Mirande Devine: Identity politics dividing United States into warring tribes

As Americans start to define themselves by the colour of their skin rather than the content of their characters, racism is the inevitable consequence, writes Miranda Devine.

Racial politics in America has jumped the shark.

We’ve reached the stage now where calories have been deemed racist, according to one overweight black women, and so is capitalism, according to socialists.

Identitarians determined to divide the country into warring tribes are working their way through the alphabet. Yesterday it was P for pools. “Why swimming is so white” was a headline.

Efforts by states such as Georgia to strengthen election integrity after the chaos of the last presidential election have been denounced as racist.

So-called anti-racists claim that black people are uniquely incapable of acquiring voter ID or finding the identification number on their drivers’ licence.

Sounds like racism to me.

People participate in a protest to demand an end to anti-Asian violence on April 4 in New York City. Picture: Getty/AFP

There has been an alarming spate of racist attacks against Asians in New York and elsewhere in the country recently.

This has been blamed mysteriously on “white supremacy”, even though the attackers rarely turn out to be white.

Judging by the suspects charged by police and the surveillance photos released by the NYPD, the perpetrators of these Asian hate crimes appear almost always to be black males.

But Democrats blame Donald Trump because at times he would describe the coronavirus as the “Wuhan Virus” or the “China Virus”, because that is where it came from.

Yet no one minds calling new mutations of the virus after the places from which they emanated – the Indian or South African variant, for instance.

No racism there.

The reality of New York’s anti-Asian attacks is that they are random, senseless violence.

The victims are not robbed and most are vulnerable, elderly or female. In one attack caught on surveillance camera, a frail elderly man was sitting on his walker at a bus-stop waiting for his bus, bothering no one, when a passer-by, a young black man, took a running leap and kicked him in the chest.

He knocked him to the ground where he lay motionless.

After a rise in hate crimes against Asians across the U.S. and in New York City, groups are speaking up and demanding more attention to the issue. Picture: Getty/AFP

In another brutal assault in mid-town Manhattan last week, a small 65-year-old women on her way to church was set upon by a well-built black man who punched and kicked her in the head when she fell to the ground, and reportedly made anti-Asian slurs. “(Expletive) you. You don’t belong here.”

It’s pretty obvious that the attacks are driven by racism. But if you genuinely want to stop a crime from spreading, you need to understand why it is happening.

The worst thing you can do is point the finger in the wrong direction.

As Americans start to define themselves by the colour of their skin rather than the content of their characters, racism is the inevitable consequence.

The “anti-racism” movement that sprang up after the death of George Floyd last year is the antithesis of what Martin Luther King advocated and it is tearing the country apart.