in more ways than most people get to experience in a lifetime.
And I have meditated on the challenge to our democracy that this diversity poses. The founders of this country feared “faction” almost more than any other ill that could beset democracy.
Why? We don’t have to look far to see competing ethnic groups tearing each other to pieces around the world. Sociologists have observed that intense group identity is easy to construct and hard to break. It’s not difficult to imagine that human beings are somehow hardwired to seek group affinity, to define themselves as part of a group in opposition to the “other.”
The challenge is that to have a functioning democracy, we have to overcome our ethnic identities and see ourselves as one community and one nation.
On a practical level, the reasoning is math. In a democracy, it takes majorities or supermajorities to pass legislation that addresses a particular public problem and, thus, to build consensus around a solution requires, to some degree, a shared worldview and underlying sense of common interest: I have to believe that if my neighbor loses his or her health care, I could lose my health care. If my neighbor is brutalized by the police, I could be brutalized by the police. This shared sense of fraternity forms the basis for the consensus needed to enact critical policy changes.
But on an even more important level, overcoming ethnic solidarity is important because to cohere as a nation requires each of us to sacrifice for the greater good, generation after generation. It requires patriotism, to believe that this country stands for some common value or purpose greater than ourselves. This sacrifice takes many forms: from paying taxes, voting and participating in the democratic process, to being willing to fight and die for this country. We have to resist the impulse that my grandmother identified and be involved in the project of overcoming our tribal identities.
And this is where we are running into serious problems from both the left and the right. On the right, we face the intense current of white Christian nationalism that runs in varying degrees through the Republican Party.
This worldview is complemented and reinforced on the left by critical race theory and its many intellectual stepchildren, where identity is deeply associated with race and ethnicity and is further defined in opposition to white (or “colonial”) oppression. Consider, when the mayor of Boston has a Christmas party to which white people were not invited, or when the federal government proposed to give out grants that went first to selected minority groups, regardless of income or capacity, as it did with some pandemic aid programs. I know the intent is to focus on the long-term effects of racism and try to provide redress — but the impact is to reinforce tribalism.
My grandmother would have said “I told you so” — it’s us against them. If you had accused her of racism, she would have shrugged, “Of course I am, it is the natural order of the world.”
This narrative of ethnic group identity and power struggle is reinforced in almost every newspaper article that identifies a policy issue as being a “Black,” “Latinx” or “BIPOC” problem; it is being reinforced in everyone’s TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X feeds — often riddled with misinformation from the enemies of this country who want to destroy faith in our institutions.
There is a reason that past generations often used socioeconomic criteria rather than racial criteria to talk about social problems: It cuts across ethnic and racial lines and pulls us out of our tribal crouch to focus on a common problem. In fact, social scientists are starting to realize that when a problem is defined as a “Black problem” or a problem with disparate impact on a minority population, it becomes less important to everyone else. It undermines public support for a solution because it ceases to become our common problem: it’s their problem.
This doesn’t mean that there isn’t racism or that we shouldn’t address it — quite the reverse. It is why overcoming racism is so critical to the multiethnic, multiracial democratic project of this country. It is why the de facto segregation of our schools and neighborhoods for instance is so pernicious — it’s not just about the wicked intersection of race and poverty but an even bigger problem, this divide undermines the unity of purpose necessary for a strong democracy.
Yes, we must redress disparity, and, yes we must face racism. I’m not here to give glib or easy answers, but we are not going anywhere good with “white privilege” or an oppression narrative just as we are not going anywhere good with white nationalism. Rather, we will only succeed through a vision of shared outcome, a shared vision of our nation’s future and one that transcends identity politics. What this means is not fully defined, but I would suggest a place like Georgia — with its long history of Civil Rights struggle and its new history of incredible, global diversity — would be a great place to start.
Carolyn Bourdeaux is a former member of Congress from Georgia’s 7th District. She is a contributor to the AJC Opinion page.
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