The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time

by Yascha Mounk

A society that encourages all of us to see the world through the ever-present prism of identity will make it especially hard for people who don’t neatly fit into one ethnic or cultural group to develop a sense of belonging.

The lure that attracts so many people to the identity synthesis is a desire to overcome persistent injustices and create a society of genuine equals. But the likely outcome of implementing this ideology is a society in which an unremitting emphasis on our differences pits rigid identity groups against each other in a zero-sum battle for resources and recognition—a society in which all of us are, whether we want to or not, forced to define ourselves by the groups into which we happen to be born. That’s what makes the identity synthesis a trap.

Many progressives have come to believe that the traditional emphasis on our common humanity amounts to an erasure of the injustices facing oppressed groups. They also worry that members of marginalized groups are at constant risk of serious psychological harm when they have to study or work in institutions that remain dominated by members of the ethnic or cultural majority. These political and psychological precepts often lead to an organizational upshot: rather than focusing on efforts to integrate society, progressives have increasingly militated for the creation of spaces and organizations in which members of minority groups can remain among themselves.

In a pluralistic society, freedom of association will always lead to some amount of “homophily,” the well-documented tendency of people to seek out those who resemble them. But the practices that are now in vogue go much further.

The rise of progressive separatism is rooted in two complementary intellectual transformations: the embrace of strategic essentialism and new worries about omnipresent threats to the psychological safety of marginalized groups.

the practices encouraged by the advocates of progressive separatism fly in the face of these insights. Instead of encouraging citizens of diverse democracies to reconceptualize themselves as part of a broader whole, progressive separatism encourages them to see each other as members of mutually irreconcilable groups. And instead of creating more situations in which they can cooperate as equals, it encourages them to self-segregate and primes them to focus on the status inequality between them. The key precepts of progressive separatism fly in the face of fifty years of research about how to build cross-ethnic and cross-cultural solidarity.

A better solution to the persistent problem of segregation is a redoubled commitment to integration. The goal must be to create more contexts and opportunities in which people from different groups can interact and cooperate.

Race-neutral policies wouldn’t just help to ensure that all needy people can hope for assistance; ironically, they would also help to lessen disparities between different ethnic groups.

The best way to deal with those situations in which the demands of sex and gender do clash is to recognize that they involve a genuine trade-off between the legitimate interests of two different groups. Most of the time, this recognition can set the stage for humane compromises that are respectful toward the needs and the dignity of both. But identifying such compromises becomes impossible if hospitals, sports leagues, or prison wardens insist that the notion of biological sex is an oppressive social construct that must never be considered when making rules.

By encouraging us to interpret every historical fact and every personal interaction through the lens of race, gender, and sexual orientation, advocates of the identity synthesis make it impossible to understand the world in all of its complexity. And by portraying society as being full of bigots who pose a constant threat to members of every conceivable minority group, they encourage more and more people to feel adrift in a relentlessly hostile world.