Across the red line: does identity politics cause more problems than it solves?

[absolutezero0k]

Just caught some of this in the car and looking forward to listening to the full programme on i player.

Across the Red Line - Series 4, Does identity politics cause more problems than it solves? - @bbcradio4 www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0008j7m

Interesting, I'd like to hear it. I'm not sure if I'll be able to, I can't always get BBC stuff here.

I've been reading an interesting book called Mistaken Identity, by an American Marxist. I've thought for a while that id politics were toxic, maybe even behind a lot of the rise of racism and such recently, and I would say the argument he is making is tending to support that. What he seems to be suggesting is that identity politics strengthens conceptualisations of race, as well as other identities, rather than challenging them, and it also makes them vectors for power through the state, and also divides the various identity classes as well so that real change can't happen.

But it's helpful for oppressors (willing or unconscious) to ignore/override particular needs. Let's not be blind to the forces that want us to be identity-blind.

Yes.

Identity politics is fundamentally divisive. It seeks to segregate people by race, religion, sexuality, gender, nationality etc etc rather than bringing them together on common ground and it is just as much of a problem on the left as it is on the right - if not more so.

*Yes.

Identity politics is fundamentally divisive. It seeks to segregate people by race, religion, sexuality, gender, nationality etc etc rather than bringing them together on common ground and it is just as much of a problem on the left as it is on the right - if not more so*

Absolutely.

Definitely more so. Particularly when identity has become subjective and is combined with intersectionality. End result is the oppression Olympics with the possibility to ainpot identify into gold medal place.

Instinctively I would say Yes. ID politics is very seductive and genuinely is undoubtedly important for encouraging people to point out important disparities, but actually as a way of living our lives and speaking to each other I feel that it reduces us to our tiny little boxes of category and it weakens the sense of community that applies to all of us and keeps us together as human beings.

It also doesn’t seem coincidence that it has grown along with social media narcissism and call out culture. I don’t know though where I would draw the line- I know there are some elements of identity that are really important to me- like biological sex- and I know another non-female couldn’t understand some things about that- so I don’t want to be hypocritical about it. I would never say I want to be identity-blind in my politics.

I’m interested to see how others are working this out.

Simply identify even. Not sure what that autocorrect was. Ainpot?

Lion

But sex isn't an 'identity'. It is objective reality. Identity is inherently subjective.

This is why to me the whole 'respect my identity' or the 'my identity is valid' mantra is such bs. Your subjective view of yourself has nothing to do with me. (General you).

Nancy Fraser has written about this well - the trend to seek recognition rather than redistribution as a form of justice.

Worth looking out her essays and articles as I can't really do it justice but she says potentially one form of seeking justice can contradict another even from within the same group of people

However I do think it's very important not to fall back on 'I don't see colour' types of thinking. Barriers you face in life do matter and a class analysis of oppression is very helpful.
Individualism is where it gets tricky for me. The interlinking of identity politics and individualism/solipsism.

However I do think it's very important not to fall back on 'I don't see colour' types of thinking.

I think this is tricky, and as a way of thinking it's acquired an undeservedly bad reputation. You are right of course that if you take this very literally it means you can't see certain important patterns. I do think that for the most part, when people say things like this, what they mean is that they see colour (ethnicity, etc) as really irrelevant in certain important ways.

But taking it from a more analytic POV, there are plenty of serious thinkers and academics, including many who are POC, who say that race exists fundamentally to allow racism, and that as long as there is race, there will be racism. If that is true, then the long term goal has to be to invalidate, and ultimately lose, the whole category or idea of race, so that in fact people really will not see it. I think we can have some sense of what that might look like if we think about other instances where an idea like that has been lost. In my part of the world, there is no longer any real sense of separate European races, where it used to be quite strong especially with regard to certain ethnicities. People may know that someone comes from that background, but it's not a division with any ontological or social meaning.

I think this was the kind of vision many regular people had in even the recent past about how we could end racism, and people had an intuitive sense that while we might not be able to forget about race yet it was still something that we didn't want to make more important than it already was. The rise of identity politics seems to have changed that significantly, it's become one of the non-PC ways to think, people are reprimanded for doing so. Instead of challenging the idea of race, identity politics actually solidifies it.

I personally think that's the wrong approach, but what I find particularly disturbing about it is the way anyone who believes that is being presented by the progressives. For the most part it's simply not admitted that anyone who is a POC might possibly think that way. If it's pointed out that actually it's not that uncommon, and you give some examples, the answer is that we can't reprimand them since they are POC, but certainly any white person who thinks that way is a racist. The suppression of argument is very worrying to me, the acceptability of it being based on your race is worrying to me, the use of the word racist in a way that seems designed to make people immune to the accusation is worrying to me. And it seems all to be tied up with something in the identity politics way of thinking.

Rereading what I just wrote, the last paragraph is confusing, what I mean to say is that those who think race must be lost as a category are presented as racists, and it's not admitted that any POC think that way unless you force the issue.

I firmly believe that identity politics (a key tenet of 3rd wave feminism) is largely accountable for the whole TRA situation we're experiencing lately.

Yes. I know I keep harping on but Ben Elton's Identity Crisis book highlights this perfectly.

I haven't read the whole book - just the amazon preview - but what I liked was how it portrayed someone trying to do his best and getting absolutely set upon both publicly and at work with colleagues. Constantly feeling dread that he might mess up.

I don't think it's helpful to harangue people for wrongthink. But equally the victim-blaming attitude he espoused was fairly unhelpful and I can see I might have said so eg on twitter if it had happened irl.

I think the way we receive feedback and the way we give feedback could do with an overhaul.

Wrt getting rid of race to get rid of racism - yes, pseudoscience did reify races as ontological categories when racial characteristics are much more fluid in reality and this happened during and after slavery, because of racism.

I genuinely think though that we can't fix the existing problems if we can't name them. The coded language that comes out of people who don't reflect on bias does stigmatize marginalized people further, for example.
Or hiring practises.

If we can't say 'there are figures suggesting you never promote BME people to management' how can we address it?

At a systemic level it's important.
Whereas maybe at an individual level it's energy wasted on solipsism a lot of the time.

Also the horizontal-ish hostility.

Reprimanding an autistic woman for speaking out about being an autistic woman, because you are a (female) non-binary person who believes gender is created by neurotypical people and you can never ever get a platform (because you are tedious).
Instead of, for eg, saying 'hi thank you for sharing your story- here's mine' and seeing what happens.
The fighting for crumbs is where a lot of the energy gets wasted.

It's worth noting that racism started as a real scientific theory. That theory was proved wrong (race literally doesn't exist in humans).

Racism is the belief that race exists and is deterministic of character/ability/value etc.

Anyone who thinks race really exists is, by definition, racist. You can discuss the problems of racism without buying into it.

I firmly believe that identity politics (a key tenet of 3rd wave feminism) is largely accountable for the whole TRA situation we're experiencing lately.

Gosh, MRAs blaming women for everything. Gosh we've never heard this before, like, ever.

Racism is the belief that race exists and is deterministic of character/ability/value etc.

This is a good description and is the exact same thought process that beliefs in ladybrains come from.

Populations differ physiologically and there are times when that matters, particularly in medicine, but physiological differences do not say anything at all about character, or preferences, or intellectual abilities. For reasons that have always escaped me a large proportion of people are incapable of separating factual, biological difference from ephemeral differences in feeling/character/preference. This is true of racists, sexists and extreme identarians alike.

Yes. I know I keep harping on but Ben Elton's Identity Crisis book highlights this perfectly.

Kat I heard him on loose ends recently talking about this, sounds good.

Gosh, MRAs blaming women for everything. Gosh we've never heard this before, like, ever.

The large number of male feminists are equally to blame.

I don't think it can really be argued that feminism doesn't feature in identity politics.

*The large number of male feminists are equally to blame8

There is no such thing as a male feminist. Hope that helps.

Sadly, the world outside of mumsnet doesn't agree.

Neither does this gentleman.

Liberal feminism — actually neoliberal Thatcherite feminism now with a postmodern twist — is identity politics.

Radical feminism is not identity but CLASS politics.

In CLASS politics, there are 3 big axes of exploitation based on position wrt one’s labour and resources:

Economic class, where workers sell their labour and the fruits of that are profit taken by the ownership class.

Sex class, where women are the means of reproducing the necessary workers and the fruits of whose sexual, domestic, and reproductive labour are taken by men.

Race/ethnicity class, where, depending on location, people of a certain race or ethnicity are maintained as a reserve pool of labour to be employed or not depending upon need and whose land or natural resources are taken or colonized by those of the dominant race/ethnicity.

Identity politics are neoliberal because they give primacy to the individual over the class and the marketplace over the commonweal, and they are postmodern because they privilege subjective experience over material reality.

Further, identity politics conflates various hierarchies into one word “privilege” whereas class politics teases apart the difference between exploitation/oppression, discrimination, and disadvantage.

As for the world outside MN it agreeing that men can be feminists, a large reason for that is the fact that almost every “feminist” media outlet, including Jezebel, Everyday Feminism, and Bustle, are owned by men, just as every university Women’s Studies department in the 1990s was relabeled Gender Studies and taken over by men.

Men have acted as a fifth column within feminist politics and turned it away from the politics that actually brought about ALL of the liberating and supportive legal changes that contemporary Western women avail themselves of and that are now — strange coincidence! — being threatened or unwound.

Sounds like a bit of a 'no true Scotsman' argument tbh.

Because of this change at university level, contemporary liberal feminists know next to nothing about the theory, political practices, or history of second wave radical feminism. It’s simply not taught.