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As is said by the philosophers of sexuality, you don’t choose your sexuality. Nor do you “choose” your skin. And having at birth received your whiteness or blackness or brownness — or any other hue and shade — this makes you no more, nor no less, better or worse, wiser or dumber, more or less talented than any other person whatsoever. White, brown, black or blue, we are all God’s children, and the tint of our outsides is not a determinant of our virtue or lack of it. I had thought these were lessons long ago learned and never to be forgotten.

When did skin colour become an index of moral worth?

And finally we come to male, the designation of half the human species since the species began. Is being male a moral error, a genetic flaw, an inevitable placement in an inferior status of the human? Contrarily does being female confer moral advantage by virtue of biology? To ask the question reveals its inanity.

Particular men and particular women, in any category, many be odious, but that does not emerge from their being of a particular category. The sex, race or age of any individual is not an explanation of the conduct of the individual. In the times before identity politics we deplored using collective designations to evaluate, praise or blame, individuals. But now we search for virtue and its opposites according to our groupings. We fracture our common humanity, belittle the elements that make us all one, in favour of identity rivalries.

And so we have come to that strange place where, should it happen that the two finalists in the Democratic primary would both be old and white and male, that it will come as a grief and a regret. It is a strange turn, that our exertions to rid ourselves of all prejudices, never to tag people on the basis of exterior and inescapable characteristics, has rounded on itself, and to point this out may even be seen as an outrage.

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