Community leaders often purport to speak on behalf of all members of their group when expressing the wishes or needs of the group. For example, when demanding reparations for historical injustices, they identify themselves and every member of their group as a collective unit deserving redress. The same applies when a community is said to need special assistance—for example, the "black community" is said to be collectively vulnerable even though there are many famous black millionaires. The justification for this, the identitarians claim, is that group identity is important and members of the group have a common experience that unifies them and makes it appropriate to see them as a group. This also has important implications for how history is understood, with historical events often being explained by reference to group opinions or group motivations.

However, double standards apply. Different considerations arise when the tables are turned and the group is accused of exhibiting negative traits. Then group leaders are at pains to explain the importance of individualism and why entire groups should not be held responsible for the actions of individual members. For example, Tim Walz, the Governor of Minnesota, has accused President Trump of deciding to "broadly target an entire community" because Mr. Trump said, "Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of Minnesota." Mr. Walz does not want all Somali people to be viewed as gangsters or fraudsters. He wants to emphasize that fraudsters are individual Somalis responsible for their own criminal conduct. His message is, "Do not paint an entire group of people with that same brush, demonizing them." NYT reports that:

Debate over the fraud has opened new rifts between the state's Somali community and other Minnesotans, and has left some Somali Americans saying they are unfairly facing a new layer of suspicion against all of them, rather than the small group accused of fraud. Critics of the Walz administration say that the fraud persisted partly because state officials were fearful of alienating the Somali community in Minnesota.

The Walz administration treats Somali people as a group for purposes of helping them with welfare and food assistance, the very schemes through which the fraud was perpetrated, but objects to them being treated as a group for purposes of assigning responsibility and blame for that fraud. These double standards should be rejected. Mr. Walz's fear of alienating an entire community, choosing instead to turn a blind eye to criminality in their midst, is precisely the same type of collectivist thinking that he complains about when Mr. Trump tars that entire community with the same brush. The same analysis applies to a Somali congresswoman from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, who objected to "her group" being demonized and spoke out on behalf of the group, saying, "What keeps me up at night is that people whose identities I hold—black, Somali, hijabi, immigrant—will suffer the consequences of [Trump's] words, which so often go unchecked by members of the Republican Party and other elected officials." She used collectivist identitarian language, speaking as a representative of "people whose identities she holds" to complain about collectivist tarnishing of people based on the identity they hold. She purported to speak on behalf of the "black, Somali, hijabi, immigrant," despite the fact that many who hold that identity are known to disagree with her due to clan warfare raging among Somalis in Africa.