Police Psychology:  Identity Politics

by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D, AABP

This is one of those terms that many people in the media throw around, but few in real life understand.  Let me describe it simply as far as what is going on in the media.

Basically, it is about the power of the voice.  The straight white American male has the least voice and sits as the baseline.  Now above the baseline are any persons who belong to a group that can claim they are victimized, or oppressed, or have effects of being victimized or oppressed in the past.  Basically, the white American female makes claim to being victimized because of sex and can be seen as above the American male.  The same is for people of color — Black, Hispanic, Indian, West Indian, etc.  Basically, they are rank ordered even further within this category and depending on how loud they get at the time.  Now if you are a member of more than one identity group you have even more power.  So, a Hispanic female has even more power in identity politics than a Hispanic male.  Now further, sexual orientation gives you a bigger voice in some political circles, so if you are a gay white male you have a larger voice in political identity that the straight white American male.  Religion plays a large role also.  The Muslim is probably first on the identity power list, but Jewish people have a good case because of the Holocaust.  If you are a gay Jewish female Hispanic you have a pretty powerful voice.  Although a Muslim Hispanic female transgender would even trump the voice of the Jewish gay.  Geez, why is this so complicated.  That’s the tongue-in-cheek approach to what is meant by identity politics.  Now let’s apply it to policing….

Police Officers are the straight white American male.  Just by assumption, they are angry bigoted narcissists that will shoot anyone who doesn’t do what they want.  Their color doesn’t matter, and their genders matters very little.  The common criminal on the street who claims brutality has a stronger voice, but if that person is black, or Hispanic (and their “…Lives Matter”), their voices have more power than the cop.  People you wouldn’t want to meet on the street in broad daylight, will garner interviews on the evening news if a cop is involved.  Add any combination of gender, or gender identification and the cop with no identity (except his profession) will be definitely be wrong.  I almost find it funny when someone with 30 plus arrests is assumed to be the person in the right in a police altercation because he spoke bad about the cops and is a member of an identity group.  Actually, I don’t find that funny, I worry!

We have become a world of extremes.  Fox News and CNN (and MSNBC, and ….) present such a one-sided picture of the world, they create dramas out of missteps.  “They are ripped from their parents and marched off to the showers just like in Nazi Germany.  And just like in Nazi Germany, many will not return.”  Or how about “the children are put into a spa-like atmosphere when they play games and watch TV hardly knowing their parents are gone.”  This is the immigrant children crisis of the past week, as described by two cable-news channels one number away from each other.  What a complete like of crap, but what do you expect from identity politics.  Identity politics breeds extremism.

I can remember the concern in the 1970’s when affirmative action was giving college scholarships to black kids and many people would complain that they were taking that money away from kids who deserve it and giving it to lower functioning kids.  I didn’t see the wisdom then either because I was in college in the 70’s, but I see the logic behind it now and the world is a better place because of affirmative action (in education at least).  Maybe some people need to get upset a little to have progress. 

Back in the 70’s there was a different kind of identity politics as the world was getting used to accepting black people as equals.  “I had a black person at my cocktail party” was the claim of adults in the 70’s.  My generation was the first to not even think about that. Maybe identity politics is the affirmative action of this generation.

My advice when faced with identity politics is fight extremes whenever it occurs in yourself first.  Extremes are the root of many of the psychological problems that I see in my offices.  Life tends to return to the middle, that’s called “regression to the mean” and it is a statistical principle.  We always go back a little toward the average.  Avoid the extremes and let the natural process of life to return it back to the middle.  Maybe there is a higher purpose.  Law enforcement officers were superheroes after Sept 11, 2001, now they are in a stunning crash and the true victims of identity politics.   If you can avoid the extremes in yourself, it will make its way back to the center.

My daughter’s school has a motto that is appropriate here.  When faced with “being right or being kind – Choose Kind.”  That sums it up quite well!

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