The 2022 Tory leadership race was praised by much of the media for its diversity. It was celebrated by many as a win over the left, as evidence that left-wing understandings of racism and liberatory politics were misguided. Anyone could be a Conservative: it was no longer the preserve of rich white men, and those from marginalised identities were not bound to Labour. Though performing a form of identity politics themselves, the Tories argued that the leadership election demonstrated the need to end all this leftist discourse around how identity characteristics impact one’s life. The right-wing conceptualisation of social justice had won out: there is nothing systemic here—no white privilege, no patriarchy—only hard work and Conservative values. And though Sunak did not win then, he, after the shortest premiership in British history that resulted from that election, became the first Prime Minister of colour. Given the fact that Labour has never had a woman or person of colour officially lead their party, this seems to amount to a total victory for the Tories on the issue of representation.
The claims made by the Tory party and much of the right-wing press, as well as the focus on the surface-level diversity of these candidates demonstrate, reveal a fundamentally individualist understanding of what identity and liberation politics look like and aim to achieve. In this essay, I want to demonstrate how the Tories are shifting the way we think and talk about oppression, what that means materially, and how we might combat it.
I believe what happened during the leadership election demonstrates a form of elite capture. This is, roughly, the way that ideas and political projects which are meant for everyone are ‘hijacked by the well-positioned and resourced’, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò puts it in his Boston Review article. Many conservative politicians and others on the right have begun to adopt the language of identity and liberatory politics to subsume these potentially emancipatory concepts into their own agendas.
What does this mean in practice? As Táíwò elaborates in his book, ‘the interests of [a marginalised group] get whittled down to what they have in common with those at the top, at best. At worst, elites fight for their own narrow interests using the banner of group solidarity.’ The implication is that discussions of racism and other forms of oppression which occur under the banner of identity politics obscure the systematic nature of these phenomena.
Elites benefit fundamentally from systems that generate unequal distributions of material and social capital. It would therefore be imprudent for them to admit into their own understandings of racism, for example, anything that implicates these systems. Consequently, fundamentally systemic inequalities such as the earning gaps between white Britons and Bangladeshi/Pakistani ones or the sentencing disparities within the justice system are discussed only as interpersonal phenomena. This point is particularly relevant given Sunak’s premiership. As the richest MP, there is a sense that his personal wealth is exemplary of the wealth that all South Asian Britons can accumulate. However, this view overlooks how Sunak’s wealth was made possible by his supremely privileged background. Again, problems of wealth and income as they pertain to race are rendered individual rather than systemic.
This represents a grave conceptual loss. Decades of thinkers from Angela Davis to Marilyn Frye to Kimberlé Crenshaw have worked to make clear the systemic and interlocking nature of oppression(s), and the collective nature of action that must follow. What the discourse—and specifically the praise—around the Tory leadership’s diversity and Sunak’s later election represents is a shift towards an understanding of oppression that buries this.
Perhaps I am overstating the significance of these events. But I think they provide useful focal points for analysing this shift. One can also look at the coverage of Truss’ cabinet. With no white men in the Great Offices of State for the first time in history, the cabinet was lauded for its diversity. What is important here is that the discourse around these events shapes wider discursive environments about identity. And Tory MPs are able to shape this environment in their position as elites, specifically in their positions as government officials with large platforms and access to the media apparatus.
The conceptual loss of a systemic and collectivist understanding of oppression is detrimental to collective political action. It makes it more difficult to generate the kind of solidarity needed. When the dominant narrative is that racism or misogyny only exist in the interactions between individuals, then fewer people are sympathetic to political action that is built on a different understanding of these systems. It buttresses pre-existing scepticism about systematic phenomena, eroding the conceptual foundations upon which much practical political action must be built and making these political visions harder to realise.
Alongside this discursive power, certain elites—in this case, political elites—have the power to shape the world more directly. They can implement economic and social policies that directly change the material conditions of society. Take Thatcher, for example. The problem was not just that she said that there was no such thing as society, even granting the fact that the promotion of this view on the part of political elites would have substantial real-world effects. More significantly, she was also able to enact policy that made it difficult to build such a thing. She left communities to economic ruin, underfunded public services which provided focal points for local communities, and encouraged a social and economic environment that pitted individuals against one another in a zero-sum game for the generation of economic value. She was able to take her individualist discourse and build a world atop it.
Alternatively, look at Kemi Badenoch’s parliamentary speech on Critical Race Theory (CRT) last year. It is a problem that she has the power and platforms—remember she was Equalities Minister at this time—to change the discursive environment. It is a bigger problem that she went on to call for its removal from school curriculums, something over which she had influence—though perhaps not the direct power—in her ministerial role. Her call to remove CRT demonstrated a desire to remove collectivist and systemic understandings of oppression further from public understanding, and in turn impair the ability to generate (collective) action on the back of those understandings. The role this kind of (mis-)education plays in upholding systems of oppression is best explicated by Carter G. Woodson in The Miseducation of the Negro: ‘If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action.’ Badenoch is once again Equalities Minister; and though she does not have what is considered a top position in this cabinet, that might change in a future administration. She may even have her own administration. What world would she try to build atop her words then?
Or look at the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman. During her time as Attorney General, she took a hardline stance on the interference of international law in the Rwanda policy, arguing the ECHR was interfering in democracy. She cited extrication from the ECHR as the only solution to Britain’s ‘immigration problem’. The ‘immigration problem’ is now hers; she has already set about ‘solving’ it, setting a target of no boats crossing the Channel when she entered office under Truss and doubling down on this commitment in recent times. A fundamental feature of elites is that they have power, and both Badenoch and Braverman are using that power to mould the world into their vision.
While the Left does not follow the Right in ignoring systems of oppression altogether, much of the recent discourse that has dominated identity and other forms of liberatory politics on the Left has similarly been characterised by a hyper-individuation. Many have flattened existing systems of oppression into specific individuals’ experiences of them and leaned into focussing on an ever-increasing number of identity characteristics that a person could have in order to try and find the person who could generate the most ‘correct’ take on a topic. This is not only imprudent as it cedes important conceptual ground; it is also rhetorically and politically foolish. It lays the ground for people like Braverman and Badenoch to use their identities to give moral weight to their attempts to obstruct progress and liberation.
I think this hyper-individuation has ultimately come from the improper application of a few important and powerful pieces of philosophical and political theory: intersectionality and standpoint epistemology.
Intersectionality is, roughly, the idea that different systems of oppression, such as racism and patriarchy, can interact to compound or change the oppression faced by those impacted by more than one of those systems. In practice, I think that the attempt to recognise this fact has led many well-meaning people to splinter groups on which solidarity could be built. This focus on each person’s exhaustive list of identity characteristics has led to the fracturing of identities that are important for collective political action.
I will take Táíwò’s summary of standpoint epistemology as comprising three seemingly innocuous ideas:
- knowledge is socially situated;
- marginalised people have some advantages in gaining some forms of knowledge; and
- research programmes (and other areas of human activity) ought to reflect these facts.
Táíwò argues that the application of these ideas has commonly led to what he calls ‘the politics of deference: an etiquette that asks people to pass attention, resources, and initiative to those perceived as more marginalised than themselves.’ This is a good instinct. Ironically, though, it often does not account for the social situation in which it finds itself. The politics of deference functions by turning to the most marginalised person in a particular room without considering the social structures that keep certain people out of those rooms altogether.
If we follow the threads of these concepts as they’ve been implemented, Badenoch—the very person who was calling for CRT’s removal from the curriculum—might be the person to whom we are told to defer when examining questions of liberatory racial politics.
It need not be like this. Intersectionality and standpoint epistemology can be marshalled to facilitate solidarity and political action. As Táíwò notes, The Combahee River Collective, who coined the term ‘identity politics’ in their 1977 manifesto, ‘emphasised individual differences not as a litmus test for who could participate but rather to reveal limitations in other groups’ definitions of the scale and scope of problems and solutions alike.’ This approach can be extended to how we apply the concepts of intersectionality and standpoint epistemology.
Both of these concepts teach us to be epistemically humble—a strong basis, I think, for political solidarity. They teach us to ask the questions: ‘what am I missing?’ and ‘what don’t/can’t I know?’ By recognising that oppression can intersect and compound across identities in ways that are particularly hard to understand if you are not appropriately socially situated, we are forced to generate connections across groups. We are not rendered isolated individuals with our own exhaustive lists of identity characteristics to be checked off. Instead, we begin to understand our own identities as part of a wider system of oppression that we can never adequately unmake through working solely in our (hyper-)specific communities. We begin to better understand the scale and scope of the problems and solutions, as well as bringing the focus back to systems and collectives rather than just individuals.
Both intersectionality and standpoint epistemology represent vital battlegrounds in this conceptual war. The Tory party is likely to only continue getting more diverse. They will only continue what Cameron started: they will ‘change the face of the Conservative party by changing the faces of the Conservative party.’ We will likely have more elites who have the right identities to marshal the language of identity politics and continue to capture the concept. We must resist understandings that facilitate this. We must ensure that we do not capitulate to an individualistic identity politics that loses sight of the fundamental aims of dismantling systems of oppression that perpetuate injustice.