There is much concern today among conservatives and Republicans, at present two separate groups, that identity politics is corrupting our culture, laws and public policies. Liberals, progressives and Democrats think that recognizing and accepting people’s self-identities when there has been discrimination and denial of equal opportunities is essential to a just society. Individual rights are almost an obsession with Americans. We care almost as much about our rights to equal treatment under the law and in our communities as we do our property rights and accumulating money and material possessions. The central importance of our identities and what we perceive to be the identities of others have been with us since we became Homo Sapiens. We have always lived in groups so we have always had what would now be called rights in our own property and to be free from harm by others.
A History of Exclusion
Humans always had an identity in our kin group, villages and tribes and recognized other kin groups and tribes as having separate identities. All we have to do is look at how we have treated 
people with other identities over the thousands of years for which we have records, multitudes of wars and the exclusion of people with different identities from equality with the dominant group in communities and nations. The English and French hated each other for centuries. The Native Americans and the first English settlers may have started with friendly relationships but the tensions arising from different cultures, different understandings of what is property and competition for resources began early. Wars and massacres began in the 1600s, and discrimination by European–Americans against Native Americans has still not ended.
In the history of the United States, there has been a succession of identities and resulting efforts to exclude the new arrivals and keep them in their place. Probably the first was the separate identity of the Africans imported for slavery. There have long been separate laws for “Negroes” and whites. Free African-Americans were not completely accepted even in the north both before and after the Civil War. Segregation in hiring, housing, education, wages, access to health care, access to government jobs and access to accommodations existed throughout the United States. The South took it further by refusing to allow African-Americans to vote or prosper and by creating the Jim Crow laws. Even 1% of African-American ancestry made a person an African-American.
Of course, they didn’t know that we are all Africans! All humans’ most ancient ancestors came from Africa. The blood of all of us is African. We are all Negroes it’s just that our skin color changed depending on where our ancestors moved to.
Divide and be Conquered
Our brains seem to naturally divide us by our “identities.” When I lived in the country, even the chickens separated by color. So I think, the part of our brain that wants to treat people who look different or who are from different cultures differently is our “chicken” brain. The European immigrants to the Americas may not have invented identity politics and customs, but they used it 
consistently and we still do. After the Africans, came the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, Asians, southern Europeans and eastern Europeans. All of them were held to be lesser, low-quality and not trustworthy, and were actively discriminated against. All except perhaps the Jews are now recognized as equals probably because they are white and from Europe. That is now their perceived identity.
For conservatives and Republicans to complain about identity politics or culture is pure hypocrisy! They may not have invented it, but they have been the prime users of it since their ancestors first emigrated to what became United States. (Yes, all conservatives and Republicans are immigrants or their ancestors were. (Their ancestors were just lucky to come before we had all the unfunded immigration laws that we do now.) The very definition of a conservative is an active desire to keep things the same, to keep their privileges, for their culture and religious preferences to remain dominant, and to keep other people in their place. The old rich never like the nouveau rich and eventually the nouveau rich don’t like the new nouveau rich. American Protestants don’t like Catholics, Jews and Muslims, and don’t even like most of the other Protestants. The identity politics they complain about are the efforts to implement the Declaration of Independence’s claim that all people are created equal and to repair the damage is been caused by deliberate discrimination. We know that we all differ in the gifts and abilities that we are born with, but we are all equal in the pursuit of happiness and access to the opportunities offered by our nation. They need to quit whining and start supporting the effort not to “Make America Great Again” but to constantly work to make America greater than it was before!
Repairing the Road Forward
The difficult issue is how to repair the damage. Simply stopping discrimination does not make all of us equal, and it does not repair the damage. African-Americans, Native Americans and Americans with Mexican and Hispanic heritage still have much lower incomes and wealth and the average American. Their health statistics, life expectancy, infant mortality, militant maternal 
mortality are also much worse. They still do not have equal access to health care, just like the working poor who work for companies that do not provide affordable health insurance, or any. Their educational opportunities are worse. For example, the gerrymandered, one-party dictatorship of Republicans in Ohio’s General Assembly has never obeyed the Ohio Supreme Court’s orders to provide equal funding for high schools.
Affirmative action increased the opportunities for better jobs, access to higher education, and improved the conditions listed above. All the evidence shows clearly, however, that it has not come close to doing the job. Unfortunately, the U. S. Republican Supreme Court justices have decided that enough has been done to address past discrimination and the people cannot be discriminated against using affirmative action. It is unfortunate that affirmative action does mean that African-Americans and some others will get jobs and be admitted to universities while other equally qualified “whites,” and apparently Asians, who might have been admitted instead or hired would not be. To compensate for and repair the damage done by discrimination, the costs, the only people who can do it are those living now. We must pay for the damages caused by our ancestors. In the Bible, a curse upon the sinner may continue for seven generations. That is the consequence of the curse of discrimination. Affirmative action must be continued and enforced, and whatever action is necessary must be taken to rise above the Supreme Court’s opinions.
No Easy Answers
I don’t have an opinion on reparations. As a moral issue and as legal payment for damages, I think that is clear that reparations for slavery and 100 years of demeaning, repressive discrimination are required. But what is feasible? Compensation for slavery would require very expensive and time-consuming bureaucratic administration to determine who is eligible for what. President Andrew Johnson canceled General Sherman’s order granting 40 acres and a mule to former slaves in Georgia. I don’t think it was offered to slaves in any other states. However, if that is the base from which reparations are to be calculated, whatever the amount is what would be equally distributed among the descendants of slaves. It would be based on the value of what the former slave would’ve received divided among their living descendants. If there has been four generations since then and they each had two children, the distribution would now be among 30 people. But how could anyone prove that they are descendants of slaves? I suspect that many of the records are very poor, and the work required to prove it to the government could be huge. We are one of the richest nations in the world, but the only one that does not provide guaranteed affordable healthcare for all of its citizens. I think that one of the reasons is that too many people think that we cannot afford it in spite of the fact that we currently spend more money on healthcare and get worse results in all the other developed nations. With that many stingy Americans, I think it is unlikely that any reparations will ever be approved.
The NAACP offers some interesting alternatives. Those and other options should be seriously considered. https://naacp.org/resources/reparations
