Connection Between Fatherlessness and Identity Politics

The biographies of at least some of today's race-minded trailblazers suggest a connection between fatherlessness and identity politics. The author of the bestseller White Fragility was a child of divorce at age 2. The author of the bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race reports that her father left the family and broke off contact. Also when she was 2. The author of another bestseller, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, was raised by a single mother. The author of another hot race book, The Anti-Racist: How to Start the Conversation About Race and Take Action, was raised by his grandmother. Colin Kaepernick's biological father left his mother before he was born, but he was then adopted and raised by a white family. James Baldwin, a major inspiration for today's new socialist writers, grew up with an abusive stepfather. His mother left his biological father before he was born. The list could go on. In 2019, 44% of Americans aged 18 to 29 were nones. N-O-N-E-S. None of the above is now the fastest-growing religious subset in the United States. If fatherlessness and secularization are two aspects of the decline of the paternal principle, there remains a third: attachment to country. Here too, millennials and Gen Z stand out. For many years, the decline of American patriotism among the young has been charted in surveys which I brought to your attention just earlier. And that's the— what I've taken out. Oh, almost done. All manner of accelerants have made matters worse. The internet, social media, racial prejudice, tax political leadership— lack, excuse me, lacks political leadership, scandals within the churches, the coarsening of political conversation. The polarization of the media into clashing armies, so has the metastasizing of the Civil Rights Act. As Christopher Caldwell has observed, a feverishly partisan intellectual class has stoked the flames with critical race theory, charges of fascism in America, and other debased characterizations of the country. Like Edmund in King Lear, who despised his half-brother Edgar, these disinherited young are beyond furious. Like Edmund too, they resent and envy their fellows born to an ordered paternity, those with secure attachments to family and faith and country. That last point is critical. Boy, is she right about her own point. That last point is critical. Their resentment is why the triply dispossessed tear down statues not only of Confederates but of founding fathers and town fathers and city fathers and anything else that looks like a father, period. The men and women who think they have no country cannot abide those who have a country. Any more than the illegitimate son in King Lear can endure his half-brothers enjoying a patrimony. And that is the article. I've said that in my own way all of my life. People with no religion resent those who have it. People with no fathers resent those who have them. I'm talking about abandoned or never started with. It's not always true. Nothing is always true in the observing of the human condition, but it is largely true. Those who have no identity create an identity. If you're not a Christian, if you're not an American in your identity, then you will have a racial identity. You can add Jew, you can add Muslim, I don't care what religion. For the sake of this argument, most Americans have been Christian. To think that people value a racial identity proves what I have long believed, and why I found Steven Pinker's book, optimistic about the future, to be so naive. We don't go in some linear moral progress. We have large patches of going backwards. We are in one of them now. If your primary identity is black, that notion is morally primitive. Simple as that. If your primary identity is white, that is morally primitive. However, far more blacks are black before anything else than whites are white before anything else. That is a tragedy that was created by white liberals.