Anybody who knows me knows I hate identity politics.

I’m going to tell you why you should hate it too. I’m going to incite racial-identity-politics-hatred (geddit?), and other kinds of identity-politics-hatred as well.

…by promoting R as an identifier you may encourage people to use R as a signal for group formation.

Humans like to divide themselves into groups. There is plenty of psychological evidence of this and no doubt there are evolutionary reasons for it. People can divide themselves into groups according to certain characteristics: let’s say that they do this along dimensions A, B, C, D, E, and R. For example, A could denote ‘intelligence’, B could denote ‘ability at playing the piano’.

Let’s assume that R is the most salient of these characteristics, much more immediately visible than the others. So say I catch a glimpse of you from my balcony – then I can tell your R, but not your A, B, C, D or E. Furthermore, let’s assume that treating people differently according to their R characteristic is a very bad thing which we would like to discourage.

There may, for example, be a history of negative social attitudes to people with certain types of R characteristic. One way in which one could seek to remedy this injustice would be to change laws and institutions in ways that help people who suffer because of their R characteristic. The reason that this may be a mistake is that by promoting R as an identifier you may encourage people to use R as a signal for group formation. For example, when Nick Griffin was interviewed on election night and was answering accusations that the BNP is a racist party the conversation went something like this:

Interviewer: But your party doesn’t allow non-white members.

Griffin: The Black Police Officers’ Association doesn’t allow white members. Are they racist?

Conversely, by stressing characteristics other than R it may be that R can be lessened as an important identifying characteristic when it comes to coalition formation. There is some evidence to support this; see for example Kurzban, Tooby and Cosmides (2001).

Even if there is no discrimination according to R, if people think there is discrimination according to R then the people thought to be discriminated against will do worse than those not thought to be discriminated against.

There may also be another effect from raising awareness of discrimination due to a given characteristic. When facing a setback people who are in a group thought to be discriminated against will be more likely to think that the cause of the setback is discrimination. If a person doesn’t get a job and he thinks the reason is that he is less qualified than another candidate he may well work harder in response, trying to get right what he might have done wrong.

If, on the other hand, he thinks the cause is discrimination this may discourage additional effort. So the people who are thought to be discriminated against will work less hard than they otherwise would do. Working less hard would lead to pay disparities with groups not thought to be discriminated against.

For clarity I reiterate this last point:
Even if there is no discrimination according to R, if people think there is discrimination according to R then the people thought to be discriminated against will do worse than those not thought to be discriminated against.

So we have two reasons why identity politics and highlighting of discrimination may be counterproductive. Anyone thinking about policy in these areas should take these into account if they want to avoid unintended consequences.

UPDATE: I see Dizzy has also written on this topic in relation to the BNP.