We should be celebrating accomplishments, not identity

This is National Women’s Month, but not all of “us” are celebrating it. I cannot stand these “months” and “days” and other increments of time devoted to identity.

People deserve to be honored for what they do, not who they are. I have absolutely no problem with Veterans Day, Mothers and Fathers days, Memorial Day, Presidents Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and all the other observances dedicated to accomplishment. It’s when we start getting into Black History Month, Hispanic History Month or Women’s History Month that I want to gag. So should Blacks, Hispanics, and women, and here’s why.

I had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I was born with a uterus. I did not, in utero, work hard to organize the chromosomes and develop the unique biological parts that would turn me into a female. As far as I can remember, and it’s a rather hazy memory, I was just hanging out in my spa of amniotic fluid eating, checking the calendar to see when my nice vacation in Lucy World was over. Someone else did the heavy lifting on that one.

Similarly, Black Americans have nothing to do with the fact that they are Black. I’m pretty sure that Clarence Thomas considers being a Supreme Court justice to be something extraordinary and exceptional, just as Ben Carson must believe that being a world-famous pediatric neurosurgeon is amazing, and just as Condoleezza Rice has to know that being a concert pianist who just happened to also become secretary of state is aweinspiring.

And if she hadn’t talked about being a “Wise Latina” and wrote a book about how she came to achieve that distinction” I also would have thought Sonia Sotomayor was thrilled to have been appointed to the high court, alongside Thomas. Latina, or not.

Being proud of your identity is a good thing. But when that becomes the focus of our attention and admiration, to the exclusion of actual accomplishment, we end up patronizing the very people we hope to praise. I saw that happening when President Joe Biden announced that he was excluding every candidate that was not a Black woman from consideration for the Supreme Court. Not only did it put the focus on ovaries and melanin to the exclusion of merit, it painted Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson — his actual nominee — into the “Black woman” corner. Even if she is eminently qualified for the position, and with a double Harvard pedigree she most likely is, she will always be the nominee who checked the right identity boxes with Biden and the progressives.

This identity stuff is very much a leftist thing. I cannot remember the last time that a conservative had an ethnic or gender litmus test before they decided who was right for the job, or who should be able to speak on certain issues, or who was entitled to an apology. That happens all the time on the left. It might happen occasionally among those of my tribe, but that is the regrettable exception, not the rule.

And when you pander to someone because of some accident of birth and geography, or because of the way they are sexually oriented, they know you’re doing it. Sometimes, they remain silent because they like getting things for free. Other times, they have the integrity to speak out about how stupid it is to be honored for something over which they had no control.

I know you might be saying that there is value in recognizing the history of minority groups. That’s true to an extent. There is value in honoring survival and triumph over difficult odds. But it is the survival that should matter, the accomplishment, the act of living and fighting and creating. Simply “being” a thing, in a vacuum, is irrelevant. Those months and days and societal markers that honor identity over action just keep us mired in our tribes.

You will not see me celebrating being a woman, happy as I am to be one. I’ll be too busy celebrating being human, alive, and grateful for all the nonnamed months, days and years I’ve been blessed with.