Identities are like fruitcakes: we all got them, what are we going to do with them. When people say we shouldn't do identity politics or that identity politics is something we can avoid, I get a wee bit annoyed. Why? Because we all have identities, and they naturally and inevitably shape politics. Let me take a step back and then forward.
The first half of my career, I very much focused on ethnic politics and nationalism since I was interested in the international relations of ethnic conflict--secession and irredentism mostly. So when I think about identity, I think of two things: groupness and implications for policy. First, any identity sets up concepts of who is us and who is them and how tolerant one is of the them. Much identity politics is about competing to define who the us is and how we should treat the others. Are Jews white? Who is an American? Who is Canadian? The political competition within the Canadian Conservative Party about immigration and multiculturalism is partly about figuring out who is a Canadian. The political programs of both Harper and Trudeau have been about defining what it means to be Canadian--why should anyone care about the War of 1812. Anyhow, sorry for the Canadian tangent, but the key is this: much identity politics is about defining who are the relevant actors, whose interests matter most. Note the post-election discussions of the working class and ... the white working class. Also, note how Hindu Indian-Americans were fans of Islamophobic Trump until they started to realize that Trump is a white supremacist, and Indians are not white. Intersectionality is a thing.
The second way to think about identities is that we all have multiple identities, and each one contains some kind of implications for various policies. Religion influences attitudes about sexuality, the role of state in religion and vice version, gender, notions of justice, education, etc. Language tends to affect policy preferences about jobs and education. Race? If it were not freighted with history, maybe no clear implication for politics, but since race in the US is so much affected by the weight of past decisions, hells yeah, one's race affects one's political preferences. So, much of politics is about making certain identities more salient than others, which then makes some issues more useful for creating coalitions and dividing the coalitions of the others. I lived through a Quebec election that was three-sided: one party was federal and tried to focus on goverance, a second was focused on Quebec independence (language and all that), and a third was focused on being intolerant of immigrants. To be clear, no identity has a single political program. Divisions between Martin Luther King and other African-Americans were partly about whether to change the system or separate. Which is why Black Panther struck me--that it was people with the similar identities fighting about the implications for how one should engage the world.
Either way, much of politics is very much identity politics. The only people who deny this reality are those whose identities already dominate politics. I remember reading books about Race and US foreign policy--and it blew my mind to think that white folks and their race influenced US foreign policy. Seems obvious now, but it was in a time and a context where folks were wondering about whether US foreign policy would remain rational and realist if other groups with other views of the
national interest, or their group's interests, would shape US foreign policy (Mrs. Spew considers anyone using the term identity politics dismissively is really anti-civil rights so she substitutes civil rights activism for identity politics).
So, today, in the US, when I hear people dismiss identity politics, they tend to be white Christian folks who have always won and imposed their values on US politics (and projecting themselves, fear what the others would do if they are in power). There was, of course, conflict among these folks about who and what counts as white (are Italians white? are Arabs?) and as Christian (in Lubbock, where I lived, the category of Christian is much narrower than I conceived). But these folks tend to agree that when People of Color push issues favorable to their group or point out that Black Lives Matter, they get upset, because they are uncomfortable with being informed that their vision of "All Lives Mattering" might just still have some identity politics to it.
In sum, identities always matter, politics is often about defining the content of the identity, the boundaries of identities and how one should treat those of other identities.
2 comments:
That's not exactly what I said. The far right has taken to using the term identity politics to refer to civil rights activism because when they complain that they are against identity politics, it sounds much better than saying that they are against civil rights activism. It's reframing the narrative so that they can be openly bigoted while pretending to just be concerned about the tenor of discussion over civil rights issues.
It's the same game played by the anti-choice movement that calls itself pro-life. Every time pro-choice people use their term pro-life instead of anti-choice, it allows the anti-choicers to control the conversation and present themselves as a reasonable, concerned interest group, rather than the authoritarian, violent slavers that they actually are. Likewise, white supremacists and other repressive groups win every time pro-equality people use the term identity politics to refer to civil rights issues, because it reframes it to be a "reasonable" discussion over political policy issues, rather than people trying to assert their basic civil rights and others opposing those rights with violence, intimidation, discrimination, slurs and above all, dismissal. "Identity politics," like the previous term "politically correct" dismisses civil rights issues as unimportant and over-sensitive by the marginalized instead of absolutely fundamental to our society and equality.
You raise a fundamental problem in liberal political systems - we want to ignore our “human” nature in an attempt to reach the ideal of all men being created equal. As humans, we are trapped by our evolutionary history. We lived for millennium as hunter-gathers in groups of no more than 100. Association with that group meant more than identity, it meant survival. Fast forward to today. We try to be the people of our idealized vision of what man is, but we are constrained by the psychology of our hunter-gather past. Civilization is not normal for us. It is hard work.
We risk our future by not realizing the limitations our past has thrust on us. All of us are tribal. All of us see the world in terms of us and them. We have to work to get beyond that. But before we can hope to achieve the world we want to have, we have to recognize and emit the failings of our all too human nature.
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