Pundits who decry 'tribalism' know nothing about real tribes
Pundits who decry ‘tribalism’ know nothing about real tribes
Their rhetoric has more to do with Western stereotypes than tribal reality
The Washington Post
Perspective by Christine Mungai
Christine Mungai is a writer and journalist in Nairobi, Kenya. She was a 2018 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
January 30, 2019 at 10:21 a.m. EST
The U.S. electorate, commentator Andrew Sullivan
wrote recently, has devolved into “two tribes whose mutual incomprehension and loathing can drown out their love of country.” In the New Yorker, George Packer
argued last fall that politics today “requires a word as primal as ‘tribe’ to get at the blind allegiances and huge passions of partisan affiliation.”
“Tribalism” has become an inescapable concept in American politics, partly because the partisan divide in America’s public sphere is becoming more shrill and polarized (though the hyper-partisanship is
asymmetrical: The right leans further right than the left leans left).
But there’s a significant problem with using the words “tribal” and “tribalism” to describe this trend: The usage is historically inaccurate when you consider the actual behavior of indigenous peoples, whether African, Native American or Asian. The current use of “tribal” is based on a racist stereotype about how groups of such peoples have interacted historically, and even today.
I know something about “tribalism,” since I was born and raised in Kenya, a country made up of
44 different ethnic groups. My parents are Kikuyu, but they raised my siblings and me in a cosmopolitan, urban environment. My experience with tribes, and my historical knowledge of them, do not resemble what I read about in the writings of political pundits.
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