Almost in response to the criticism of identity politics by Fukuyama and Appiah, comes a NYT article by  Pankaj Mishra describing the cult of whiteness that limits progress. It is hard to separate issues like identity politics and cultural appropriation from white supremacy. Fukuyama and Appiah view marginalized group protest as a means of creating  identity politics in reactionaries. Mishra views identity politics as a demand of respect from marginalized groups. He views white supremacy is always in action and is always attempting to suppress ethnic minorities. 

Fukuyama and Appiah find the solution in the national creed. There is no need for identity politics groups. We look to the Constitution. The Constitution originally did not view blacks as human. The Constitution did not think blacks and women had the right to vote. Corrections were required. When we think about the Constitution today, we think about the body that decides what the Constitution “thinks” about issues of our daily lives. There is no reason for ethnic minorities to take comfort in Kavanaugh interpreting the Constitution. We are left wondering what 5-4 decisions say about our national creed. National creed is not going to rescue marginalized groups. 

Mishra notes that white supremacy has deep roots in American history. White supremacy does not need identity politics of marginalized groups to do its evil from the first three paragraphs of his NYT article.

“White men,” an obscure Australian academic named Charles Henry Pearson predicted in his 1893 book “National Life and Character: A Forecast,” would be “elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside” by people they had long regarded as their inferiors — “black and yellow races.” China, in particular, would be a major threat. Pearson, prone to terrors of racial extinction while living in a settler colony in an Asian neighborhood, thought it was imperative to defend “the last part of the world, in which the higher races can live and increase freely, for the higher civilization.” 

His prescriptions for racial self-defense thunderously echoed around the white Anglosphere, the community of men with shared historical ties to Britain. Theodore Roosevelt, who held a complacent 19th-century faith, buttressed by racist pseudoscience, that nonwhite peoples were hopelessly inferior, reported to Pearson the “great effect” of his book among “all our men here in Washington.” 

In the years that followed, politicians and pundits in Britain and its settler colonies of Australia, Canada and the United States would jointly forge an identity geopolitics of the “higher races.” Today it has reached its final and most desperate phase, with existential fears about endangered white power feverishly circulating once again between the core and periphery of the greatest modern empire. “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” President Trump said last yearin a speech hailed by the British journalist Douglas Murray, the Canadian columnist Mark Steyn and the American editor Rich Lowry. More recently, Mr. Trump tweeted (falsely) about “large-scale killing” of white farmers in South Africa — a preoccupation, deepened by Rupert Murdoch’s media, of white supremacists around the world.

There is little blacks can do other than protest. White supremacy began to crumble under its own weight, but it remains in force today.

The exposure of Nazi crimes, followed by decolonization and civil rights movements, generally discredited quasi-scientific racism and stigmatized overt expressions of white supremacism. In our own time, global capitalism has promised to build a colorblind world through economic integration. But as revolts erupt against globalization in its latest, more disruptive phase, politicians and pundits in the Anglosphere are again scrambling to rebuild political communities around what W. E.B. Du Bois in 1910 identified as “the new religion of whiteness.”

Trump is popular because he promotes white supremacy. His followers object to marginalized groups demanding respect

Mr. Trump appears to some of these powerful but insecure men as an able-bodied defender of the “higher races.” The Muslim-baiting British Conservative politician Boris Johnson says that he is “increasingly admiring of Donald Trump.” Mr. Murray, the British journalist, thinks Mr. Trump is “reminding the West of what is great about ourselves.” The Canadian YouTube personality Jordan Peterson claims that his loathing of “identity politics” would have driven him to vote for Mr. Trump. 

Other panicky white bros not only virulently denounce identity politics and political correctness — code for historically scorned peoples’ daring to propose norms about how they are treated; they also proclaim ever more rowdily that the (white) West was, and is, best. “It is time to make the case for colonialism again,” Bruce Gilley, a Canadian academic, recently asserted and promptly shot to martyrdom in the far-right constellation as a victim of politically correct criticism. Such busy recyclers of Western supremacism, many of whom uphold a disgraced racial pseudoscience, remind us that history often repeats itself as intellectual farce. 

Identity politics is a defense used by marginalized groups. White supremacy is true evil