Identity politics is a term that attracts bifurcated responses and invokes starkly distinct imagined connotations. On the one hand, it appears to be at the forefront of progressive activism, a connecting bridge between intersectionality analysis and large-scale student movements; on the other hand it appears to be associated with the insular, exclusionary tendencies of politics on both the left and right — pandering to individuals’ identities and origins as a heuristic in mobilisation, in substitution of the ‘reasonable pluralism’ that old-fashioned liberals aspire towards. In truth, identity politics is a concept that encompasses both the ugly and the ‘pretty’ — the ugly of divisionism, sectarianism, and exclusionary discourse; the ‘pretty’ — of providing visceral and powerful identity-markers around which disempowered groups can rally and galvanise.
I take identity politics to refer to a mode of political activism, ideology, and interests organisation that are based upon groups formed by identity characteristics — e.g. race, gender, sexuality etc. At its core, identity politics remains a largely normatively neutral term, with both positive and negative consequences that follow (see Schlesinger 1991 for his critique of identity politics). My argument is simple — that identity politics possess unique benefits that cannot be supplanted; that whilst there are harms associated with identity politics, they are likely to persist in a counterfactual world without identity politics; that with all that said, we must aspire towards ‘doing’ identity politics better, to the extent that we treat it as a constantly performative and self-generative exercise in political and social speech.
To begin with, identity politics has three distinct benefits: it enables us to recognise, embrace, and identify identity-specific experiences of oppression — and utilise such experiences as starting points around which movements can rally and contest politics; it provides a uniquely robust, perceived-to-be-fixed, and post-material basis of rallying and social mobilisation, and finally, it provides us with a distinct lens in devising our remedial policies towards social injustices.
First, let us consider the claim on the identity-specificity of oppression. Oppression can be characterised as the imposition of disadvantage by one group or individual towards another, without the autonomous consent of the subjugated individual(s). Without going into excessive detail on the non-dominion accounts of freedom, we could assume that an individual that is oppressed is rendered unfree — whether it be in economic terms of employment and income (see the wage gap between women and men); social terms of communal exclusion or inclusion (see manifestations of racial discrimination towards migrants in western ‘liberal’ democracies), or political terms. More specifically, identity politics raises the thesis that different individuals’ experiences of social oppression can be unique and non-analogisable to others’ suffering: a woman’s confrontation with harassment and catcalls is foundationally different from the racist speech-acts that Muslims have to tolerate as they walk on the streets of London. Such fundamental non-fungibility sources from the fact that beinga woman and being a Muslim (certainly not mutually exclusive!) are experiences that draw upon two distinctly separate systems of power — the former is one where the pinnacle is defined by the male; the latter is one dominated by traditionally ‘white’ religions.
Preemptively speaking — contrary to the criticism that identity politics homogenises individuals and erases different experiences within the same category, identity politics in fact allows us to embrace the different positions and statuses that individuals take on within a myriad of social hierarchies, in accordance with how they are situated in each individual identitarian dimension. Identity politics primes us to the indescribability of individuals’ suffering in the language of the “Other”, thus empowering us to resonate with howothers suffer without forcing us to achieve the impossible of fully understanding their subjugation. More concretely, it relates the ‘unique’ experiences of the individual to features that — through social construction and historical processes — have become salient in how others choose to interact with them; in doing so, the causal nexus and web of responsibilities underlying individuals’ oppression become clear and available for social critique and reforms.
Why appeal to identity categories and not merely individual characteristics, then? Why should we attribute the oppression of X to a universalistic treatment of X’s race, as opposed to X being an individualof that certain race? This is because over-individualisation obscures the communalnature of the oppressive experience: that when a black man is stopped and frisked by a white policeman, this is a trope that in turn legitimises wider-scale racial profiling — through being cited as a ‘norm’, a ‘statistically typical mode’, or a quasi-defence of other cases of unwarranted racial profiling. Thus the oppression that follows from one act of violence both endures and persists in the wider population. The power of citation and co-opting well-defined statistical norms for political purposes is asymmetrically distributed — it is very hard for minorities to gain salience as they argue (even with statistics and evidence) against the attempts to smear them with the behaviours of others in their community; but all it takes for a privileged, oppressive individual to smear the minority is the ability to cherry pick one negative “exemplar” and to proceed from there. Rushdie notes, in his Satanic Verses, how otherness is imposed onto minorities: “they describe us… They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct.” Furthermore, the erasure of queerness in mainstream sex education may well affect queer students on an individual level, but also carries a collectively important meaning as it implies that the queerness of citizens is not an item that is worth political attention or state-endorsed calls for minimal tolerance. Every individual experience of suffering, to the extent that it can be narrated through collectivist terms, takes on a new layer of meaning that only identity politics — and not ‘individualistic politics’ — can articulate.
An alternative defence of identity politics appeals to its powerful rallying function. Identity politics transcends the material. The affinity we feel towards those from our identity group often transcends the capricious and transient ‘economic motives and bases’ that define our actions in a capitalistic structure. By resorting to features that are embedded in an individual’s social experiences, identity politics provides a basis — disconnected from transactional calculus or materialistic analysis — for groups to galvanise and form communities that strive for political action. It is the shared identity constructed under political blackness that empowered African-Americans in the civil rights movement — despite their other political or economic differences — to rally around the shared goals of rectifying historical injustices and mitigating persisting inequalities.
Moreover, identity politics reinvigorates the political— it transforms the political into an experience that is both intimate and public: intimate in that it draws upon the most rooted and fundamental aspects of the individual’s life as an interpretive device for politics; public in that it transforms such fundamentals into the basis of a shared social reality within a group. Through these two mechanisms, identity politics renders the political emotively resonant and cathartic: when one marches on the streets of an authoritarian state bent on suppressing one’s identity, one embraces their precarity — the vulnerability of presenting themselves (in high profile) in public, exposing themselves to the critique and potential challenges to their identities — (Butler 2015) and reflects upon the interconnectedness between their precarity and their identity. In the process of such reflection, individuals raise their compassionate yet exuberant calls to action towards one another. It is through such collective action and personal disclosure that a truly political space emerges, drawing upon the emotional warmth of a shared identity in reviving the political.
Above all, identity politics is a powerful guiding heuristic to policy-making. Rather than presuming that all individuals across different identity groups and dimensions share homogenous preferences about what ‘improvements’ to their welfare look like, we are informed by identity politics that individual identities can shape preferences, values, and norms in ways that we ought to respect. All this is not to say that we should feel apathetic towards cases where identities are imposed upon individuals (e.g. when someone is raised in a deeply conservative Christian or Taoist family, and indoctrinated — against their initial wishes — to accept the rituals and dogmas of the religions); this is nevertheless to say that where we find individuals’ identities something they genuinely hold onto dearly, we ought not penalise them by imposing a broad-brush approach to rectifying inequalities and bettering their welfare. Identity-sensitive policy-making not only improves the individual’s lived experiences; it renders society as a whole more inclusive and open to the plurality of comprehensive doctrines that exist today.
There is one very potent criticism of identity politics that I wish to address. This criticism proceeds as follows: some of the most reactionary, oppressive, or socially regressive movements over recent years are fuelled (allegedly) by identity politics. The surge in right-wing populism over the past five years (from the US to France, from the Netherlands to the UK) appears to be a damning indictment of identity politics as a double-edged sword: that to the extent it has emancipated individuals, it has also propagated the rise of anti-emancipatory forces.
Towards this point there are a few responses. The first is to note that in the absence of identity politics, the privileged and powerful could still reach out towards their respective communities in forming exclusionary, reactionary organisations that practice wanton bigotry — this can be achieved through dog-whistling (e.g. “Do you care about national security?” in legitimising white racism towards persons of colour in the US; or “I prefer a united Britain that is as strong as we were in our colonial days.” in justifying xenophobia towards migrants in the UK). Alternatively, such bigotry could be propagated through mass media and education programmes, which substitute for identity politics in providing an alternative base for the dominant identity group in society. In other words, a counterfactual without identity politics would see no less bigotry and exclusion.
The second is that the rise of identity politics allows us to make better sense of the underlying basis of such ‘reactionary movements’ — it enables us to trace the communities formed by such individuals to distinct characteristics of theirs, thus enabling us to situate their formulation within wider political trends: for instance, situating the rise of white supremacist groups within a broader reactionary backlash towards social progressivism over the past three decades. If anything, identity politics grants us the tools to interpret, comprehend, and thus strip away the mystique underpinning these problematic movements.
The final response is a concession — and a brief call to action. It must be conceded that to a certain extent, identity politics is inevitably intertwined with totalitarian politics — whether it be in white supremacist thought that guides members of the alt-right, or the fixation upon destroying the religious enemy in radical sects of all religious, or the nationalism that fuels xenophobia in countries ranging from China to the US. Yet the solution to this problem is not to dissolve or abandon identity politics altogether. It is instead one where we aspire towards a more robust, holistic, and thorough vision of identity politics.
bell.hooks stresses the value of our forming a critical political consciousness — the best way to critique authoritarian demagoguery founded upon identity politics is to subvert the imposed categories of identities through reinventing the relationships between identity categories. Rather than letting fascistic regimes get away with defining one identity group as racially or genetically allegedly superior to another, we must take them head on and point out the equality and egalitarianism between identity groups — that whilst we differ, there is no ‘different’ Other to the ‘constant’ Self.
Yuval-Davis (1999) discusses the notion of ‘transversal politics’ as an alternative to identity politics — one where individuals engage in ‘a mode of coalition politics in which the differential positionings of the individuals and collectives involved will be recognized, as well as the value systems which underly their struggles’ (Yuval-Davis 1999, p. 25). Where I perhaps slightly diverge from Yuval-Davis (1999) is my relative optimism that such an enterprise is not antithetical — and is in fact complementary — to the identity politics project. Individuals recognise each others’ positionings, needs, and relative disadvantages; they also accept that such experiences have some degree of untranslatability and identity-specificity.
Through developing resonance— empathy, respect, and mutual acknowledgment of worth — with each other in spheres where they canempathise, they become enlightened to pockets where such resonance is impossible, and yet become cognizant of their own complicitness in others’ experiences of oppression. An exemplar for this may be the interlocution between black PoCs and Asian PoCs in their respective struggles for racial recognition and equality. Asian PoCs should come to recognise their complicitness in white structures that may exclude black PoCs, whilst black PoCs reflect upon the tendencies of certain sects of their movements that may engage in implicit or explicit racism towards Asians through enforcing testimonial quieting (Dotson 2011).
Identity politics is only likely to become an increasingly important tool for social change and activism. What it would perhaps benefit from is the recognition that beyond unity and disunity, union and division, there exists a welcome third mode of politics — that of union in difference, diversity in solidarity.