In Defense of Identity Politics

 

A certain tendency (Marxists, largely, and some anarchists, but also many conservatives - what's the diff, amirite?) moralistically berates us and tells us we should avoid "identity politics".  If they weren't such preachy jerks about it, it would actually be kinda sweet.  And of course, they're right - in a perfect world, that would be the morally right thing to do - to totally abolish all identity politics, whatever that means.  A world without identity politics is unimaginable - literally.  But it's sad that identity politics exist.  It's a shame.  It's a nightmare.  I will even go all the way and say that it's a tragedy.  And yet it is a reality.  Identity politics are a kind of vicious cycle, which just gets deeper and deeper, and seems impossible to escape.  There's no way to avoid it.  We can be in denial of identity politics, we can be angry about identity politics, we can be depressed about identity politics, we can try to bargain with identity politics, or we can try to develop some character about this and simply confront and accept the sad reality of identity politics.

What's rather odd is that the Marxists who claim to reject identity politics really do nothing but engage in identity politics.  When they say something like, "As a Marxist, I assert that..." or "As a dialectical materialist, my analysis is..." or "As socialists, our duty is to..." or even "As anarchists, we believe that..." aren't they making the same kind of rhetorical move as the people who say, "As a Black woman, I..."?  This may not be standpoint epistemology (and not all those who engage in identity politics are standpoint epistemologists), but aren't they asserting that the truth-claim of their propositions is in some way dependent upon, or at least bolstered by, their distinct perspective?  [See also: Perspectivalism]  Except that there is a big difference between the identity politics of Marxists and the identity politics of, for instance, those who advocate for the interests of African Americans: namely, that the identities leftists use - words like "communist" and "socialist" and "Marxist" are (at least to a certain degree) chosen identities, elective identities.  No one is forcing them to be a Marxist.  Whereas racial identity is (albeit in an often complex and sometimes even self-contradictory way) stamped onto people from birth.

In a sense, one might say that all politics is identity politics.  There is no "pure" politics that does not get in some way tangled in questions of identity.  But this does not mean that all politics arises from pre-existing identities.  Actually, the reverse is true: 

Politics creates identities.  Or, to clarify this statement, we could say that power, and resistance to power, create identities.  And in both cases, these identities are created in complex, often non-linear, sometimes quite surprising ways - it is not simply a matter of an identity being created by a relation to power in an automatic, reflexive way, as a stimulus-response.  Are there any identities that exist entirely separate from power and unaffected by it?  I'll leave that as an open question.

But what is clear is that politics often creates identities.  For example, consider the concept of "whiteness" (whether capitalized or not).  "Whiteness" did not exist prior to the systems of power and privilege that produced it.  People did not think of themselves as "white" for centuries - they thought of themselves as "French" or "British" or "Dutch," and so on - and before that, they had no concept of nation, and their loyalty was to their local lord or their local parish or to family or to God.  And after that, people had a sense of being from Virginia or Pennsylvania.  The concept of whiteness was created later, when the slave-owning "planter" class - a tiny minority among European Americans - needed to shore up its political legitimacy among the more numerous, poorer European Americans, and invented whiteness and white supremacy as a pretext for an uneasy cross-class alliance against African Americans and Native Americans.

Perhaps, after humanity has gone extinct, there will be forms of politics that do not involve identity at all, perhaps practiced by software algorithms.  But so long as humans exist, identity will matter.

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