social justice league chats
Thank God For Identity Politics
Thank God For Identity Politics
You know what we had before Identity Politics? We had White Dudes. T he other day on Twitter, a man posted a picture of my coloring book he'd given his daughter for Christmas. He was excited to give her a coloring book full of badass intersectional feminists.
theestablishment.co




I hate the term "identity politics". I think it's reductive and being used as a meaningless buzz word. I don't think we should use it. It was social justice, now it's identity politics. I don't think white dudes should get to keep classifying what everyone else cares about as other or special or different.
I don't know if I'm making sense. It's like in the bookstore when things get shelved as women's fiction instead of just fiction. It's a way of saying "you belong over here and not with everyone else". But we don't, and you don't, and everyone doesn't, and by telling someone their political stances are tied to their identity is denying that everyone's politics are tied to their identity! We shouldn't be allowing any terms that imply that white and male are the norm. They're NOT.
Politics focused around white men is also identity politics, e.g. Trumps rhetoric about bringing back jobs for white men. Also the entirety of the rights Christian politics is identity politics.
It's used a lot as a buzz word by people who don't really understand its meaning for sure but it has legitimate meaning and use.
That's... dubious, by its original intended meaning, which had to do with the concept of forming coalitions of marginalized identities to increase their political power and make positive change.
Yeah, in my experience, "identity politics" is commonly used by brocialists/manarchists (who privilege class struggle) to attack others on the left.
I actually do think the thing called "identity politics" exists & is pretty classist. But it had the great benefit of making it mainstream to discuss male & white supremacy. (In contrast, it's not mainstream IMO to discuss class war & wage slavery.)
Useful to contrast identity politics with intersectionality:
Amen. This whole "WE GOTTA DITCH IDENTITY POLITICS BECAUSE SOME WHITE DUDES FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE" was a dumb idea from the start.
I get we're still licking our wounds from the election, but christ have some goddamn sense. Abandoning what brought huge minority support for the Democratic party is 100% not the way to go.
I feel like modern identity politics attacks symptoms instead of the roots of problems. I don't think you can try to create racial/gender/etc equity in a society that at its core encourages oppresion based on class because minorities will inherently end up in the lower classes.
And you think first/second wave feminism and other earlier activism was focused on class?
Never mind that it was primarily straight cis white men who were the ones who were focusing on class and excluding other people from that discussion.
An example below related to the rise of radical feminism and its separation from leftist thought at the time.
"In the 1960s, radical feminism emerged simultaneously within liberal feminist and working class feminist discussions, first in the United States, then in the United Kingdom and Australia. Those involved had gradually come to believe that it was not only the middle-class nuclear family which oppressed women, but that it was also social movements and organizations that claimed to stand for human liberation, notably the counterculture, the New Left, and Marxist political parties, all of which they considered to be male-dominated and male-oriented. Women in countercultural groups related that the gender relations present in such groups were very much those of mainstream culture."
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_feminism