Identity politics
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Identity politics is a political style that focuses on the issues relevant to various groups defined by a wide variety of shared characteristics, including, but not limited to, race, social class, religion, sex, gender, ethnicity, ideology, nationality, sexual orientation, gender expression, culture, currency, shared history, medical conditions, profession, and other of the many ways in which people differ from each other, and into which they may be classified or classify themselves.
Appeal to these shared commonalities, or disdain for similarly constituted groups seen as undesirable or aberrant, has likely been a feature of primate politics since before the emergence of Homo sapiens. It is not obvious from the broadest definition, but identity politics as usually understood under the label is a variant of Marxism, and as such it is a political style strongly associated with the hard political left.
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[edit] History
The association of identity politics with the American left grew out of a confluence of circumstances in the 1960s. Marxist theory lost much of its attraction for young idealists after the Krushchev revelations confirmed the worst suspicions about the Soviet Union under Stalin. The unprecedented prosperity of postwar America led left intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse[wp] and C. Wright Mills[wp] to conclude that the Marxist model of class conflict was irrelevant to issues of social justice in America. The social milieu of activists had changed from the working class base that was associated with the labor movement in the 1930s and 1940s. The civil rights movement was based in black churches, with support from white and black students and intellectuals. The movement against the Vietnam War and the military draft was associated with the universities and had a natural constituency of young men. At the same time, draft resistance was a rejection of traditionally male roles and manliness, ideas that still had great currency among the working class. The AFL-CIO[wp] was seen as a Cold War establishment lapdog. The working class at large was seen as uneducated, apathetic, and backward thinking. They were written off as part of any immediate strategy for social change.[1]
[edit] Civil rights and black power
While the civil rights movement inspired a wave of idealism and hope that America was moving toward fulfilling its founding creed, and had major accomplishments in the Civil Rights Act[wp] and the Voting Rights Act[wp], the experiences of its activists led to a growing bitterness. The issues impeding the well-being of blacks across America were nebulous and complex when compared to the legally codified discrimination and vicious racist terrorism of the deep south. Two competing strategies emerged for the betterment of blacks throughout America, the black nationalism espoused by Malcolm X, and a strategy focused on building cross-racial coalitions that addressed broader issues facing the less-enfranchised sectors of the urban working class as a whole. The former gained popularity among embittered veterans of the civil rights movement such as Stokely Carmichael[wp] and H. Rap Brown[wp], and among white leftists seeking edgy radical credentials. The latter was favored by Martin Luther King, labor organizers, and the more traditional, labor-oriented segments of the left. King was implementing that strategy in Memphis when he was killed.[2][3]
The urban race riots of 1965 - 1968[wp] polarized those who saw them as a humanitarian, moral, and political disaster and those who saw them as a political opportunity. H. Rap Brown's slogan of "Burn, baby, burn!" was an extreme expression of the response of the emerging black power movement. The stage was set for the New Left to shift from the idealistic, principled inclusiveness of the civil rights movement to the bitter, cynical, nihilistic parochialism of the black power movement. The spring of 1968 saw the release of the Kerner Commission report[4] on the urban race riots of 1965-1967 and the assassination of Martin Luther King, which served to reinforce the idea of an irreconcilable racial divide and feed the despair that there could ever be a transformative social movement that crossed racial lines. That led the New Left to overlook some important realities - that there was in fact a burgeoning black middle class making gains in education, income, and political influence during the 1960s into the 1970s; that the race riots were largely among less educated blacks unable to capitalize on the new opportunities for more educated blacks; that the riots occurred in areas where black political power was ascendant; and that the black power movement was not gaining the allegiance among blacks that the civil rights movement had. The base of the black power movement continued to be black students and intellectuals, with support from white New Leftists.[1]
The identity-based outlook of the black power movement also provided the model for gender-based identity politics that grew out of the New Left. Conflations between the situation of blacks and the situation of women are made by white radical feminists to this day, although never by black men or women. More recently, gay activists angered by the tepid support of gay issues among blacks and Hispanics proclaimed, "Gay is the new black."[5]
[edit] Formulation of the idea
| Marxism in this country had even been an eccentric and quixotic passion. One oppressed class after another had seemed finally to miss the point. The have-nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having. The minorities seemed to promise more, but finally disappointed: it developed that they actually cared about the issues, that they tended to see the integration of the luncheonette and the seat in the front of the bus as real goals, and only rarely as ploys, counters in a larger game. They resisted that essential inductive leap from the immediate reform to the social ideal, and, just as disappointingly, they failed to perceive their common cause with other minorities, continued to exhibit a self-interest disconcerting in the extreme to organizers steeped in the rhetoric of "brotherhood."[6] |
Leftists of a Marxist bent observed during the 1960s that, while traditional Marxism posited the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the currently most vital left wing movements revolved around matters of race (the civil rights movement) and, somewhat later, sex or gender (see feminism). The New Left was a leftist revival that sought to swap in these and other subcultural concerns as substitutes for Marxist class struggle.[7] A key document in its formalization as an ideology was the Combahee River Collective Statement[8], a manifesto published in 1977 by a collective of African-American lesbian feminists who met in Boston between 1974 and 1980. It made the term "identity politics" central to its mission:
| This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough. |
A universal assumption is that certain identity groups that are alleged to be historically oppressed are granted automatic moral worth and sympathy as a result. Who is chosen as the most deserving will of course depend on your perspective.[9] "The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking."[8]
[edit] Social constructionism
Many of the identities addressed by this version of leftism are social constructions, a fact that makes the harder forms of social constructionism appeal to persons whose political views are shaped by it. Karl Marx famously advocated that workers should "seize the means of production":[10] a revolutionary proletariat must seize control over the physical assets of the capitalist class. Identity politics, by contrast, swaps in such things as racial or sexual groups, substituting conflict theory for class struggle, and as such moves the focus of leftist activism from the distribution of wealth to the hegemony of competing identities and ideas. It could be described as shoehorning race, sex, and other social identities as proxies for socio-economic class.
Its social constructionist basis makes it attractive, particularly, to academics. Postmodernism and deconstruction, broadly speaking, are its handmaidens. It is very concerned with issues of representation and social influence. It judges, for example, the mix of skin colors of models and actors that appear in advertisements as an important civil rights issue, and views the integration of advertising materials as a significant civil rights victory, rather than mere tokenism. Its chief political victories resemble this; speech codes and other new forms of etiquette are some of its more conspicuous successes.
Social constructionism invites us to believe that we can change the world by using different words. As such, identity politics as an academic exercise generates a great deal of cant.
[edit] See also
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Wm. O'Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960's (Quadrangle, 1971).
- ↑ Ernesto B. Vigil, (1999). The Crusade for Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Government's War on Dissent. University of Wisconsin Press. p. 54. ISBN 0-299-16224-9.
- ↑ Where Was Martin Luther King Headed?, Saving Commumities.
- ↑ http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6545/
- ↑ Michael Joseph Gross, Gay is the New Black?, The Advocate, Nov. 16, 2008
- ↑ Joan Didion, "The Women's Movement, New York Times, July 30, 1972
- ↑ George Novack, writing as "William F. Warde", "Who Will Change the World? The New left and the Views of C. Wright Mills" International Socialist Review, New York, Volume 22, No. 3, pp. 67-79. (1961)
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Combahee River Collective Statement
- ↑ Paolo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, ch. 1
- ↑ Das Kapital, vol. I, Ch. 32