Is our obsession with race condemning our ability to manage our politics?

By Laura Bohnert

Race and politics seem to be inherently linked. It was, after all, racist ideology that formed (at least alongside, if it hasn’t formed it itself) the Trump empire: the platform went from building a wall to keep Mexicans (those “bad hombres”) out, to evicting all immigrants, to threatening North Korea with war—all within the confines of the need to enact violence against that ever-looming terrorist threat.

Canada, on the other hand, resisted Harper’s fear-mongering anti-terrorist platform in favour of Trudeau, who is all about the refugees—but that doesn’t mean Canadian politics are any less racially-obsessed. Jagmeet Singh, a Canadian and a popular politician, was just elected as the new NDP leader. He’s the first turban-wearing Sikh to sit as a provincial legislator in Ontario, which should be recognized as exciting progress—except that people still can’t seem to move beyond the focus on his race and his turban (…and his fashion sense?) to get at his actual political views.

Does this mean we are doomed to a race-first, campaign-second approach to critiquing our political leaders?

It all comes down to the problem of identity. Psychologically speaking, in order to have a clear identity, we need to have a clear and present other identity that we are not: I am not him, I am me. It’s a dichotomizing function that is inherent and thus problematic to our sociological foundation, but problematics, for a moment, aside, the backbone of it is that, in order to identify the space in which we exist and the shape within which we exist, we also need to be able to identify that by which we do not exist.

Widen the scope of that to the idea of national identity. We have clear borders drawn around our countries that don’t just separate them from each other, but which also create a political and national identity within that division from one another (I am not American; I am Canadian). Even political unions function using this dichotomy (allies versus axis).

The dependence on the idea of a “them” to form a coherent and tangible “us” creates a point of anxiety. If we let “them” in, they will destroy the structures that compose the definitions of “us”. War, essentially then, becomes a means of securing the national identity by eradicating the other that threatens to destroy that identity as fundamentally through incorporation as it could with its bullets.

This defines the US in a nutshell. I mean, add the abhorrence of gun control to the mix, and you basically have their shoot first, form your politics about it later approach. If we break it down, Trump’s campaign is, essentially, about forming a strong “American” identity—we need to “make America great again.” To do that, you need to have clear and threatening others to define (or unite) your national identity against. In Trump’s world, that means you need opponents.

Historically speaking, the US never looked like a stronger, more opposing force than it did during the war. I’m not sure that means Trump should pick a fight with the most volatile and unstable nation he can find, but in fairness, he did first try to wage that war with the Democrats, Mexico, Russia, Australia, the entire Middle East, England, the black US community, Puerto Rico, Canada over the milk thing…the list isn’t exactly short, but Trump has to keep jumping from one to the next because, without those definitive “others,” the great American identity would collapse.

The terrorist threat is thus an essential component in the ability to sustain the current national identity, especially as the world becomes more and more culturally and economically international. It is the closest link to political warfare, and thus the fear of it needs to be internalized within borders by projecting that fear onto anyone who looks the part of “other.” That’s why terrorist acts are so quickly labelled in the news—despite the fact that many of the most horrific acts, like the Las Vegas shooting, are perpetrated by those from within our own national border—and that’s why Singh’s race has become a point of obsession: he has united the idea of the other with the image of Canadian political (and thus national) identity.

What is actually strange, however, is Canada’s weird fixation on visual “trendiness.” Trudeau has been in the spotlight more for his selfies and hairdo than he has for his politics, and part of Singh’s popularity can most certainly be linked to his “recognized fashion and style sense,” as purported by magazines and other publications. Now our NDP leader is Sikh—aren’t we so fashionable and forward thinking?

The link between race and politics is an inherent sociological and psychological problem—the inability to distinguish political popularity from celebrity popularity? That’s another problem altogether, one that is a lot more baffling.