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As a new American citizen (since November 2019, yay!!), I have been thinking a lot about "belonging" and the discourse of, and about, political "polarization". I am about to start reading Ezra Klein's new book "Why we're Polarized" and I have some thoughts before I do.
1. As someone who has been in and out of the US since 1994 and educated here and in South Africa, Swaziland, the Netherlands, one piece of magic that the US does much more easily than other places is to manufacture new citizens and new citizenships.
2. That is not a neutral thing. US immigration law has long had a preference to manufacture such new citizens in a way that reinforces white supremacy. Immigrants become citizens if and only if they buy into the values of the status quo and show how committed they are to those.
3. Immigrant are only allowed to be transformational and become part of the power structure to the extent that those who can assimilate into whiteness do so, and those who can serve as a buffer for power also do so. African and Caribbean immigrants know this very well.
4. This relates to theories of polarization in a very specific way, and its not my own thought but one many others have put forward. Polarization of the kind we see today is fundamentally about the inability of the white power structure to adjust and accommodate new entrants.
5. Who are those new entrants? Black people, Latinx people, women, poor and working class people. As these people have gained a larger share of the pie, the white power structure has reacted and pushed back unable to accept the idea or the reality of equal participation.
6. Equal participation requires accepting the validity and concerns of those groups as central to politics, instead of ridiculing it as 'identity politics'. It requires that the white power structure cede primacy and transform rather than absorb.
7. This has been a hugely effective shift and so the polarization we see has been primarily one-sided with white power structures and white citizens moving away from the rest of the country rather than everybody else moving away from each other.
8. It has created much more space for new immigrants like me, (it was always an option) to choose to side with the new entrants to power rather than the white power structure. This is why the immigration restrictionists want to slow down immigration because they understand that
9. But it means that polarization won't simply go away. It is built into the inability of the white power structure to recognize that a political structure built on the exclusion of black, Latinx, Native American and the poor and working class is untenable.
10. Polarization, of the current kind, only goes away with the recognition of the actual social compact of America: that all can and have a right to be be full citizens if they profess loyalty to the idea and promise of America as it should be, not as it is.
11. I took my oath of citizenship in service to that ideal, warts and all, in order to be a transformative citizen.
Some reviews of Klein's book which have been helpful: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/ezra-kleins-why-were-polarized-and-the-drawbacks-of-explainer-journalism
Another one: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/polarization-republicans-democracy-ezra-klein-book-review.html
