Pundits who decry 'tribalism' know nothing about real tribes [View all]

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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