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• Stacey Abrams’s new essay on identity politics reveals why she’s a rising star

The former Georgia gubernatorial candidate took to an elite journal to make the case for identity politics. What she wrote matters.

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Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams delivered the Democratic response to Trump’s State of the Union on Tuesday — and did an impressive job. State of the Union speeches are typically boring afterthoughts; Abrams’s showed why so many in the Democratic Party see her as a rising star.

But what does Abrams really stand for, and what does she really think? To get a sense, it’s worth reading an essay by her published last Friday defending one of the most controversial ideas in American public life: identity politics.

The piece, published by the journal Foreign Affairs , is a response to an essay by famed intellectual Francis Fukuyama. In a recent book, Fukuyama lambasted left-wing movements for dividing the country by focusing too much on appeals to race and gender; he called instead for Democrats to refocus on class to win back blue-collar Trump voters.

It’s a familiar argument, and one Abrams finds decidedly unpersuasive. She argues that identity politics is simply the assertion of historically marginalized groups’ interests and right to participate as equals in society, an inevitable and necessary feature of a society marked by social oppression. The piece marks Abrams as the rare politician willing to mount a full-throated defense of the idea of identity politics; the fact that she does so in a sharp and compelling way helps explain why the Democratic Party sees her as a rising star.

Why Stacey Abrams believes in identity politics

The core of Abrams’s argument is that identity politics is not something that members of marginalized groups can ignore. If they want equality, they must address the issues and social structures that oppress them.

“The marginalized did not create identity politics: Their identities have been forced on them by dominant groups, and politics is the most effective method of revolt,” Abrams writes. “What Fukuyama laments as ‘fracturing’ is in reality the result of marginalized groups finally overcoming centuries-long efforts to erase them from the American polity — activism that will strengthen democratic rule, not threaten it.”

The point here is not that it’s bad to be labeled as “black” or “female”; Abrams personally embraces both labels. Rather, it’s that the social significance assigned to being a member of an oppressed group — the mental baggage, stereotypes, and mistreatment you experience from others as a result of your identity — is not something individuals can choose to take on or reject. Your race, gender identity, sexual orientation, or religion cause you to be treated in a certain way, forcing you to be aware of your marginalized social role and identify with it whether you’d like to or not.

As a result, Abrams argues, minority groups face two choices: either ignore their own oppression or engage in some form of so-called identity politics. Asking minorities to eschew identity politics is tantamount to asking them to ignore their own oppression. How can you include black Americans in modern politics if you don’t talk about police violence and voter suppression? How can you include women without talking about the gender pay gap, or LGBTQ Americans without addressing the lack of federal anti-discrimination laws?

You can’t, at least not meaningfully. In Abrams’s view, critics like Fukuyama are functionally telling people like her to sit down and shut up.

Abrams also finds the alleged alternative, a class-focused politics, unpersuasive. She points to the Democratic party’s nationwide victories in 2018 as evidence that candidates can run on identity issues and win (although Abrams herself did not).

She also argues that positioning messages based on class and those based on identity as being in conflict is part of the problem — and results in the exclusion of minority concerns from politics. It’s worth quoting her at length here:

Fukuyama and other critics of identity politics contend that broad categories such as economic class contain multitudes and that all attention should focus on wide constructs rather than the substrates of inequality. But such arguments fail to acknowledge that some members of any particular economic class have advantages not enjoyed by others in their cohort. U.S. history abounds with examples of members of dominant groups abandoning class solidarity after concluding that opportunity is a zero-sum game. The oppressed have often aimed their impotent rage at those too low on the social scale to even attempt rebellion. This is particularly true in the catchall category known as “the working class.” Conflict between black and white laborers stretches back to the earliest eras in U.S. history, which witnessed tensions between African slaves and European indentured servants. Racism and sexism have long tarnished the heroic story of the U.S. labor movement—defects that contributed to the rise of a segregated middle class and to persistent pay disparities between men and women, disparities exacerbated by racial differences. Indeed, the American working class has consistently relied on people of color and women to push for improved status for workers but has been slow to include them in the movement’s victories.

Instead of opposing class and identity, she concludes, an effective left-liberal politics would point out the connections between different forms of social stratification — crafting an appeal that speaks to both economic and social concerns rather than reducing one to the other.

In Abrams’s view, it’s possible to build a political movement that recognizes both the particular challenges facing distinct identity groups and, at the same, manages to appeal to all of them.

“The current demographic and social evolution toward diversity in the United States has played out alongside a trend toward greater economic and social inequality. These parallel but distinct developments are inextricably bound together,” Abrams writes. “The entrance of the marginalized into the workplace, the commons, and the body politic — achieved through litigation and legislation — spawned reactionary limits on their legal standing and restrictions meant to block their complaints and prevent remedies. The natural antidote to this condition is not a retrenchment to amorphous, universal descriptors devoid of context or nuance. Instead, Americans must thoughtfully pursue an expanded, identity-conscious politics.”

Why Abrams’s argument matters

The devil is in the details when it comes to this kind of argument. It’s easy to hazily appeal to a kind of united-quilt identity politics, but much harder to create a political campaign that effectively harnesses this kind of vision.

Barack Obama was the unquestioned master of this tactic, managing to make different groups feel like their interests were being taken into account while also selling a master narrative of unity to the broader American public. But not everyone has Obama’s talents as a political communicator, to put it mildly. It remains to be seen how good Abrams will be at putting her vision into action in future campaigns, either in Georgia or nationally.

But the theory here is important in its own right. By mounting a full-throated defense of identity politics — arguably the most criticized concept in American politics today — Abrams is bolstering her reputation as a Democratic politician worth watching, attacking the conventional Washington wisdom at a high intellectual level.

It’s also notable that someone with Abrams’ level of prominence is making this kind of argument. The anti-identity politics case has become so ossified that its defenders often seem almost incapable of questioning their own premises.

In Fukuyama’s response to Abrams, he accuses her of painting white America with too broad a brush. “It is absurd to see white Americans as a uniformly privileged category, as she seems to do,” Fukuyama writes.

But nowhere in Abrams’s essay does she do that. It’s possible to recognize that the white working class has historically benefitted from certain elements of white privilege — being included in New Deal programs that blacks were initially excluded from, for example — without saying that they are “uniformly privileged.” Abrams’s attention to the nuances of identity allows for this more subtle analysis, which Fukuyama doesn’t seem to grasp.

There’s two paragraphs in particular where Fukuyama seems to give up the game. He writes:

People can walk and chew gum at the same time. Even as Americans seek to right injustices suffered by specific social groups, they need to balance their small-group identities with a more integrative identity needed to create a cohesive national democratic community.

But then later in the essay, he also writes:

In practical terms, overcoming polarization means devising a posture that will win back at least part of the white working-class vote that has shifted from the left to the right. Peeling away populist voters not driven by simple racism means taking seriously some of their concerns over cultural change and national identity.

There’s a contradiction here: Fukuyama wants minorities to talk about their issues, but only if it doesn’t offend whites concerned about “cultural change and national identity,” which he deems a less problematic form of anti-minority politics than “simple racism.” So can Latinos advocate for fewer deportations and amnesty for the undocumented, or would that tip the “balance” of acceptable topics? Can black Americans argue for affirmative action or reforming the criminal justice system? Can trans people argue for their right to use the bathroom corresponding with their gender identity, or is that too much “cultural change?”

This confused response illustrates the value of Abrams’s argument. Her focus is on the definition of identity politics, of showing how it is functionally coextensive with the idea of minorities advocating for their own interests. Critics of identity politics often get away with being frustratingly vague as to what exactly they’re attacking; the weaknesses of the argument only become manifest when you press them on the definition.

So Abrams is an unusually talented politician: One who can both give a great speech and engage thoughtfully in print with one of America’s most prominent academics. Put together, it shows just why the Democratic Party is so excited about her.

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Guest Essay

How to Argue Against Identity Politics Without Turning Into a Reactionary

By Yascha Mounk

Mr. Mounk is the author of the forthcoming book “The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time,” from which this essay is adapted.

In the spring of 2017, a senior administrator at Evergreen State College in Washington announced that she expected white students and faculty members to stay off campus for a day. The so-called Day of Absence, she explained, was intended to build community “around identity.”

One professor publicly pushed back against this idea. As he wrote to the administrator , “on a college campus, one’s right to speak — or to be — must never be based on skin color.” He would, he announced, remain on campus.

What followed was a bizarre gantlet. Though the Day of Absence was officially voluntary, the professor’s refusal to take part painted a target on his back. Protesters disrupted one of his classes, intimidating his students and accusing him of being a racist. The campus police, he said, encouraged him to keep away for his own safety. Within a few months, he quit his job, reinventing himself as a public intellectual for the internet age.

In his early media appearances, the professor, Bret Weinstein, described himself as a leftist. But over time, he drifted away from his political roots, embracing ever more outlandish conspiracy theories. Of late, he has insinuated that the Sept. 11 attacks were an inside job and called for health officials who recommended that children be vaccinated against Covid to face prosecution modeled on the Nuremberg Trials.

Mr. Weinstein, in short, has fallen into the reactionary trap.

He is not alone. Other key members of what’s been called the “intellectual dark web” also started out opposing the real excesses of supposedly progressive ideas and practices, only to morph into cranks .

These dynamics have left a lot of Americans, including many of my friends and colleagues, deeply torn. On the one hand, they have serious concerns regarding the new ideas and norms about race, gender and sexual orientation that have quickly been adopted by universities and nonprofit organizations, corporations and even some religious communities. Like Mr. Weinstein, they believe that practices like separating people into different groups according to race are deeply counterproductive.

On the other hand, these Americans are deeply conscious that real injustices against minority groups persist; are understandably fearful of making common cause with reactionaries like Mr. Weinstein; rightly oppose the legislative restrictions on the expression of progressive ideas in schools and universities that are now being adopted in many red states; and recognize that authoritarian populists like Donald Trump remain a very serious danger to our democratic institutions.

Mr. Trump and others on the right deride the new norms as “woke,” a term with strongly pejorative connotations. I prefer a more neutral phrase, which emphasizes that this ideology focuses on the role that groups play in society and draws on a variety of intellectual influences such as postmodernism, postcolonialism and critical race theory: the “identity synthesis.”

Does it make sense to speak out against the well-intentioned, if wrongheaded, ideas that are circulating in progressive circles at a time when Mr. Trump retains a serious chance of winning back the White House? Is there a way to oppose such practices without turning a blind eye to genuine discrimination or falling for conspiracy theories? In short: Is it possible to argue against the identity synthesis without falling into the reactionary trap?

Yes, yes and yes.

There is a way to warn about these views on identity that is thoughtful yet firm, principled yet unapologetic. The first step is to recognize that they constitute a novel ideology — one that, though it has wide appeal for serious reasons, is profoundly misguided.

In recent years, parts of the right have started to denounce any concern about racism as being “woke” or an example of “critical race theory.” This right-wing hyperbole has, in turn, persuaded many reasonable people that critical race theory amounts to little more than a commendable determination to teach children about the history of slavery or to recognize that contemporary America still suffers from serious forms of discrimination. Critical race theory, they think, is simply a commitment to think critically about the terrible role that race continues to play in our society.

This soft-pedaled depiction of their ideas would come as a shock to the founders of critical race theory. Derrick Bell, widely seen as the father of the tradition , cut his teeth as a civil rights lawyer who helped to desegregate hundreds of schools. But when many integrated schools failed to provide Black students with a better education, he came to think of his previous efforts as a dead end. Arguing that American racism would never subside, he rejected the “defunct racial equality ideology” of the civil rights movement,

According to Mr. Bell, the Constitution — and even key Supreme Court rulings like Brown v. Board of Education — cloaked the reality of racial discrimination. The only remedy, he claimed, is to create a society in which the way that the state treats citizens would, whether it comes to the benefits they can access or the school they might attend, explicitly turn on the identity groups to which they belong.

To take critical race theory — and the wider ideological tradition it helped to inspire — seriously is to recognize that it explicitly stands in conflict with the views of some of the country’s most storied historical figures. Political leaders from Frederick Douglass to Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. recognized that the Constitution was not enough to protect Black Americans from horrific injustices. But instead of rejecting those documents as irredeemable, they fought to turn their promises into reality.

Critical race theory is far more than a determination to think critically about race; similarly, the identity synthesis as a whole goes well beyond the recognition that many people will, for good reason, take pride in their identity. It claims that categories like race, gender and sexual orientation are the primary prism through which to understand everything about our society, from major historical events to trivial personal interactions. And it encourages us to see one another — and ourselves — as being defined, above anything else, by the identities into which we are born.

This helps to explain why it’s increasingly common these days to see schools seek to ensure that their students conceive of themselves as “ racial beings ,” as one advocate puts it. Some of them even split students into racially segregated affinity groups as early as the first grade . These kinds of practices encourage complex people to see themselves as defined by external characteristics whose combinations and permutations, however numerous, will never amount to a satisfactory depiction of their innermost selves; it is also a recipe for zero-sum conflict between different groups. For example, when teachers at a private school in Manhattan tell white middle schoolers to “own” their “European ancestry,” they are more likely to create racists than anti-racists.

There is even growing evidence that the rapid adoption of these progressive norms is strengthening the very extremists who pose the most serious threat to democratic institutions. According to a recent analysis by The New York Times, Mr. Trump has attracted a new group of supporters who are disproportionately nonwhite and comparatively progressive on cultural issues such as immigration reform and trans acceptance, but also perturbed by the influence that the identity synthesis has in mainstream institutions, like the corporate sector.

It is naïve to think that we face a choice between speaking out against wrongheaded progressive ideas or fighting against the threat from the far right. To breathe new life into the values on which American democracy is founded and build the broad majorities that are needed to inflict a lasting defeat on dangerous demagogues, principled critics of the identity synthesis need to do both at the same time.

Many people who were initially sympathetic to its goals have since recognized that the identity synthesis presents a real danger. They want to speak out against these ideas, but they are nervous about doing so. It’s not just that they don’t want to risk alienating their friends or sabotaging their careers. They fear that opposing the identity synthesis will, inevitably, force them to make common cause with people who don’t recognize the dangers of racism and bigotry, push them onto the “wrong side of history,” or even lead them down the same path as Mr. Weinstein.

I understand these apprehensions. But there is a way to argue against the misguided ideas and practices that are now taking over mainstream institutions without ignoring the more sobering realities of American life or embracing wild conspiracy theories. And the first part of that is to recognize that you can be a proud liberal — and an effective opponent of racism — while pushing back against the identity synthesis.

Many people who argue against the identity synthesis are so fearful of the reactions they might elicit that, like the schoolchild who flunks a test on purpose because he’s scared of what it’ll say about him if he does badly, they preemptively play the part of the unlikable jerk. But doing so is a self-fulfilling prophecy: When you expect to upset people, it is easy to act so passive-aggressively that you do.

But nor should you go all the way to the other extreme. Some who argue against the identity synthesis are so embarrassed to disagree with a progressive position that they go out of their way to offer endless concessions before expressing their own thoughts. When somebody does push back, they apologize profusely — whether or not they’ve done anything wrong. That kind of behavior succeeds only in making them look guilty.

Instead, critics of the identity synthesis should claim the moral high ground and recognize that their opposition to the identity synthesis is of a piece with a noble tradition that was passed down through the generations from Douglass to Lincoln to King — one that has helped America make enormous, if inevitably incomplete, progress toward becoming a more just society. This makes it a little easier to speak from a position of calm confidence.

In the same vein, it is usually best to engage the reasonable middle rather than the loud extremes. Even at a time of deep political polarization, most Americans hold nuanced views about divisive subjects from how to honor historical figures like George Washington to whether we should avoid the forms of artistic exchange that have come to be condemned as “cultural appropriation.” Instead of trying to “own” the most intransigent loudmouths, critics of the identity synthesis should seek to sway the members of this reasonable majority.

Even when you do find yourself debating somebody with more extreme views, it is important to remember that today’s adversaries can become tomorrow’s allies. Ideologues of all stripes like to claim that the people with whom they disagree suffer from some kind of moral or intellectual defect and conclude that they are a lost cause. But though few people acknowledge defeat in the middle of an argument, most do shift their worldview over time. Our job is to persuade, not to vilify, those who genuinely believe in the identity synthesis.

Sometimes, outspoken critics of the identity synthesis used to be its fervent proponents. Maurice Mitchell, a progressive activist who is now the national director of the Working Families Party, once believed that the core precepts of the identity synthesis could help him combat injustice. Today he worries about how its ideas are reshaping America, including some of the progressive organizations he knows intimately. As he writes in a recent article , “Identity is too broad a container to predict one’s politics or the validity of a particular position.”

To avoid following the path charted by Mr. Weinstein, opponents of the identity synthesis need to be guided by a clear moral compass of their own. In my case, this compass consists of liberal values like political equality, individual freedom and collective self-determination. For others, it could consist of socialist conviction or Christian faith, of conservative principles or the precepts of Buddhism. But what all of us must share is a determination to build a better world.

The identity synthesis is a trap. If we collectively fall into it, there will be more, not less, zero-sum competition between different groups. But it is possible to oppose the identity trap without becoming a reactionary.

To build a better society, we must overcome the prejudices and enmities that have for so much of human history boxed us into the roles seemingly foreordained by our gender, our sexual orientation, or the color of our skin. It is time to fight, without shame or hesitation, for a future in which what we have in common truly comes to be more important than what divides us.

Yascha Mounk is the author of the forthcoming book “The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time,” from which this essay is adapted.

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The Defeat of Identity Politics

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Days into the national insurrection that boiled over after the police lynching of George Floyd, in May, 2020, Muriel Bowser, a Black woman and the mayor of Washington, D.C., ordered that the words “Black Lives Matter” be painted in mustard yellow along Sixteenth Street, near the White House. The symbolism radiated from multiple directions. Almost a week earlier, law-enforcement agents had used tear gas to clear Lafayette Park, which intersects the street, of protesters. The mural was a thumb in the eye of Trump, who certainly took it as such. He thundered, in response, that Bowser was “incompetent” and “constantly coming back to us for ‘handouts.’ ”

In the fall of 2021, Bowser announced that the segment of Sixteenth Street displaying the mural —renamed as Black Lives Matter Plaza—had been turned into a permanent monument. She explained, “The Black Lives Matter mural is a representation of an expression of our saying no, but also identifying and claiming a part of our city that had been taken over by federal forces.” Speaking of its wider significance, she said, “There are people who are craving to be heard and to be seen, and to have their humanity recognized, and we had the opportunity to send that message loud and clear on a very important street in our city.”

Last spring, nearly two years after her confrontation with Trump, Bowser proposed a new spending budget for Washington, D.C., that spoke as loudly as the paint used to decorate B.L.M. Plaza. In a press conference celebrating a surplus created in part by the federal government’s pandemic stimulus, Bowser announced, “We’ve been able to invest in something we’ve been wanting to invest in a long time—the sports complex. We’ve been able to invest in a new jail.” Bowser was promising to spend more than two hundred and fifty million dollars to eventually replace part of the existing jail. She was also proposing thirty million dollars to hire and retain new police officers, with the goal of bringing the force to a total of four thousand members; another nearly ten million dollars would add one hundred and seventy new speed cameras across the municipality.

Despite Bowser’s very public embrace of the slogan “Black Lives Matter,” even enshrining its existence in the nation’s capital, the D.C. Mayor was now advancing a political agenda that stood in stark contrast to the movement’s demand to defund the police. Instead, Bowser had denuded the most radical imaginings of the movement into the decidedly vague “craving to be heard,” while also wielding it as a shield to protect her from activists’ accusations that her policies would harm Black communities. Bowser was able to benefit from the assumption that, as a Black woman who had angered and been insulted by Trump after painting “Black Lives Matter” on a public street, she could be trusted to do what was in the best interest of the Black community.

The most profound changes in Black life in the past several decades have been along the lines of class and status, creating political and social chasms between élites and ordinary Black people. After the struggles of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, it was no longer politically tenable in the U.S. to make decisions about minorities without their participation. This was especially true in cities that had experienced riots and rebellions. But exclusion gave way to shallow representation of African Americans in politics and the private sector as evidence of color blindness and progress. The rooms where decisions were being made were no longer entirely white and male; they were now punctuated with token representations of race and gender.

Not only could the few stand in to represent the many but their existence could also serve as evidence that the system could work for those who had formerly been excluded. And these new representatives could also use the language of identity politics, because many of them continued to experience racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. But their aspirations were different from those who first used these left-wing political frameworks. The new representatives were not interested in transforming the system so much as they were trying to navigate it.

These tensions are strained when Black élites or political operatives claim to speak on behalf of the Black public or Black social movements while also engaging in political actions that either are in opposition to the movement or reinforce the status quo. It is a process described by the writer and philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò as “elite capture.” The concept, derived from the politics of global development, describes scenarios in which local élites in developing countries would seize resources intended for the much larger public. Táíwò explains that the term is used “to describe the way socially advantaged people tend to gain control over benefits meant for everyone” (if only rhetorically).

Táíwò, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown, published his first book earlier this year. Titled “ Reconsidering Reparations ,” it argues that, if colonialism and slavery were responsible for the maldistribution of wealth and resources that has made Black and brown people particularly vulnerable to today’s climate crisis, then the repair should be just as expansive or capable of remaking the world. In 2020, Táíwò wrote several essays critiquing the variety of ways that the concept of “identity politics” has been transformed from a radical invention of the Black feminist left of the sixties and seventies into a placid appeal to racial and gender representation. The themes of these essays have now been spun into a tight, short volume published by Haymarket Books, titled “ Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) .”

Táíwò begins his examination of identity politics with the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black lesbian socialists that formed in the late nineteen-seventies. Among them were Demita Frazier and the twin sisters Barbara and Beverly Smith, who wrote the Combahee River Statement , in which they coined the term “identity politics.” The women were veterans of the antiwar and feminist movements but also connected to the civil-rights movement and Black-liberation struggles of the era. In their wide range of experiences, the issues of importance to them—namely organizing against forced sterilizations and intimate-partner violence against women—were rarely taken seriously by others, including Black men and white women.

In the Combahee River Statement, the authors explained that Black women had to map out their own political agenda: “We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us.” They continued, “This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. . . . We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.”

In this way, standpoint epistemology, or the ability to acquire knowledge because of your lived experience or social standing, is closely linked to the Combahee’s vision of identity politics. It was a powerful rejection of the status quo in the social sciences, which for many years had relied upon powerful outsiders, typically white men, to extoll their own wisdom about the lives of the marginalized, excluded, and oppressed. The powerful social movements of the era swept aside the common sense of white-male authority, transforming the marginalized from examined objects into subjects capable of controlling their own destiny.

Táíwò describes a subsequent shift in which these frameworks have become unmoored from their outsider status to be used by rich and powerful people, including people of color, to maintain the status quo. He adds that “recent trends in identity politics seem to be supercharging, rather than restraining, élite capture.” He cites examples of Black élites using radical slogans or other kinds of social-movement invocations to further the status quo while appearing to be aligned with the movement and Black public opinion. There are also more complex examples of activists using undemocratic forms of organizing that prioritize the insights and acumen of paid staff and organizers over the working-class public. In some dramatic examples, ostensibly grassroots organizations have transformed themselves into foundations to dispense money and advice to grassroots organizers, as was the case with the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. Táíwò speaks directly to the dynamic that can emerge in these situations: “In the absence of the right kinds of checks or constraints, the subgroup of people with power over and access to the resources used to describe, define, and create political realities . . . will capture the group’s values, forcing people to coordinate on a narrower social project that disproportionately represents elite interests.” This was Audre Lorde’s pointed insight when she remarked that the “master’s tools” cannot dismantle the master’s house; the oppressed cannot use the same methods as the oppressor and still hope for a just outcome.

Though élite capture is a general phenomenon, there is something particularly jarring about its effects on Black politics, especially in the United States. Given the history of racial subjugation of Black people and the prevalence of state-sponsored white supremacy well into the twentieth century, a collective experience attributed to, by Táíwò and others, “racial capitalism,” Americans tend to see racial categories as stable, if not static. This is also true among African Americans, even though within Black communities there is much more awareness of the tensions of social class that pull at the threads assumed in the universalizing trait of blackness. And, because racism remains powerful across categories of class, there is an assumption that a single Black community is united around an ongoing struggle for Black freedom.

Consider the experiences of LaToya Cantrell, the first Black woman to be the mayor of New Orleans. During the protests of 2020, Cantrell was a target of labor activists, who were angry about the lack of sick leave and other provisions for workers in the tourism industry, and who rallied outside her home, where she was working during the height of the pandemic. In an open letter, Cantrell invoked her identity to rebuke the protesters. She wrote:

This moment must redress those who have been marginalized by our tourism economy, by failed policies, and by an economic collapse that has hit the least of us the hardest. It cannot be about misdirected anger. It cannot be about empty gestures. And it cannot be about storming angrily into a residential neighborhood leaving my daughter feeling terrorized, a 12 year-old black girl, whose mother rose from the epicenter of the crack cocaine epidemic, whose family did not come from a place of privilege. . . . My father was a victim of the crack epidemic. My stepfather was another casualty of the same scourge—which ran unchecked by those in power, while it decimated the black community. My brother was system-involved and turned his life around. My stepbrother was system-involved and taken from us by violence at 18. This is not a story about privilege and power. I can stand up and say Black Lives Matter because I’ve personally had to fight to make that true every day of my life.

Cantrell’s personal story is a moving one but also one that was dispatched to deflect legitimate protest: she is the mayor; she holds a position of power and authority in local government. This tactic is powerful not because the people it’s directed at don’t understand that élites can be manipulative and evoke personal stories to conjure empathy, but because the persistence of racism makes the stories resonate personally. And, when public officials are subjected to racist attacks, as they often are—just think about the Obamas—then the feelings of familiarity and solidarity are intensified in ways that resemble what political scientist Michael Dawson has described as “linked fate” or the idea that the social, economic, and political fortunes of African Americans are tied together because of shared identity and history.

These appeals to identity politics are much more impactful than the promises of corporate executives to spend money to make Black lives matter. Nevertheless, as Táíwò writes, “treating such elites’ interests as necessarily or even presumptively aligned with the broader group’s interests involves a political naivete we cannot afford.” This confusion then “functions as a form of racial Reaganomics: a strategy reliant on fantasies about the exchange rate between the attention economy and the material economy.” Táíwò adds that we need to “fix the social structure itself—the rooms we interact in, and the house they make up. Deference, as a strategy, bears at best a tenuous relationship to this goal.”

These politics are not only present in big-city encounters between elected officials but also within political movements and coalitions. Táíwò describes this as the tendency to “pass the mic” to supposedly the “most impacted” in a given room or meeting. As he explains, “At face value, a commitment to these ideas should help us resist and contain elite capture. They should provide a basis for respecting knowledge that the institutions of the world otherwise want to discredit.” But, for Táíwò, the focus on deference or passing the mike can be counterproductive, in that it “locates attentional injustice in the selection of spokespeople and book lists taken to represent the marginalized.” He’s not suggesting we return to political meetings dominated by conversations between white men. As he clarifies, “We all deserve these attentional goods, which are often denied, even to the ‘elites’ of marginalized and stigmatized groups.” But he uses his own experiences as an example of the problem in the approach. More than a few times, Táíwò has had the mike passed to him because he is Black and a first-generation Nigerian American in the United States, though to center him as more authentically aware of social injustice ignores Táíwò’s class privilege, as an American kid who went to good schools, with Advanced Placement and honors classes, compared with the fate of tens of millions of Nigerians and many others who grew up in the U.S. He concedes that it may be better to hear from him than to hear from a white person of a similar class background, but he nevertheless maintains that “these are the last facts we should want to hold fixed. And if our aim is simply to do better than the epistemic norms that we’ve inherited from a history of explicit global apartheid, that is an awfully low bar to set.”

To that end, Táíwò is interested in constructive, as opposed to deference, politics. “A constructive political culture would focus on outcome over process,” he writes—“the pursuit of specific goals or end results rather than avoiding complicity in injustice or promoting purely moral or aesthetic principles.” Táíwò does not get into the details of how activist groups might go about building campaigns, but he does see the politics of deference within these groups as undermining their potential. As he writes, “To opt for deference, rather than interdependence, may soothe short-term psychological wounds. But it does so at a steep cost: it may undermine the goals that motivated the project—and it entrenches a politics that does not serve those fighting for freedom over privilege, for collective liberation over mere parochial advantage.” He says, of traumatic experience, “It is not what gives me a special right to speak, to evaluate, or to decide for a group. It is a concrete, experiential manifestation of the vulnerability that connects me to most of the people on this earth. It comes between me and other people not as a wall, but as a bridge.”

With this definition of trauma, Táíwò invokes the feminist classic “ This Bridge Called My Back ,” and the political debates over social change in which the concept of identity politics emerged. In an interview, Barbara Smith , of the Combahee River Collective, once talked about the importance of the idea of a bridge as a way to overcome difference, saying that the notion of, “ ‘If I don’t have a particular identity, I’m not allowed to work on a particular issue’—that sounds to me like an excuse. That sounds to me like O.K., so that’s what somebody decides if they’re not really willing to go there, and go through the struggle of crossing boundaries and working across differences.”

What Táíwò and the Combahee River Collective, of which Audre Lorde was also a member, were arguing is not to paper over our differences for the sake of building inclusive movements. Rather, they demonstrate that identity politics is an important entry point into a world deeply defined by racism and gender inequality and hatred, but it alone is not enough. We must find the ties that bind us together, to see how our oppressions are linked, to build bridges to each other’s struggles and find ways to unite. This is the opposite of élite capture; it is a remaking of the world. As Táíwò, echoing Marx, reminds us, the point, after all, is to change it. ♦

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Identity Politics and Culture Wars

Judith butler, cornel west, and glenn greenwald join moderator simon critchley in the 2021 holberg debate.

Panelists Judith Butler, Cornel West, Glenn Greenwald, and moderator Simon Critchley. Photo credits: University of California, Berkeley; Robin Holland; David dos Santos; Andrew Zuckerman. Image credit: DF for Public Seminar

A fierce debate over social justice and identity-based politics seems to have exploded in recent years in the Western world, and few areas of life remain untouched by cultural conflicts. To some, identity-based politics has been embraced as an effective strategy to combat discrimination and marginalization. To others, it may seem that identity politics has resulted in culture wars involving violent conflicts and a destructive exchange of labels. 

Identity-based politics often relate to volatile issues such as abortion, homosexuality, transgender rights, pornography, multiculturalism, and racism. Identity conflicts also involve fundamental orientations such as religion and ideology, as well as political issues ranging from freedom of speech to the distribution of wealth and privilege. 

Debates on these issues have challenged established views on equality and brought about an alternative demand for identity-based equity as a better approach. Even the term identity politics itself is debated, as many will contend that it is inherently biased and used by those who oppose struggles for social justice by marginalized groups.

Regardless of one’s position on the current culture wars, it seems apparent that they involve both struggles for social justice and struggles for power. With this in mind, the Holberg Prize invited Judith Butler, Cornel West, Glenn Greenwald, and moderator Simon Critchley to discuss the following question: 

Does identity politics as it is currently manifesting itself offer a suitable avenue towards social justice, or has it become a recipe for cultural antagonism, political polarization, and new forms of injustice?

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation , which took place on December 4, 2021.

SIMON CRITCHLEY : A fierce debate over social justice and identity-based politics seem to have exploded in recent years in the Western world, and few areas of life remain untouched by cultural conflicts. To some, identity-based politics has been embraced as the effective strategy to combat discrimination and marginalization. To others, it may seem that identity politics have resulted in culture wars, involving violent conflicts and a destructive exchange of labels. Identity-based politics often relate to volatile issues, such as abortion, which is very much on the agenda in the United States, this Supreme Court debate, Mississippi law, on Wednesday, I believe. 

Homosexuality, transgender rights, pornography, multiculturalism, and racism. Identity conflicts also involve fundamental orientations such as religion and ideology, as well as political issues, ranging from freedom of speech to the distribution of wealth and privilege. Debates on these issues have challenged established views of equality and brought about an alternative demand for identity-based equity as a better approach. That’s something we want to flag as a question in the air, and a lot of the questions were on that issue. What has evolved in the movement from equality, this value of which we can talk about the history of it, to equity? What has evolved? What does that mean? And is it a good idea? 

Even the term identity politics is itself debated, as many will contend that it is inherently biased and used by those who oppose struggles for social justice by marginalized groups. So, should we even be talking about this, I guess is the big question, the elephant in the room. Regardless of one’s position on the current culture wars, it seems to be apparent that they involve both struggles for social justice and struggles for power. And that is what brings us here today. And the question is the following: Does identity politics, as it is currently manifesting itself, offer a suitable avenue towards social justice, or has it become a recipe for cultural antagonism, political polarization, and new forms of injustice? So, that’s the question we can begin by thinking about, and I’d like to ask Judith to kick us off. 

JUDITH BUTLER: Great. Thank you, Simon. I’m very pleased to be here with you and with brother Cornel, and with Glenn, far away, but nevertheless very present. I’d like to start by calling into question the framework, and, I suppose, that’s a typical thing to do, or perhaps you may have expected that by inviting me.

(Laughter.)

BUTLER: But I really worry sometimes when I hear criticisms of identity politics because it’s not always clear what is meant by identity politics. And, for instance, if identity politics is the struggle for gay, lesbian, trans, human rights; or if identity politics is a struggle for racial justice; if identity politics is a demand to have architecturally accessible buildings, public and private, on the part of disability activists; do we say that those examples are identity politics? Is the defense of abortion rights identity politics, if it includes arguments about women’s lives, their freedom, their movement, their capacity? 

Very often, I feel that social movements on the Left are grouped as identity politics, even though they do not always argue on the basis of identity. In other words, it’s not just a question of claiming, this is my identity, and I deserve social and public recognition for this identity. That may be in the mix, but usually it will take the form “I am living in a world in which justice, a democratic ideal of a hallowed political principle, has not yet become justice for all.” So, if I talk about racial justice, am I talking about identity, or am I saying that whatever forms of justice we’re living with have not yet benefited from the emancipatory movements that seek to establish racial justice as part of justice? 

I mean, maybe racial justice becomes something else, or gets relegated to a position of identity politics because it questions something about the abstract character of justice, but maybe what it’s questioning is who is included in that abstraction and who is not and how do we get to a place of having justice as something that is all-encompassing and that is justice for all? I mean, what would it mean to arrive there? It may well be that racial justice asks us to rethink justice; racial equality makes us rethink equality; sexual freedom asks us to rethink freedom, freedom for whom? Who has not yet been freed? Who has not yet known freedom? 

It seems to me that these are large principles that belong to any democratic project, especially a radical democratic project or politics. And that we are most often talking about rethinking freedom, equality, and justice; making it stronger; making it more encompassing; making it more substantial, less abstract and less exclusionary. That doesn’t strike me as a particularism, like, oh, here are all these identities. It is not right to say that those in this struggling are struggling only for their particular interest. Or that they are taking away from a common good. Or that they are taking away from a universal framework. They are taking away from a larger sense of politics. No, I think it is the larger sense of politics that’s being identified as exclusionary, and there is a call for a rearticulation of those basic principles. 

So when justice projects, freedom projects, and equality projects are dismissed as identity projects we’re clinging to an older ideal and not looking at the exclusions it has made, the effacements on which it has proceeded, and we’re holding to a status quo that actually does need to be radically challenged. Now, I have one other point as part of my introductory remarks and that’s the following: 

The largest, most influential, and dangerous version of identity politics that we are living with in this world is white supremacy. That is an identity politic. That is the defense of whiteness. That is the defense of whiteness as superior, the defense of whiteness as the norm, as that which doesn’t even need to be marked as part of the norm. And the neo-fascist trends we’re seeing, the hyper-nationalism we’re seeing, the police violence, the border closing, the border violence we are seeing throughout Europe—these are racist projects of states that are very often promising to their people a restoration of white supremacy, a defense of white supremacy, against racial and ethnic and religious diversity. And so, I think that we often imagine that identity politics is a fragmenting process that the Left is responsible for or that has happened inside the Left, but actually the largest and most noxious, most destructive one is white identity politics, which takes the form of asserting white supremacy, either explicitly or implicitly, and we need to get wiser about how that’s happening and how we might oppose it.

CRITCHLEY: Mhm. So, you see identity politics as a kind of a stalking horse?

BUTLER:  Sometimes. I mean, I think we can talk further about the struggles that we’re seeing in social media and struggles among movements, and what is disturbing about those struggles, what is helpful about those struggles. I am happy to do that. I am just not sure identity politics is the term that can describe those struggles, and I also think that it’s a way of not listening. (Laughs.) It’s like, call it identity politics and then you don’t have to listen because you’ve put it in that category. You don’t have to listen to what folks are saying. So, that worries me.

CRITCHLEY: Yes. Would you say the same thing about culture wars?

BUTLER: Well, the thing about culture . . . I mean, if we have a movement for Black lives on the streets, is that about Black identity? Or is it about racial justice? Or is it about the legal system? Is it about institutions of violence? Is it about the police? Why do we call that cultural wars if the cultural is separable from issues of violence or institutionalization or state power? I think that when we separate off . . . something that we call merely cultural, (laughs) we’re making sometimes a false distinction, right? If trans people believe they should be able to walk the streets of . . . Poland or any street in Hungary . . . or Brazil without harassment or arrest or violence or potential criminalization or pathologization, are we talking about identity politics? Are we saying, oh, those are cultural politics that belong to trans people, or are we saying, hey, this is public space. This is a public freedom. Movement through the streets—that’s a public freedom. You know, Take Back the Night: was that just women—women’s identity? Is that cultural? It’s like, no—no, this is actually about being able to move freely in the world without violence. Now, that’s not merely cultural. That’s about bodies in public space and what our substantial freedoms are and how society is organized either to let us exercise that freedom or to stop us from exercising that freedom. Now, someone says, oh, that’s merely cultural or purely identity, I’m thinking they’re not listening.

CRITCHLEY: Yes. We can get into this more, but while I was doing some research on the history of the idea of culture wars—you can take it back to the German Kulturkampf in the late nineteenth century—but really what I found out was that there’s a book by James Davison Hunter from 1991 on culture wars, which is always about the definition of America. The issue is always about, we’ve lost the soul of America, how do we get it back? We’ve lost it in these culture wars. I think Pat Buchanan used “culture war” in 1992, and it begins to be increasingly politicized . . . We seem to be back there in some way. So, there’s an issue about these very terms we have, identity politics and culture wars. So, thank you, Judith. Cornel?

WEST: I want to begin, really, with the great Henry James and his letter to Robert Louis Stevenson, when he said, “No theory is kind to us that cheats us of seeing,” and I would say the same thing about language. I would say the same thing about philosophy. So, one of the tests of talking about identity politics: What does it blind us of? Culture wars: what does it blind us of? Now, all of us have blind spots. I mean, Adorno reminds us, a splinter in our eyes is the biggest magnifying glass, and he gets that from Matthew 10, New Testament. So, that . . . the sense of coming in with a spirit of humility and recognizing the limits to which we view any situation becomes part and parcel of how we think critically. 

So, when sister Judith began with an interrogation and a scrutiny of the very framework of identity politics, that’s where I also want to begin. I think that’s very important, you see. Because, you see, for someone like myself who comes out of the Black Freedom Movement, I have never viewed myself as part of any talk of identity politics. See, Fredrick Douglass and Martin King and Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker, they weren’t part of identity politics at all. The Black Freedom movement is a species of the human freedom movement of every corner of the globe trying to affirm their dignity, and, as a Christian, I would say sanctity and therefore be part of struggles against structures and institutions as well as self-critiques of themselves—wrestling with white supremacy inside of them, male supremacy inside of them, anti-Jewish, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim elements inside of them. 

And so, the question becomes, okay, if we’re going to use the word identity politics, the question becomes: What is the moral content of one’s identity? There’s a variety of different identities one can have that lack a moral substance. There’s a variety of identities that one has that have an ethical and moral substance. And then, what are the foreseeable consequences, especially political, of the kind of politics that flow from that? For those of us who are fundamentally committed to the change, the deep changes in our structures . . . it can be predatory capitalist, it can be empires that are still around, the Chinese empire and the American empire and so forth. It can be concerned with the rich humanity of non-binary precious folk, or precious gays and lesbians, or peoples of color. Those are not buzzwords or PC chit-chat labels, but rather precious human beings who are trying to look for what every human being has a desire for in the face of death, which is for protection, for association, and for recognition. That goes all the way down in each and every one of us. So that when we look at the talk about identity politics, we want to give us a genealogy. Where did that come from? Is this simply a neoliberal version of Black freedom, woman freedom, gay freedom movements that are sanitizing and losing sight of the deeper issues of human suffering and human social misery in the face of dominations—in the face of lies told about them? Because white supremacy is a lie that hides and conceals crimes. The same is true with male supremacy and the other ideologies that I mentioned, you see. So, that’s my starting point. Because in any dialogue for me and here I’m with Gadamer—we were talking about Gadamer, you know, who is one of my deep influences and teachers. He says, well, traditions are unavoidable and escapable, and the question is in what kind of tradition you want to situate and locate yourself. Now, he’s got a traditionalist understanding of tradition. . . he’s conservative . . . I’ve got a much more subversive conception of tradition, so I’m talking about traditions of critique and resistance, but they’re still traditions.

And I’m just a small instant in that tradition. I want to be true to the best of that tradition. I want to be true to what the Harriet Tubmans and Martin Kings and W. E. B. Du Boises are concerned about, and what were they concerned about. How does integrity face oppression? How does honesty face deception? How does decency face insult? How does courage meet brute force? And so, the criteria are always going to be integrity—intellectual, spiritual, moral integrity. It’s going to be honesty— intellectual, moral and spiritual honesty. It’s going to be concerns about courage and concerns about decency. And, in the end, that means I look at the world through more of a spiritual lens.

CRITCHLEY: So, for you, the issue of identity politics, and the issue that we’re here to discuss, becomes a question of moral and spiritual integrity?

CORNEL WEST: Absolutely.

CRITCHLEY: Which, for you, is always linked to solidarity?

WEST: Absolutely.

CRITCHLEY: These words, identity politics and culture war, these are symptoms of something . . .

WEST: And looking at the world through the least of these. You see, I began with the genius of Hebrew scripture. Right? It’s the spreading of that chesed , that loving kindness, that steadfast love to orphaned, widowed, fatherless, motherless, those persecuted, those subjugated. I mean, that’s the best of . . . the worst of Hebrew scripture, the Canaanites and other things, we notice there’s a best and a worst. But I’m talking about the genius of that Hebrew scripture, you see, and so, the question then becomes, what do we mean by spiritual?

All I mean is what the great Rabbi Heschel understood it was namely indifference to evil. That’s spiritual decadence. It’s callousness to those who suffer. That’s spiritual decadence. And what is a lack of morality, lack of integrity, honesty, decency and courage? And so, when we think of identity politics, we’ll say, okay, let’s give it a chance. Here’s the test. If you can meet these tests, then you can call it almost anything you want. But you’re probably not going to end up calling it identity politics. It’s going to be struggle for human dignity and freedom against adverse circumstances, the structures of domination in various ways, and which ideologies divides and devalue and disrespect people, you see. 

And that is a challenge which is as old as the species. As old as the species. Because I think when Hegel called history a slaughterhouse and when Gibbon called it a story of human crimes and follies, they were not completely off. Most of human history is a history of hatred and greed, and domination and subjugation, and we have these magnificent moments of interruption and disruption, of a smile, of a touch, of a laugh. Personally, of love and relationships. And then democratic possibilities, in which you broaden the scope of who actually ought to . . . be able to play a role in shaping the destiny in the public sphere of any social regime. 

And so, in that regard, you know, I have a rather dim conception of we human beings on the one hand. Baldwin used to say we’re walking disasters, but Baldwin, using the language of Ibsen, says we’re also miracles. We’re miracles and disasters at the same time. You know what I mean. That’s what Nora was saying I was looking for America. Don’t hold your breath, Nora. We’re talking about A Doll’s House , of 1879, the first great work of modern time. 

But we ought to mention Ibsen in Harlem. We ought to mention Ibsen in Chicago (laughs) because it is this wrestling with this darkness inside of us, and the darkness in our society, and how do we cast a light? Just a flickering light—a flickering candle​​to keep those traditions alive that are concerned about that light.

CRITCHLEY: Before we turn to Glenn Greenwald, just a question on defining terms. So, identity politics, as I understand it, was first used in the Combahee River Collective, who were a Black socialist feminist group . . . operative in the Boston area between 1974 and 1980. And I think it was first used in 1977. So, we have that. And, as I understand it, again from my reading and research, there you could get an idea that the issue there is acknowledging the place from which you come—to enter the political arena. 

Okay, thank you. Let’s move on to Glenn Greenwald, if you would care to make some remarks, please? 

GLENN GREENWALD: Yes, so, first of all, thank you so much to the Holberg Committee for inviting me to be a panelist alongside two of the scholars, Dr. West, Dr. Butler, whose work I’ve admired for so long. It’s really an honor to be asked to participate in this conversation about an issue I regard as incredibly important, but also very complex. And like Judith and Cornel, I actually think it is important to start with the question since it is the topic of what do we mean by identity politics? And to me it is one of those terms that eludes any precise definition, a sort of platonic form. It reminds me a lot of the word terrorism . . . or even political labels like liberal and conservative. They kind of mean everything and they mean nothing, and they sort of get defined through their functionality rather than as fixed terms, making them a little bit illusive to discuss. 

So, I think, what we do have to focus on is not so much, what do we mean by identity politics? In some abstract sense, but how is it being deployed? How is it being used in our discourse and in our politics? And, I suppose, you can look at identity politics in its most benevolent form, in a way that is quite positive, and . . . for me, I use my own life as a prism in which to understand identity politics in its vast and its most admirable form. 

You know, the formative experience of my life was coming of age as an 11-year-old or a 12-year-old in the early 1980s with Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority in their political ascension, learning and discovering that I was gay—having no idea what that meant at a time when homosexuality was almost never discussed publicly except in association with an actual, literal disease that was horrific, where the images were mortifying—of people emaciated and dying and nurses afraid to care for them. And internalizing the idea that it wasn’t just a metaphorical sickness, but an actual sickness that had defined my identity was an incredible difficult burden for anyone to have to internalize and try to navigate, let alone someone who doesn’t have the emotional skills to try and process something like that. 

And my whole life has been defined in some way by that societal inequity, going all the way to 2005. Which is pretty recent, right? Not the 1960s, not the 1980s, but 2005. I met my husband in Brazil. We fell in love, decided we wanted to be together. But at the time, there was a law in place called the Defense of Marriage Act, enacted only in 1994, signed into law by Bill Clinton, overwhelming bipartisan support that barred the federal government from granting immigration rights or any other spousal-based rights to same-sex couples that opposite-sex couples automatically would receive. Which for us meant, at the time, that if I had fallen in love with a Brazilian woman instead of a Brazilian man, she would have immediately gotten a green card. We would have been able to live together in the United States, but because it was a he and not a she there was no possibility of living in my own country with the person who I had decided I wanted to live my entire life with. 

And so, we were forced to stay in Brazil. And, obviously, being in Brazil, most people don’t weep for you when you say you’re forced to live in Rio de Janeiro, but the injustice of that was a major factor in my life. And you know, now I have not just a same-sex marriage but an interracial marriage, an interracial family. We have two sons we’ve adopted—a third child for whom we have guardianship—none of whom is white in a country where systemic racism is a problem. We have to have those kinds of conversations about why it is that when they leave the house it’s urgent that they have their identification even though the white kids they’re playing with don’t need that. It’s because the police will stop them and be suspicious of why they’re there when that’s not true of their white friends. 

And so, the idea of combating those sorts of injustices that are based on demographic identity and group. . . yes, and group membership, to me is not identity politics. It’s what Judith said earlier: it’s identity politics that have fostered those injustices. The idea that heterosexuals have rights that gay people don’t. That white people have privileges and are expected to be treated a certain way, that non-white people don’t. Combating that to me is not identity politics. Combating that to me is warring against identity politics—this kind of tribalistic notion of justice, that some groups are entitled to rights and privileges to which other groups are denied. 

And that’s the kind of identity politics to which . . . the extent that label is applied to that, they don’t think among decent people, by definition, is particularly controversial. I think any decent person, by definition, is opposed to the idea that what race you are, what sexual orientation you are, what gender you are, should define what your rights and privileges under the law are, or even under cultural and social mores. That doesn’t mean everyone agrees with that. I mean, every decent person, by definition, agrees with it. And I think polls show and legal changes show that increasing numbers of people do agree with that—that we’re headed certainly in the right direction. Whether fast enough or not, we’re certainly . . . that’s the progress we’re making. And like any progress it’s generating some backlash, but I think even with that backlash it’s still on the right path. 

Where I think identity politics gets trickier and more problematic is when it ceases to be about ending those kinds of categorical privileges, and where—the perception at least if not the reality—it’s about fortifying them, but maybe in different ways. In 2018, I interviewed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during her primary run against then congressman Joe Crowley, and it was at the time when almost nobody knew who she was.

WEST: Yes, I saw that. Yes.

GREENWALD: I know it’s impossible to believe there was ever a time in our lives when no one knew who AOC was, but I promise you there was. It was very recent. I interviewed her when she was unknown, and one of the questions I asked her . . . she was a young Latino woman challenging a white male incumbent. I asked her: What role should identity politics play in your election? What role should your race, and his, and your gender, and his, play in the decision that voters in this district make when deciding who to send to Congress? What is your view on identity politics when it comes to those kinds of questions? Should people vote for you because you’re a Latino woman and he’s a white male? 

And she said, Look, my view of identity politics is—of course diversity and representation matter, but the concern I have with it is that it’s so often used as a deceitful Trojan horse, is what she called it. That status-quo standers of power can recruit different faces that look like they represent change because they are on their surface more diverse, but in reality they become tools to protect the status quo, to create a false perception that there has been a radical change. When, in reality, they’re actually there to strengthen the status quo. 

I think the election of Barack Obama in 2008 was perhaps the best illustration of that. Again, no decent person could have been anything other than emotionally moved on January 20, 2009. To see him and Michelle and their two daughters walk into the White House, given the reins to the United States. But then the next eight years was very much a kind of continuation of the neoliberal order of the Democratic Party. It was a historic event in one case, but it not only didn’t radically change much, but in a lot of ways the appearance of that kind of change was weaponized to entrench the status quo further. And I think this has become an increasingly potent tool of institutions of authority. 

One of the most disturbing for me was two years after we did the Snowden reporting in 2013 and 2014, showing that Western intelligence agencies had instituted a program of mass surveillance. In 2015, the GCHQ, which is the British counterpart of the NSA and more extreme and even less legally constrained than the NSA, if you can believe there is such a thing—it’s sort of the kind of yappy bulldog that the United States farms out its surveillance wishes to the British when they can’t do it themselves—

CRITCHLEY: We’re always happy to do that work. (Laughs.)

GREENWALD: Literally bathed itself in the rainbow flag. They lit up their futuristic, creepy, UFO-style headquarters in the rainbow flag and said, we have had famous gay code-breakers who we drove into suicide at the time, and now to kind of rehabilitate our image we’re going to celebrate our LGBT employees. The CIA releases videos celebrating Women’s Day and the diversity of their agents. Corporations put Black Lives Matter logos on their Instagram page, and it dresses up these pernicious institutions with a mask of benevolence that doesn’t actually change what’s underneath. 

So, one thing that concerns me is its weaponization. It’s cynical weaponization, in many ways. And then the other concern I think that a lot of people have, myself included, is that sometimes the discourse that emerges from what may be well intentioned and benevolent efforts to end certain kinds of discrimination have the effect, or maybe even the intention, implicitly, or . . . explicitly to be divisive further in how we think about different groups. That we talk not about humanity meeting on its common ground, but this group or that group being inherently more violent, inherently more domineering, in a way that I think is encouraging people to start to judge each other not as individuals, but as members of groups. 

Like we did 50 years ago, but maybe with a different formula. And, you know, I guess to me the ultimate objective is when I think about the success of Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign. The shocking improbable success of a campaign with no money, no institutional support, that came very close to defeating the Clinton political machine and probably would have absent interference that wasn’t particularly ethical on the part of the DNC. 

What the success was—it brought together people—not based on demographic identity, but based on a multiracial working-class coalition. Which, to me, in terms of defeating the excesses of militarism and materialism and corporatism, is our only way out. And I’m concerned at some points that discourse . . . is dressed up as social justice—is further dividing us along these traditional categorical lines or demographic groups in a way that’s making that ultimate goal more elusive than ever.

CRITCHLEY: Thank you very much. That is very compelling. Maybe we could think a little further on that issue. There’s a tweet from Glenn Greenwald from August 20, 2020, which I’d like to link to something that I also found in Cornel. The tweet goes: 

“Contempt for it on the merits aside, one has to acknowledge the propagandistic genius of exploiting harmless-to-power identity politics as the feel-good cover for perpetuating and even strengthening the neoliberal order and further entrenching corporate and imperial power.” 

Which sort of echoes some of the things you were just saying now. And linking that together with what Cornel said, where you’re talking about the Democratic Party, in particular:

“Identity politics are presented by the Democratic Party as this progressive cutting-edge tool to make the class hierarchy and the imperial hierarchy more colorful, with all the talk of diversity and inclusion. It makes it seem like they are on the cutting edge because they are concerned about everybody in life, which is not the case.” 

There’s the issue of, I guess, the Democratic Party, (laughs) and also the issue of about, you know, what happens when corporations, institutions, universities, museums are all so woke? Right? And will use BLM and the rest as marketing, you know? 

A question that was sent in maybe will focus this, which is: What is your favorite alternative approach (laugh) to identity politics? What do you recommend instead? 

And because something that comes up in Glenn Greenwald’s interventions that I’ve been looking at closely of late. And also, Cornel and Judith, I’d like to know your views on this, is really the indictment of the corporate media, right? And the way, in a sense, they’re fetishizing certain identity claims, certain identity politics, in order to look as if something is being changed, when nothing is changing. So, what do you think about that? 

BUTLER: Well, it seems to me that maybe it’s important to mark the three different categories that have come up so far. One, I suggested, there’s a right-wing or reactionary or conservative or smug-liberal (laughs) dismissal of identity politics as fragmentation, and I suggested that we need to ask whether white supremacy is the largest and most destructive form of identity politics, and also, is it true that what’s been labelled as identity politics is identity politics, or are these radical movements for justice—for equality or freedom? 

And then, it seems to me that Glenn has also given us now a second way of thinking about this, neoliberal corporations are using multiculturalism, or the rainbow flag, or even Black Lives Matter as logos to signal or advertise their inclusivity, but they are still engaged in exploitation and in extractivism (laughs) in other ways of destroying our planet, and our prospects of employment, especially for poor working-class folks. So, there’s that. 

But then there’s a third issue, which Cornel has raised, and which we might also think about in terms of the history of Black feminism, which is: whose lives have been degraded, or whose lives have been effaced? Whose perspectives has not been heard or not included? Like . . . so, for instance, here we are and we’re all very pleased to be here, but I was mindful that we don’t have a woman of color in this conversation and what difference would it make, I would ask, to have a woman of color here? 

Now, you might say, oh, that’s identity politics, but maybe not. Maybe this kind of exclusion is a patterned one. Maybe we could look at many institutions in which that exclusion is taking place, or where intellectual dialogue is assumed to be taking place among men of color, and queer folk, and well-meaning white people. But we don’t have that perspective here. Now, it’s not a single perspective. It’s a whole history of positions, and anybody who reads in Black feminism knows that there are lots of struggles and conflicts and different ways of proceeding. 

But you know, one thing that Angela Davis has always asked us to consider is when you’re invited to be included in an institution—it could be a corporation, it could be an educational institution, it could be a government post—you have to ask yourself whether that is the kind of institution you want to be part of or not. Inclusion by itself is not an absolute good. We don’t want to be included in a fascist regime. We don’t want to be included in an antisemitic regime. We don’t want to be included in forms of capitalist and corporate industries that are destroying the earth and depriving the Indigenous of their lands and their livelihoods. 

So, inclusion itself is not adequate as a goal, right? And it can be deployed in the way that Glenn suggested. But this third category—which Cornel designates as spiritual—I want to say that experience of effacement of not being in the picture, of not having a presence publicly, intellectually, socially, politically, and the patterned or structural ways of which those exclusions take place—we need to think about that as part of social political economic inequality. And so, I think the Black feminist critique of inclusion—and it’s a strong one—is precisely a refusal to accept identity. Don’t take my identity and advertise your corporation with it, (laughs) right? 

Let’s be critical—let’s be radical about what institutions we want to be part of and what ones we really don’t want to be part of. And what’s the criteria for that? I mean, those are not identitarian criteria. People are not just saying, oh, if it includes me, then I want to be part of it. No. That’s not right. (laughs) . . . some institutions should be brought down and we should be involved in dismantling them rather than begging to be included in them. And if we’re not able to think that way, we can’t think critically. 

So, identity marks that exclusion, but it also links it to this sense of debasement. This sense of not having the capacity to express spiritually, in a free way, in a way that feels living ones’ history, one’s position in society, precisely because that has been effaced or demeaned in some ways that have been adequately insufferable. So, I think we need to take seriously that domain. And I think it’s the more substantial and important dimension of identity claims that are made in the service of broader political projects that should not be dismissed, and that are not just the effect of appropriation or description.

CRITCHLEY: Mhm. Because you in your work, The Force of Nonviolence , which is a book produced in 2020 and which is a really powerful book, at the end of it you really pull things together into a series of pages and it’s a theme which is elsewhere in your work. And it’s very important, it seems to me. You’re talking about vulnerability. And you say, “To avow vulnerability not as an attribute of a subject, but as a feature of social relations does not imply vulnerability as an identity, a category or a ground for political action. Rather, persistence in a condition of vulnerability proves to be its own kind of strength.” 

And that’s part of an argument about nonviolence and nonviolence as force, force of nonviolence, and what you call, at the end, a kind of a rageful love, militant pacifism, aggressive nonviolence, a radical persistence. I mean, there it’s as if you say we need different concepts. Vulnerability, grievability, these would be key to the kind of imaginary of equality that you’ve outlined in your work.

BUTLER:  Yes, but maybe there’s a way to re-describe what we’re talking about, so that we understand people who are struggling. We could think about Indigenous struggles, for instance, against Bolsonaro in Brazil. Or we can think about Indigenous struggles in this country, in this region, on these lands. There is both a history of victimization and slaughter and genocide, and there is also a history of persistence and of keeping certain traditions alive and keeping certain political demands alive. And thinking about how that history of suffering works with an insistent political movement, which also has invariably a spiritual dimension, maybe even the spiritual is not quite disarticulable from the economic, especially in anti-extractivist politics in Brazil, for instance. 

You know, we’re not denying the history of suffering. Nor are we saying that these folks are determined only by the history of suffering, but it would be wrong to efface that in the name of some kind of neoliberal agency that is attributed to them. No, their political power, their political movement emerges from the suffering. They know where it came from, they know . . . how it’s being continued and they struggle and gather, and they also make—and this is extremely important—solidarity with any number of groups that are also struggling against corporate power or brutal prisons, or state violence, or the failure of states to intervene when there is violence against women, trans people, LGBTQIA people. 

So, I want to suggest that . . . sometimes we hear that a group just defines itself as a victim. But the definition of that victimization is already an assertion of life. They pass the power to define, to mark, to persist. And then the question is what is wanted? Does that victimization get made into identity itself or is it part of the process of demanding repair, demanding justice, demanding freedom? So, I wouldn’t want to take . . . I wouldn’t want a political vocabulary that takes vulnerability or victimization out, or even suffering out. I think we actually need much more acknowledgement of all that, but we also need that acknowledgement to be in the service of radical transformation. 

So, it’s about making it dynamic. And also, we haven’t really talked about solidarity, but I do believe expanding solidarity is the future of the Left, quite frankly, and if some older Left wants to retrench itself and reinstall white men at the helm and make a variety of oppressions into secondary or tertiary they’re never going to win. Because even class goes across color. Like how is class lived as race? Right, we have that question, how is race lived as class? Paul Gilroy . . . and Stuart Hall . . . and intersectionality within Black feminist movement insists on that kind of questioning. So, we need to actually open up to new social movements and to hear what they’re saying, and to find ways of linking if our movements are going to be transnational and fulfill radical ideals.

CRITCHLEY: Glenn Greenwald, would you like to pick any of that up?

GREENWALD: Yes, absolutely. I’m finding this conversation fascinating. I’m, you know, doing all the thinking as I’m listening. I think one of the things that Judith said at the very beginning is something I just want to focus on for a second, which is noting the lack of women of color participating in this conversation and what impact that exclusion might have or that addition it might have on the conversation. To me, this gives a really great window into the complexities of how we talk about identity politics. 

So, you can certainly imagine that if you were to. . . you know, we obviously have racial diversity and gender diversity and sexual orientation diversity and all other kinds of diversity on the panel. It’s true we don’t have a woman of color. So, how is that . . . how does that exclusion affect the discourse? How might its addition alter it? It depends a huge amount on which women of color you decided to integrate into the conversation. So, we could for example imagine that we invited Kamala Harris or Stacey Abrams to participate in the conversation. They would be a woman of color.

BUTLER: (Laughs.)

GREENWALD: That would maybe change the conversation in a little bit of a way, maybe it wouldn’t.

WEST: (Laughs.)

GREENWALD: You could pick Nikki Haley or Tulsi Gabbard or Condoleezza Rice or Candace Owens, all women of color. That would probably change the conversation even more. And then you could pick, you know . . .

WEST: It wouldn’t just change it, brother, it would be more impoverished, but go right ahead. (Laughs.)

GREENWALD: I’m not saying it would be better or worse. In fact, that’s exactly my argument, right? It’s . . .

WEST: No, I just wanted to be explicit about what impact it would have.

GREENWALD: I think in some senses it may not have an impact depending on who it was. And then you can imagine for example picking someone who isn’t well known—who is, you know, somebody who is a single mother and unemployed, or works as a construction worker, as a police officer, who is a woman of color. Who probably would bring a vastly different view than any of those other people that I named, and which would change the conversation in much different ways as well. And so, I think it’s difficult to predict if you say, well, what would our conversation be like if we added a woman of color? Because the range of views that a woman of color would bring would be so wide-ranging depending on who they are and what their position in life is. 

And I think, you know, one of the things that always interest me so much is if you look at elite discourse about, say law and order and the police, and this kind of, you know, slogan that arose in the last year from the murder of George Floyd, of defund the police, and the like, that has a lot of currency among a kind of elite guardians of discourse of all races, and then you look at polling data of poor communities, Black communities, brown communities, and you say, do you think there should be fewer police in your communities, more police, or the same amount?T he overwhelming majority of people, and multiracial working-class communities, will say, I want the police in my community either as much as they are or more. And very, very few will say, I want fewer. 

And I think as well that when you look at the lack of diversity—to the extent you want to analyze it in the panel—you can of course say, well, there’s not a woman of color, but there’s also not someone who, say, is a member of the working class. 

WEST: Oh, okay. (Laughs.)

GREENWALD: I grew up in a working-class family. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, but you know, let’s be real about what our lives currently are. You know, we are people who have spent a lot of time in elite academic institutions, who have a lot of career and economic stability because of that. So, you could bring a working-class person into this discussion as well—I don’t mean somebody who has working-class origins, as I do and I believe probably everyone here to some extent does, but someone whose life right now has been defined by being a member of the working-class and all of the hardship that that has entailed over the last 20–30 years. 

A white man, for example, from a town with shuttered factories and opioid overdoses—and that would bring an entirely different perspective as well. And so, I think when we talk about diversity, it is important to think about the full range of diversity and not just a certain kind. Because in so many ways, if the life in America is, you could certainly argue, defined at least as much by one’s class as by one’s sexual orientation, gender, or race. And I feel like a lot of times, in identity politics discourse, that gets overlooked. 

WEST: I mean, the danger here, yes, the danger here is again, you know once you slide down the slippery slope of labels and various personal categories, then you’re missing out on not just the quality of the conversation—because I believe what Adorno (says) . . . the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. You can talk about the suffering of other people without being a member of that group. You can have a deep concern without being a member of that group. So, you’re right about what kind of person it would be in that sense, and be able to make sure there’s a variety of voices. I mean, that’s what the Negro National Anthem is, Black people, lift every voice, not echo. We don’t want extensions of echo chambers. We want quality voices, right? But quality voices is not reducible to one social position. It just isn’t. So that, on one hand, I’m with sister Judith in terms of making sure that we’ve got heterogeneity, variety, and diversity; but if we end up fetishizing diversity, then we end up with just a counting game. That’s the last thing we want. I look at the world through these lens, one fundamental question: How do we cultivate the capacity of the species to avoid self-destruction, given ecological catastrophe? That’s a need for question. I don’t care what color you are. I don’t care what gender or sexual orientation you are. We don’t have a planet that make a whole lot of difference what identity you have. 

The second is, how do we cultivate the capacity to preserve the best of democratic experiment that put poor and working people at the center? Because we live in neo-fascist times, and democracies are waning in terms of their substance. Those are fundamental questions. I don’t care what color, gender, and so forth you are you see. And then the third is existential: how do you fight off despair and despondency and self-violation and self-destruction? Because we live in dim and grim and bleak times. One of the challenges of the people who wake up. If you wake up and you see how dim things are, you might want to go back to sleep . . . Waking up is not the necessary sufficient condition for being an agent of force for good at all. Not at all. If you stay woke forever, you’re going to suffer from insomnia. You’ve got to fortify yourself and be a long-distance runner in the quest for truth and beauty and goodness and so forth. 

So that it seems to me that when we talk about the lens through which we view things, all the talk about identity politics and culture wars, they’re going to have to adjust to how one defines things. You don’t define it through those categories. And if those categories in the end aren’t . . . don’t meet the test, they need to be called into question. Even when we talk about white supremacy as identity politics, I can’t accept that kind of nude, sanitized, sterilized, deodorized language. White supremacy it is barbaric. It is monstrous. It is calamitous. The Ku Klux Klan is not identity politics. These are gangsters who like lynching people. Let’s just call it for what it is. You see, once we get into this kind of Orwellian talk of, well you know, and they lynched so and so, that was identity politics . . . No, that was thuggish behavior on behalf of people who hate people of color. Or the same are true with women. People who hate women . . . we have to use our language very explicitly here. And we can’t pull back, but in doing that we got to keep alive the common ground of the overlap of our humanity. See, for me as a revolutionary Christian that means that I got strong connections with revolutionary humanness because we’re talking about our humanity all the way down, and white supremacy is simply one particular barbaric way of perceiving the world that loses sight of the rich humanity of Indigenous peoples and Black peoples and brown peoples and so on. And let’s just call it that. It’s not identity politics in this vague sense. It’s not even just culture wars, you see. And so, the real challenge becomes, you know, how do we hold on to a language that’s clear enough? There’s always going to be some levels of obscurity in it. . . . And that’s why I’m calling into question the name-calling and the finger-pointing because we all, in some sense, are complicities with the ecological catastrophe. You see, the more colorful empire, the Black face at the head of an American empire called Barack Obama that people were breakdancing about and couldn’t say a mumbling word about drones being dropped on children in Somalia and Pakistan. 

And we can go on and on and on . . . give him a peace prize and he’s got seven wars going on. Please! That level of hypocrisy is so overwhelming, and you can still win prizes from The New York Times talking about it. You see, that’s the thing that needs to be called into question. That’s part of our intellectual vocation. That’s part of our calling in the life or the mind, to tell the truth, expose the lies—with a spirit of fallibility and humility. And getting in trouble . . . because we all . . . all of us get in trouble a lot. That’s a compliment, especially from a neoliberal establishment. Believe me.

BUTLER: It seems to me, Glenn, you demonstrated why the idea of formal inclusion doesn’t work. That formal inclusion could be infinite. We could keep, you know, producing categories of people who’ve been excluded, and then we would be, all day, trying to include them. And that form of inclusion strikes me as a display, a kind of advertisement of multiculturalism. It’s not necessarily thinking about the history of social movements, or the future struggle that we have before us to counter all the destructive forces that we are up against right now. And there are many. 

But, you know, what if we took a different attitude, like, oh, I wonder who in the academy has written on identity politics and culture wars and who has some things to say about this? Well, maybe Kimberlé Crenshaw has been talking about that her whole life, or maybe Saidiya Hartman would have an incredibly interesting perspective, or, you know, maybe Christina Sharpe or maybe Gina Dent or, you know, any number of people would come to mind, who would . . . who has been working on this for a long time—and have things to say and are published—and are invested in this. 

Now, on the one hand, we can say, “oh, well, they should be part of any kind of conversation like this, because we need a Black woman.” Oh, anxious, white anxiety, (laughs) you know. That’s not the point. The point is that we can’t have the conversation we need to have without people who have thought about this, who bring a different kind of history and perspective to it. So, you know, I agree with you that there are manipulative and false forms of inclusion, which is why inclusion itself is not the ultimate goal, but I also think that what we call identity is sometimes a point of departure for thinking about history and also a struggle against effacement, a struggle against degradation, and a struggle to exist. Now, you know, you don’t exist when you’re called the right name, but you stand a chance of existing (laughs) more than you did before if you’re called the right name. And politics can’t just be about, oh, let’s learn how to call each other the right name. That would be a very narrow idea of politics, then we would just be offering kind of narrow linguistic recognition wherever we go. On the other hand, if I’m never called the right name, that doesn’t really work, or if someone doesn’t recognize something fundamental about my history and situation in the world and just calls me a human like any other, when that version of the human never included me, it’s that version of the human that is part of the problem. And I would imagine that Cornel’s humanism—his revolutionary radical humanism—would have to revise most, if not all the ideas of the human that have come down to us because . . . the human has worked in the service of the very effacement we need to overcome. I’ll just say one last thing: I agree with you that white supremacy will never be adequately described by the term identity politics. At the same time, how do we describe that defensiveness? The presumption on the part of what person, “This world is mine.” “This world belongs to me. It always did.” If you look at Zemmour right now in France, right? He’s putting out these videos. He’s running for president. He’s a reactionary, and he’s basically saying to white people in France, nobody is saying this out loud, but you feel it, just like I feel it, that this country no longer belongs to us. He says, “Look at all these people who are in our streets. Look at what they brought.” And then he brings out the picture of hijab, the picture of Black men walking down the street. He is saying ”We have been overtaken, we are being replaced.” It’s a really strong petition to white nationalism, and to a sense that whiteness is a prerogative to own public space, to have itself reflected exclusively in public space. Now, I want to say that that is a kind of identity fascism, (laughs) identity nationalism that basically wants to have the world reflecting its identity and to expunge all elements that interfere with that exclusively white reflection of self. So, I mean, identity politics doesn’t do the work of the description we need, I agree with you, but whiteness is an identitarian politics, which is why one of the groups that goes out and pushes migrants back to North Africa or lets them drown in the Mediterranean, is called ”Identity.” That is a right-wing white nationalist group.

WEST: I hear what you’re saying. But what’s the difference, though, my dear sister, between calling it identity politics as opposed to monstrous tribalism, immoral nativism? It’s situated into the larger history. I mean, the age of Europe itself, 1492–1945, an age in which the European colonial empires are reshaping the whole globe in their image and in their interests, using the same language. You see it in Conrad, you see it in Graham Greene. Which is to say that once you hear the different term, it makes it difficult to keep track of the longer history that goes all the way . . . we’re talking about the worst of Europe, not the best. But the worst of it . . . It is identitarian, but it’s not surprising given the worst of the age of Europe. And which is precisely that possessive sense of my land and my body and somebody else’s body, their possession, and so forth. You see.

BUTLER: Yes. I would agree with you, but here, you both have used the term tribalism, which I find interesting, and I generally don’t use it just because I get worried. Like are we talk . . . are we saying that contemporary fascism or hyper-nationalism or white supremacy is a barbaric and premodern problem and that we are regressing to a premodern form of sociology when we see that?

So, what about actual tribes? What about native tribes? I mean, there are some pretty serious contemporary politics about tribal rights, and about the destruction of tribal inheritance and the stealing of tribal lands, and I kind of feel like when we use the tribalism term as something premodern we’re imagining that the modern or the late modern . . . should be more civilized. And I mean, I know you wouldn’t use that. I know you’re not going there. I know you’re not going there. But I . . . 

WEST: Yes, that’s true. No, exactly, I’ve read too much Jonathan Swift for that. I’m on the edge of misanthropy sometimes when it comes to how human beings come together. I’m telling you. (Laughs.) Absolutely.

BUTLER: Yes. No, I’m, with you. I know that. But if we say it’s a recurrent, like if we say white supremacy is recurrent, or we say that fascism is a recurrent . . .

WEST: Refashioned, reformulated.

BUTLER: Right. But it’s got to also be understood as historically specific, right?

WEST: Absolutely, I’m with you on that.

BUTLER: Right. And some of the movements we are seeing are anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant and anti-progressive movements for racial justice. So these are reactionary formations that draw from the former versions.

 ( . . . )

CRITCHLEY: Now, the last question I’ve got here, which I just thought could spice things up, is question 40. It’s to Judith, but I’d like it for all of us to think about this: 

“Judith, you spoke in a recent lecture about a mandate and the need for a mandate. . . . If the mandate is for the necessary structural changes, in order to remedy harms carried out against bodies that matter, is it possible that this mandate could not be a vaccine mandate? Isn’t it to practice population-level bio or necropolitics with vaccines, exactly to say there are bodies that do not matter to us. I.e., those bodies and lives which may be destroyed by a vaccine mandate.” And I wanted to just see where we are with that. Because it’s interesting.because it is a culture war in terms of social division, the inflammation of social division. Here we are—in wherever stage of the pandemic this turns out to be—with a very strange situation where legislation is being proposed in countries like Germany with regard to the unvaccinated. And this does raise issues around, I don’t know, who counts, who doesn’t count, who’s in, who’s out, what one is free to do and not to do. I wondered whether we thought any of these issues, identity politics and culture wars, we could think about that through the lens of the pandemic, debates about vaccines and mandates and such like. Anything comes to mind?

BUTLER: Well, I have to say that I don’t remember using the word mandate , so I don’t know in what context I apparently used it.

CRITCHLEY : I don’t have a footnote for that, no.

BUTLER: Okay, because that would help me respond more thoughtfully to the question. I understand that on the Left and the Right—and perhaps in the spectrum between—that there are many people who worry that the health crisis is augmenting state powers and in particular forms of state surveillance. 

I think that this is a chance for us to rethink our commitment to individualism, as part of the spirit of capitalism. And that it’s . . . when I wear a mask in a situation where I’m bound to be close to other people, I’m not just protecting my life or even expressing my personal choice, I’m also indicating that I’m bound to the person I am near even when that person is another stranger. That my life is tied to that life, and in some sense, (laughs) the mask gives a kind of provisional material form to that social bond. So, I’m obligated to care for others, and I would hope that they would care for me, even if we don’t know each other’s names or don’t speak each other’s language precisely because our bodies are such that we are constantly passing into and out of each other. Consider the way in which we live together. We are constantly taking in bits of each other. We share the air. We share surfaces. We sometimes share food. You know, it’s a Lucretian problem, (laughs) bits of the other getting into me and bits of me getting into the other. I mean, in a way, we are constantly ingesting other people’s worlds, and they are ingesting ours. And that’s part of what it is to be a body in the world. We’re not just these closed entities. We have a lot of porosity, and that each angle of porosity is a social relation. So, when I talk about vulnerability, it is not just my personal attribute or my individual condition, but my relation to others, or my relation to infrastructure, or my relation to the environment—something about who I am and the relations that sustain me—and that ought to sustain me and you is being articulated in that way. So, I am hoping that we can, from this pandemic, elaborate a deeper sense of interdependency. Dr. King talked about that, as a crucial dimension. Robin Kelley talks about that. I’m hoping that we can have a way of rethinking our embodied sociality, if I may speak that way, and the ways in which our lives are implicated in each other’s lives. So, I do I want governments to embrace that principle and to represent that principle, but I also understand the other position that worries that if this state of exception increases the powers of the state to survey, to regulate, to invade lives, we’re in trouble. But I want a different kind of government. You know, I’m not against government. I’m still in favor of good government (laughs) and good health care, right? Affordable health care, right? Accessible health care. I’m a left-liberal in this way. I don’t want to bring down all government services because I’m afraid of terrifying forms of state sovereignty and surveillance. I want to struggle to separate those things. And that’s what I think a responsible democratic socialism can do. So, that’s where I stand.

WEST: Yes, I think there’s always a tension between civic virtue and personal liberty, and that tension will always be there. The question is whether it is going to be creative or destructive. I tend to have a tilt for the personal liberty because I’m always concerned about the rights of the dissenting voices and I come from a people who has been incarcerated, assassinated, marginalized when the voices are raised in the name of white supremacist civic virtue. You see. And yet, civic virtue is crucial when you have such a weakened feeble civic soul craft. And so, personal liberty becomes licentiousness, selfishness. I don’t care about public life. I don’t care about common good. I just care about myself. Then, you’ve got something else going on. And the question becomes, through use of practical wisdom and phronesis, how do you stay on the tightrope with the best of civic and the best of personal liberties such that public health is addressed, and yet people don’t feel coerced and forced? You see, the coercive civic virtue is an oxymoron in a certain sense. And even the Founding Fathers at their best, the Madisons and others and I have strong critiques of the Madisons—but they were wrestling with this tension within a very truncated American democracy . . .

BUTLER: Yes, but isn’t the point to cultivate? I mean, you talk about soul craft, which is beautiful, but to cultivate an ethos of care, right, that goes beyond the family, that goes beyond the local community, the local religion. It is important that I’m not just looking out for my own. I’m looking out for people I don’t know, and people I don’t know are looking out for me. And I think that we need to build that ethos somehow, precisely so that a simple request to act in such a way that you do not imperil the life of another human does not feel like coercion, but feels like a love of life, a way of being together, a way of being in the world, a way of expanding care networks.

WEST: Absolutely. A way of being in the world together . . . absolutely. And that’s where civic education is supposed to play a role, right?

To cultivate a critical sensibility and the maturation of a loving soul, caring, concerned about other than my beloved wife. And Annahita, you know, she has a deep suspicion of mandate, she comes from Iran. They have got all kinds of mandates in that fascist state. That kind of mandate slides down slippery slopes, keeping track of people, and so forth and so on, so I understand the source of her suspicion. I’ve got similar suspicion in terms of coming from a country that was democratic, but enslaved and Jim Crowed and Jane Crowed and lynched and terrorized and traumatized, up until George Floyd and up until the present moment. So, that kind of libertarian impulse, balanced with the civic virtue, balanced with the kind of, you know, rich socio-democratic, democratic socialist, even council communists of Gorter, Anton Pannekoek, and Rosa Luxemburg; Soviet without Bolsheviks; workers’ organizations. That’s part of my tradition too, you see. That’s what makes me look different to brother Bernie. Bernie is the kind of New Deal, liberal, social-democratic—that’s revolutionary in America, we know that. But in terms of the larger spectrum, we want worker’s organization with the rights and the liberties, with democratic forms across the board.

CRITCHLEY: Glenn Greenwald, what is you view on this? 

GREENWALD: Yes, I think COVID is a great way to end the conversation because I think it’s going to be the defining event of our time, comparable probably to only the 9/11 attack in terms of at least political and cultural debates in the West, in the United States, and in the western part of the world. For me, 9/11 was my entry point into politics, and the framework that caused me to do that was a fear had emerged about a threat that was very real, and that fear was being exploited, and in my view, exaggerated on purpose in order to vest further power in the hands of the state and to place the population in greater levels of fear in order to breed an acquiescence or a conformity and inability to question the state, which had postured itself as the protective wall that was going to keep us all safe from this threat. And I see COVID and the pattern of COVID, in a very similar way, in that . . . you know, Judith referenced this, and I think it’s worth emphasizing, that the power to do things like order people to stay in their homes and to shut down businesses and to quarantine and to close borders, these are incredibly dangerous powers. They prevent citizens from organizing with one another, to protest people in power, to go out on the streets and organize. They prevent people from engaging in the most basic movement, and the fact that almost two years later we’re still accepting these kinds of extraordinarily draconian powers, even with the arrival of a vaccine that is essentially safe and effective is alarming to me. As is the intolerance of descent that has become part of this fabric, whereby, even though health authorities have been repeatedly wrong about things, and May . . . in March of 2020, if you went on to YouTube and encouraged people to wear masks, you would have been in contravention to the consensus of health authorities, the World Health Organization, Dr. Fauci, who wear saying that masks are not only unnecessary, but potentially dangerous. And this kind of framework emerged, that no questioning of scientific consensus or the consensuses of authorities was permissible, people were removed from social media platforms if they questioned the origins of COVID, even though there’s now an open debate about it. And those kinds of things are alarming to me. The fact that a population over two years has been trained to never question the pronouncements of authorities that are often wrong, to accept the assertion of draconian powers, even if well-intentioned, without sometimes asking whether these powers are excessive. 

And I think the vision that Judith drew is one that I really am genuinely inspired by, the idea that we all need to overcome our sense that we’re all kind of individualized, that we don’t care for one another, that we have no responsibility to anybody else. But as Cornel said, I find it very difficult to see how that vision can be fulfilled by threatening and coercing and forcing people upon pain of losing their jobs in the middle of a pandemic if they don’t comply with what they’re told to do. That doesn’t seem like it’s going to foster social cohesion to me or the idea that we’re all in this together. I think it’s going kind of do the opposite. It’s going to breed mistrust on the part of institutions—that if they’re trying to tell me that I don’t have the right to choose for myself what things I put into my body or my children’s body I think it’s going to breed a lot of resentment and I worry that instead of trying to use persuasion, trying to use an appeal to people’s common humanity to restore trust in our common fate where we are all tied together, that there is kind of a punitive strain that has emerged whereby we’re telling people we don’t know how effective masks are, but if you don’t wear them you’re going to be banned from all sorts of involvement in public life. And even though I am vaccinated and protected I still demand that you do, to the point that I want you to lose your job if you’re not yet convinced that it’s safe for you and your children and you don’t obey. And I just . . . I’m concerned about some of the enduring political, cultural, and social outcomes from the way in which the pandemic has been discussed and managed—and it centralized power even more in the biggest corporations. Amazon, Facebook, Google have all gotten much wealthier, much more powerful. Small businesses have gone out of business because of lockdowns and governments around the world have much greater power in their hands, too, to sensor and to keep citizens locked down or quarantined and in obedience. And I definitely worry about the long-term implications of that while obviously acknowledging that COVID is a serious health crisis.

BUTLER: Interesting. I think maybe we do have a disagreement. I am a little bit more a skeptical of personal liberty these days. I think I have always been on the side of personal liberty. I am not so sure what the personhood of personal liberty is, and if that’s a form of individualism that actually is governed by kind of death drive. You know, Glenn, you’re in Brazil, and as you know, Bolsonaro has been accused in the International Criminal Court—if I’m not mistaken—of crimes against humanity because he has failed to implement health policies that would have saved many people’s lives. And the lives that are gone are very often lives of people who are . . . who have been living in tentative shelters or who are poor, and don’t have the same kinds of protections as others who are more safely housed. I think that we have to look at people like Trump or Bolsonaro as appealing to this sense of personal liberty. Their view is “I don’t have to do anything to save anyone else. I don’t have to change anything about my life. I refuse all regulations in the name of my personal liberty because that’s my personhood and that’s my individualism.” And it encourages a form of egoism that doesn’t recognize the deep ways in which we are connected to each other. And either we are going to recognize those ways, and save some lives, or we’re going to fail to recognize those ways and go down, killing or dying, with the flag of personal liberty. I think we’ve got a death drive issue that uses the idea of personal liberty. Like I . . . you know, people who are just . . . you know, they don’t care—“I’m not vaxxed; I don’t wear a mask; I’m up against you; I’m near you on the Subway; you die; I don’t care because I’m expressing my civil liberty.” Now, I think as well, that we have to ask, who is dying? Right? In the U.S., we see it’s Black and brown people at very high rates. It’s the elderly. It’s people who are most vulnerable, people who are unhoused. We could say, I don’t want to obey a mandate or for there to be a mandate because I want my personal freedom, my ability to work. I understand that, but if your personal freedom and your ability to work comes at the expense of other people’s lives then you’ve got a quandary and we should be putting that quandary out front and center because, of course, it’s good to have freedom of movement—of course we need to work. But of course we need to save lives. And my fear is when the debate is framed as it’s personal liberty versus the intensification of state powers and their surveillance mechanisms in particular, then we are no longer able to have that conversation. Right? Put both values on the table.

WEST: That’s true. But see, that’s exactly what I mean by licentiousness in terms of the ways in which personal liberty languages mobilize for licentiousness because even in John Stuart Mill you’ve got a harm principle. 

BUTLER: (Laughs.) Yes, you do have a harm principle.

WEST: There’s no liberty without constraint. There’s no freedom without constraint, right? 

BUTLER: Yes, but it’s not just . . .

WEST: So, there has to be some accountability. If we talk about impunity—the way Trump and the others talk about it—that has nothing to do with liberty. That’s licentiousness there.

BUTLER:  I understand that. . . . So, it’s one thing for me to say, I must constrain myself in order not to do harm, and then I am still here in the position of the individual calculating what’s harm and what’s not, and Mill surely taught us how to calculate. But there might be an ethics that’s beyond calculation. In other words, I am thinking about my life, which means others are thinking about theirs in the same way. And we are linked in this living world, on this planet, right? Which is why the interdependency that we need to understand to fight COVID is also the interdependency we need to understand to fight climate destruction.

WEST: I agree. 

BUTLER: And so, we need a—I would call it a communist ontology, quite frankly.

WEST: But there’s a solidarity that’s thickened in any sense of personal liberty.

BUTLER: No, I think we need a radical social ontology. We need to rethink selfhood, its boundaries, its openings, to have a completely different ethics and a politics of care. So I’m pushing against the personal liberty folk right now. Sorry, I know that’s extreme.

GREENWALD: I have one point about Brazil that I find so interesting, and I think you illustrate your point really well. That in Brazil you have Jair Bolsonaro, who, as you absolutely correctly explained, has been incredibly reckless at best, in terms of the mismanagement of the COVID pandemic, clearly causing all kinds of deaths that were avoidable. And he has as well engaged in the discourse that vaccines, for him, are something he doesn’t think he needs because he has natural immunity, he has been encouraging people from the beginning to go out without masks and the like, and yet, at the same time, in Brazil there’s almost no vaccine hesitancy that there is in the United States. It’s something like 95–97 percent of the adult population has been voluntarily going to get vaccinated. And the reason for that is because they have a faith and trust in the Brazilian health care system that goes all the way back to when Lula broke the patent on HIV medication saying he refuses to watch people die of a preventable disease because they can’t afford the medication. Brazil has made huge strides in vaccinating people and providing an amazingly robust public health service. And so, instead of forcing people to go and do it, you’ve convinced them to trust the system—that they have their best interest in mind so you have almost no vaccine hesitancy in Brazil— despite having a president telling them they shouldn’t get the vaccine or don’t need it. Whereas in the United States, a lot of the people who have been vaccine hesitant . . . some of them have been obviously conservatives who have bought into this what you might want to call death—wish personal liberty, if you want—but a lot of them as well have been overwhelmingly Black and brown communities, poor people who have come not to trust, you know, health authorities. They remember experiments from the twentieth century, and the malicious intent behind them. And that’s why I say, I think this vision of bringing us together is going to have to be about restoring people’s faith and trust in the institutions we want them to listen to instead of threatening and coercing them and forcing them to—upon pain and punishment—to obey. I think that’s a much more kind of cohesive framework for getting people to think differently about the world.

CRITCHLEY: We’re kind of approaching the closing statement time. Nine minutes to go, right? Okay. Who was it that said that freedom is a good horse to ride, but you have got to ride it somewhere?

Freedom is a good horse to ride . . . You know, I’m with Judith on this, that . . . you know, I mean . . . is freedom is the problem. (Laughs.) It’s how you even rethink what it means to be a person, a moral person, apart from individualism, but that will take us somewhere else.

WEST: It raises the deep issue of Dostoyevsky, how many people really want to be free? Are they willing to follow a Pied Piper to evade the serious weight and gravitas of what freedom is all about? And that cuts across class, color, culture, sexual orientation. That’s where authoritarianism comes in, you see, so you have to have courage—you have to talk about the enabling virtue of courage. And that’s got to be part of your conception of who you are in your movements, in your mosques, your churches, your synagogues, your educational institutions, across the board. And what we love about the tragic is what? Those agents had courage. Hitting up against the non-gay, hitting up against a constraint. We don’t live within a moment in which courage is widely spread.

A lot of cowardly is out there, I’m telling you. (Laughs.) It comes in different colors, too.

CRITCHLEY: . . . Yes, what we know about tragic figures is that . . . there’s courage, but there’s also that there were not full agents. (Laughs.) Their agency was partial, and they knew their agency was partial.

WEST: But what does that mean? They weren’t full agents.

CRITCHLEY: When they were acting, they were being acted through, by the past. Antigone, Oedipus, they were being . . . something was being channeled through them and somehow (in) the miracle of Greek tragedies we see that, we see individuals ravaged by the death drive, actually. 

BUTLER:  Yes, well, it’s the structure of the curse, right? But sometimes people are able to evade the curse or disempower it. But it’s true, we all act in ways . . . we think we are the ground of our own action, but many historical forces act through us and we are formed by them. We are formed and disposed in certain ways. We’re not determined. We’re still free, but it’s a struggle.

WEST: Right. But the best of traditions can work through us. I mean, my mother works through me every day. I mean, I’m trying to keep track of the best. She had the worst, too. But that’s Gadamer’s point though, isn’t it? That we’re constituted by antecedent practices, figures, discourses, stories, symbols, and so forth.

CRITCHLEY: So, Glenn, how would you like to close things out, in whichever way you would like?

GREENWALD: Well, first of all I just want to again emphasize how thoroughly I’ve enjoyed this discussion. It is rare to be able to sit and take the time and to examine these kinds of complex issues in a deliberative way with people who you have enough in common with to have an constructive discussion and enough that you see things differently with and that you bring a different life experience to—to be able to examine some of the clashes as well and in a way that is constructive. And I’m always really grateful when I can participate in a discussion that is civil and thoughtful and constructive, and yet still has the integrity of everybody kind of advocating for their ideas in the best way that they can. And so I want to thank the organizers, again, for such a great event, and for my fellow panelists, for making such a discussion—great discussion. You know, I think that one of the things that has emerged most from everything we’ve all been saying is that we think that there is a social pathology that is overarching in which . . . in whatever ways we all kind of are being far too hostile with one another, thinking about one another over here in our camps, incapable of forming dialogue, incapable of forming spiritual connections, incapable of creating a society that’s based on the idea that even though we are individuals we also are going back to our roots—social and political animals—and part of a society, and inevitably that’s going to be the case. And there’s always going to be this conflict between, on the one hand, our craving to be part of a society and our need to be part of a society, and on the other, our desire to be free individuals. And those conflicts are often going to be irresolvable in a clear way. I think that one of the things that for me is exacerbating this problem is that so much of our discourse as designed on its face to bring us together is instead having the opposite effect of tearing us apart. And I am particularly worried about the discourse that emphasizes our differences in a way that obfuscates our commonality. And we began by talking about the various ways that identity politics can be used and deployed, and the understanding of what it means based on how it’s used. And, you know, I think that there has been enormous strides made in the best parts of identity politics, which is the idea that in our society, every time a privilege or a right or an opportunity is determined based upon our immutable characteristics—or who we are as a person as opposed to our actions that is something pernicious and toxic and that we want to fight against. And that is the kind of thing that to me has fostered a greater social cohesion. What I see working in the opposite direction is the kind of politics, the kind of discourse, the kind of cultural framework that encourages us to see one another not as fellow human beings interlinked with one another, but that forces us to see ourselves first and foremost as members of separate groups, and is constantly reinforcing the idea that the way in which we ought to be understood, the way in which we ought to be treated, the way in which we ought to be talked to, and about, is based on memberships in those groups. And so, you know, I think it’s great when everyone can first agree on the goal, and I think we did have a clear common vision of how society can be better. Once that happens, then it’s just a question of figuring out how best to construct a politics that fosters that ultimate vision. And I think thinking about the ways identity politics, as we talked about it, can foster that and ways that it can impede that is a really important project, so I’m glad we spent the last couple of hours exploring that.

CRITCHLEY: Thank you, Glenn Greenwald. Cornel West?

WEST: Well, I agree with brother Glenn. This has been a wonderful conversation. We thank our brothers and sisters at the Holberg Committee for bringing us together.

But I think of that wonderful line in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , examples of a go-cart of judgment. Examples. How do we attend to exemplary movements? Exemplary institutions? Exemplary practices? Exemplary human beings? Because, again, I come back . . . most of human history is a history of organized greed, institutional hatred, and . . . resentment and deceit. That’s what it is. You can’t get around it. Whatever -ism you want to call it, right? And so, the question becomes, what are the countervailing figures, voices, institutions against those hounds of hell? Now, when I was coming along the Charlotte Baptist Church, we were told, if the Kingdom of God is within you, then everywhere you go, you ought to . . . leave a little Heaven behind. And the question becomes, as intellectuals, what kind of heaven are we leaving behind, in terms of our critiques, our witnesses, our compassion, our willingness to live and die, our willingness to be nonconformist, our willingness to bear witness against the crowd? That’s the in, but not of quality. That’s right. Not just a prophetic legacies of Jerusalem, but of any serious thinker who has a deep vocation, and that’s what all three of you, all exemplify, in your own practices. And every practice is going to be, you know, fallen and finite in that sense, you see. So that, in the end, you know, there’s going to be a question of can we pass on these various kinds of examples tied to a joy? Not the joyless quest for insatiable pleasure of late capitalist culture, but a genuine joy. We started with Curtis Mayfield. He’s playing his guitar and he’s singing some truth. Because he’s got a deep joy. David Bowie is the same way. Aretha Franklin is the same way. Our young folk need to find joy in quest for truth, beauty, goodness, and, for someone religious like me, of the holy. But we’re always up against the grain. Always.

CRITCHLEY: Last word goes to Judith Butler.

BUTLER:  Oh, well, thank you all for being here, and what an honor to be in conversation, again, with you, Simon, and you, Cornel, and Glenn, to see you again. I just so apologize that I destroyed your young aspirations to have your point of view on Sartre and de Beauvoir understood. I’m afraid I do have strong views on that issue, and probably was less open-minded than I should have been when I was briefly your teacher. 

I guess, I still want to just come back to where I began, with the question of caricature. You know, like wokeness or cancel culture or being so rooted in your identity you can only talk to people or countenance the views of people who are just like you. Certainly, we all see bits of that in our world. We see most of it, I think, on social media, occasionally in the classroom, but most of my classrooms are actually more openminded than that. There’s not a lot of cancelling and calling out going on. But there might be some hard questions. There might be a demand to be heard. But even people who speak from their location and their history is saying, “Listen, you need to hear from me. I come from this history. I come from this colonized region of the world. I come from this history of violence.” They are addressing someone who is not themselves and not like them. They actually want to be heard, and that mode of address might be a Levinasian moment. It’s an ethical demand on the other to listen up, to allow your frameworks to be challenged, to live with the discomfort of that challenge, to hear the legitimate claim in somebody else’s angry voice. So, I think we need to give each other a little more space, and have a different kind of listening practice, so that we can revise the conceptual and political frameworks that haven’t been working for a whole lot of people. We can’t just clutch them, saying, “They’ve worked for so long. Who are these people? They’re fragmenting. They’re deviating.” No, maybe they’re actually asking you to revise. And sometimes that’s painful, especially from a position of privilege. Listening does mean possibly losing privilege. It means losing the presumption that your way of looking at the world is the universal way of looking at the world, (laughs) but that’s a grief. That’s a loss. One that has to be endured, alright? I mean, I’ve always thought white supremacists have to endure a certain kind of loss. They are not superior, and must live through that loss and learn to live in a different world, right? There’s rage, but there’s also grief. I’d say go in the way of grief because that kind of grieving is going to open up the world to a more equal, more caring, more communicative, more joyful place of cohabitation, and of social transformation, moving forward.

CRITCHLEY: I think what you say about mourning and precarious life in relationship to that, and . . . yes—

BUTLER:  Well, I’m aware . . . you know, even in Brazil, people would say to me, look, if gay families are okay, if gay marriage is okay, then you’re saying that the idea of the family—the heterosexual family—as stipulated by the Bible   . . . I’d respond, where did it stipulate that exactly? I’m not sure if you read the Bible—it’s a certain reading of the Bible. Anyway, that idea of the family that will lose its sense of being natural and universal. It’s like, lose it? You can still have it. You like your heterosexual family? You can be right in there. You can have it, but you might be living next to somebody else who has a different set of intimate associations. Maybe gay marriage. Maybe gay family. Maybe blended. Might be any number of things, but all you’ve lost is your sense of universality, necessity, and naturalness. And that’s a good loss to endure because it will, in the end, you know, connect you more broadly to the human community. So, that’s my view.

The 2021 Holberg debate took place on December 4, 2021, and can be viewed here . This transcript has been edited for clarity and length. It is published courtesy of the kind permission of the contributors and the Holberg Prize.

Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist.

Simon Critchley is a British philosopher and the Hans Jonas Professor at the New School for Social Research.

Glenn Greenwald is an American investigative journalist and author.

Cornel West is an American philosopher, political activist, social critic, actor, and public intellectual.

Judith Butler

American philosopher and gender theorist

Glenn Greenwald

American investigative journalist and author

Simon Critchley

Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy, New School for Social Research

Cornel West

American philosopher, political activist, social critic, actor, and public intellectual

3 thoughts on “ Identity Politics and Culture Wars ”

What a good conversation. What I think Judith Butler keeps gesturing at wisely is that those who claim the fight for civil rights is mere identity politics and therefore bad are those who feel suddenly that their own identities, which they have never interrogated but simply accepted as given by religion, society, or the community they live in, is fragile. Fragility, whether it’s white fragility, cis-fragility, spiritual fragility, or whatever, is the greatest threat to reasonable conversations about how we should organize our society.

Isn’t fragility, in fact, an aspect of vulnerability? And isn’t any threat to that vulnerable, fragile self legitimately perceived as a form of brutality? No amount of sugar-coating (or indignant scolding) about “social responsibility” can camouflage the imposition of collective authority.

The challenge would seem to be to recognize and accommodate vulnerability (or fragility) without rendering it as superiority or supremacy. What goes around comes around.

If “we’re all in this together,” we need to recognize that what we share in common (i.e., what brings us together) is the fervent desire to be OUT of “this.” We’re all exiles on Main Street.

I’m with Glenn Greenwald in his concern with personal freedom and integrity as the spawning-ground of trust. Empathy must emerge as an expression or manifestation of the individual self.

(Meanwhile, we pick each other to pieces over “identity” and “privilege,” as the oligarchs laugh all the way to the bank.)

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How America's identity politics went from inclusion to division

Political tribalism has reached a new peak, writes Amy Chua in her new book, and it leaves the US in a new perilous situation

• After being the ‘Tiger Mom’, Amy Chua turns to political tribalism

We are at an unprecedented moment in America.

For the first time in US history, white Americans are faced with the prospect of becoming a minority in their “own country.” While many in our multicultural cities may well celebrate the “browning of America” as a welcome step away from “white supremacy”, it’s safe to say that large numbers of American whites are more anxious about this phenomenon, whether they admit it or not. Tellingly, a 2012 study showed that more than half of white Americans believe that “whites have replaced blacks as the ‘primary victims of discrimination’.”

Meanwhile, the coming demographic shift has done little to allay minority concerns about discrimination. A recent survey found that 43% of black Americans do not believe America will ever make the changes necessary to give blacks equal rights. Most disconcertingly, hate crimes have increased 20% in the wake of the 2016 election.

When groups feel threatened, they retreat into tribalism. When groups feel mistreated and disrespected, they close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.

In America today, every group feels this way to some extent. Whites and blacks, Latinos and Asians, men and women, Christians, Jews, and Muslims, straight people and gay people, liberals and conservatives – all feel their groups are being attacked, bullied, persecuted, discriminated against.

Of course, one group’s claims to feeling threatened and voiceless are often met by another group’s derision because it discounts their own feelings of persecution – but such is political tribalism.

This – combined with record levels of inequality – is why we now see identity politics on both sides of the political spectrum. And it leaves the United States in a perilous new situation: almost no one is standing up for an America without identity politics, for an American identity that transcends and unites all the country’s many subgroups.

This is certainly true of the American left today.

Fifty years ago, the rhetoric of pro–civil rights, Great Society liberals was, in its dominant voices, expressly group transcending, framed in the language of national unity and equal opportunity.

In his most famous speech, Dr Martin Luther King Jr proclaimed: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men – yes, black men as well as white men – would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

King’s ideals – the ideals of the American Left that captured the imagination and hearts of the public and led to real change – transcended group divides and called for an America in which skin color didn’t matter.

Leading liberal philosophical movements of that era were similarly group blind and universalist in character. John Rawls’s enormously influential A Theory of Justice, published in 1971, called on people to imagine themselves in an “original position”, behind a “veil of ignorance”, in which they could decide on their society’s basic principles without regard to “race, gender, religious affiliation, [or] wealth”.

At roughly the same time, the idea of universal human rights proliferated, advancing the dignity of every individual as the foundation of a just international order.

Thus, although the Left was always concerned with the oppression of minorities and the rights of disadvantaged groups, the dominant ideals in this period tended to be group blind, often cosmopolitan, with many calling for transcending not just ethnic, racial, and gender barriers but national boundaries as well.

Perhaps in reaction to Reaganism, and a growing awareness that “colorblindness” was being used by conservatives to oppose policies intended to redress racial inequities, a new movement began to unfold on the left in the 1980s and 1990s – a movement emphasizing group consciousness, group identity, and group claims.

Many on the left had become acutely aware that color blindness was being used by conservatives to oppose policies intended to redress historical wrongs and persisting racial inequities.

Many also began to notice that the leading liberal figures in America, whether in law, government, or academia, were predominantly white men and that the neutral “group-blind” invisible hand of the market wasn’t doing much to correct long-standing imbalances.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the anti-capitalist economic preoccupations of the old Left began to take a backseat to a new way of understanding oppression: the politics of redistribution was replaced by a “politics of recognition”. Modern identity politics was born.

As Oberlin professor Sonia Kruks writes, “What makes identity politics a significant departure from earlier [movements] is its demand for recognition on the basis of the very grounds on which recognition has previously been denied: it is qua women, qua blacks, qua lesbians that groups demand recognition ... The demand is not for inclusion within the fold of ‘universal humankind’ ... nor is it for respect ‘in spite of’ one’s differences. Rather, what is demanded is respect for oneself as different.”

But identity politics, with its group-based rhetoric, did not initially become the mainstream position of the Democratic Party.

At the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Barack Obama famously declared, “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”

A decade and a half later, we are very far from Obama’s America.

For today’s Left, blindness to group identity is the ultimate sin, because it masks the reality of group hierarchies and oppression in America.

It’s just a fact that whites, and specifically white male Protestants, dominated America for most of its history, often violently, and that this legacy persists. The stubborn persistence of racial inequality in the wake of Barack Obama’s supposedly “post-racial” presidency has left many young progressives disillusioned with the narratives of racial progress that were popular among liberals just a few years ago.

When a grand jury failed to indict a white cop who was videotaped choking a black man to death, black writer Brit Bennett captured this growing mistrust in an essay entitled, “I Don’t Know What to Do with Good White People”:

We all want to believe in progress, in history that marches forward in a neat line, in transcended differences and growing acceptance, in how good the good white people have become … I don’t think Darren Wilson or Daniel Pantaleo set out to kill black men. I’m sure the cops who arrested my father meant well. But what good are your good intentions if they kill us?

For the Left, identity politics has long been a means to “confront rather than obscure the uglier aspects of American history and society”.

But in recent years, whether because of growing strength or growing frustration with the lack of progress, the Left has upped the ante. A shift in tone, rhetoric, and logic has moved identity politics away from inclusion – which had always been the Left’s watchword – toward exclusion and division. As a result, many on the left have turned against universalist rhetoric (for example, All Lives Matter), viewing it as an attempt to erase the specificity of the experience and oppression of historically marginalized minorities.

The new exclusivity is partly epistemological, claiming that out-group members cannot share in the knowledge possessed by in-group members (“You can’t understand X because you are white”; “You can’t understand Y because you’re not a woman”; “You can’t speak about Z because you’re not queer”). The idea of “cultural appropriation” insists, among other things, “These are our group’s symbols, traditions, patrimony, and out-group members have no right to them.”

For much of the Left today, anyone who speaks in favor of group blindness is on the other side, indifferent to or even guilty of oppression. For some, especially on college campuses, anyone who doesn’t swallow the anti-oppression orthodoxy hook, line, and sinker – anyone who doesn’t acknowledge “white supremacy” in America – is a racist.

When liberal icon Bernie Sanders told supporters, “It’s not good enough for somebody to say, ‘Hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me,’ ” Quentin James, a leader of Hillary Clinton’s outreach efforts to people of color, retorted that Sanders’s “comments regarding identity politics suggest he may be a white supremacist, too”.

Once identity politics gains momentum, it inevitably subdivides, giving rise to ever-proliferating group identities demanding recognition.

Today, there is an ever-expanding vocabulary of identity on the left. Facebook now lists more than fifty gender designations from which users can choose, from genderqueer to intersex to pangender.

Or take the acronym LGBTQ. Originally LGB, variants over the years have ranged from GLBT to LGBTI to LGBTQQIAAP as preferred terminology shifted and identity groups quarreled about who should be included and who come first.

Because the Left is always trying to outleft the last Left, the result can be a zero-sum competition over which group is the least privileged, an “Oppression Olympics” often fragmenting progressives and setting them against each other.

Although inclusivity is presumably still the ultimate goal, the contemporary Left is pointedly exclusionary.

During a Black Lives Matter protest at the DNC held in Philadelphia in July 2016, a protest leader announced that “this is a black and brown resistance march”, asking white allies to “appropriately take [their] place in the back of this march”.

The war on “cultural appropriation” is rooted in the belief that groups have exclusive rights to their own histories, symbols, and traditions. Thus, many on the left today would consider it an offensive act of privilege for, say, a straight white man to write a novel featuring a gay Latina as the main character.

Transgressions are called out daily on social media; no one is immune. Beyoncé was criticized for wearing what looked like a traditional Indian bridal outfit; Amy Schumer, in turn, was criticized for making a parody of Beyoncé’s Formation, a song about the black female experience. Students at Oberlin complained of a vendor’s “history of blurring the line between culinary diversity and cultural appropriation by modifying the recipes without respect for certain Asian countries’ cuisines”. And a student op-ed at Louisiana State University claimed that white women styling their eyebrows to look thicker – like “a lot of ethnic women” –was “a prime example of the cultural appropriation in this country”.

Not everyone on the Left is happy with the direction that identity politics has taken. Many are dismayed by the focus on cultural appropriation. As a progressive Mexican American law student put it, “If we allowed ourselves to be hurt by a costume, how could we manage the trauma of an eviction notice?”

He added: “Liberals have cried wolf too many times. If everything is racist and sexist, nothing is. When Trump, the real wolf, came along, no one listened.”

A s a candidate, Donald Trump famously called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”, described illegal Mexican immigrants as “rapists”, and referred disparagingly to an Indiana-born federal judge as “Mexican”, accusing the judge of having “an inherent conflict of interest” rendering him unfit to preside over a suit against Trump.

Making the argument that Trump used identity politics to win the White House is like shooting fish in a barrel. But us-versus-them, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant sentiments were bread and butter for most conservatives on the 2016 campaign trail. Senator Marco Rubio compared the war with Islam to America’s “war with Nazis”, and even moderate Republicans like Jeb Bush advocated for a religious test to allow Christian refugees to enter the country preferentially.

We are also seeing on the right – particularly the alt-right – political tribalism directed against minorities perceived as “too successful”. For example, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist, has complained that America’s “engineering schools are all full of people from South Asia and East Asia ... They’ve come in here to take these jobs” while Americans “can’t get engineering degrees ... [and] can’t get a job”.

This brings us to the most striking feature of today’s right-wing political tribalism: the white identity politics that has mobilized around the idea of whites as an endangered, discriminated-against group.

In part this development carries forward a long tradition of white tribalism in America. But white identity politics has also gotten a tremendous recent boost from the Left, whose relentless berating, shaming, and bullying might have done more damage than good.

One Trump voter claimed that “maybe I’m just so sick of being called a bigot that my anger at the authoritarian left has pushed me to support this seriously flawed man.” “The Democratic party,” said Bill Maher, “made the white working man feel like your problems aren’t real because you’re ‘mansplaining’ and check your privilege. You know, if your life sucks, your problems are real.” When blacks blame today’s whites for slavery or ask for reparations, many white Americans feel as though they are being attacked for the sins of other generations.

Or consider this blog post in the American Conservative, worth quoting at length because of the light it sheds:

I’m a white guy. I’m a well-educated intellectual who enjoys small arthouse movies, coffeehouses and classic blues. If you didn’t know any better, you’d probably mistake me for a lefty urban hipster. And yet. I find some of the alt-right stuff exerts a pull even on me. Even though I’m smart and informed enough to see through it. It’s seductive because I am not a person with any power or privilege, and yet I am constantly bombarded with messages telling me that I’m a cancer, I’m a problem, everything is my fault. I am very lower middle class. I’ve never owned a new car, and do my own home repairs as much as I can to save money. I cut my own grass, wash my own dishes, buy my clothes from Walmart. I have no clue how I will ever be able to retire. But oh, brother, to hear the media tell it, I am just drowning in unearned power and privilege, and America will be a much brighter, more loving, more peaceful nation when I finally just keel over and die. Trust me: After all that, some of the alt-right stuff feels like a warm, soothing bath. A “safe space,” if you will. I recoil from the uglier stuff, but some of it— the “hey, white guys are actually okay, you know! Be proud of yourself, white man!” stuff is really VERY seductive, and it is only with some intellectual effort that I can resist the pull … If it’s a struggle for someone like me to resist the pull, I imagine it’s probably impossible for someone with less education or cultural exposure.

Just as the Left’s exclusionary identity politics is ironic in light of the Left’s ostensible demands for inclusivity, so too is the emergence of a “white” identity politics on the right.

For decades, the Right has claimed to be a bastion of individualism, a place where those who rejected the divisive identity politics of the Left found a home.

For this reason, conservatives typically paint the emergence of white identity as having been forced on them by the tactics of the Left. As one political commentator puts it, “feeling as though they are under perpetual attack for the color of their skin, many on the right have become defiant of their whiteness, allowing it into their individual politics in ways they have not for generations”.

At its core, the problem is simple but fundamental. While black Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, Jewish Americans, and many others are allowed – indeed, encouraged – to feel solidarity and take pride in their racial or ethnic identity, white Americans have for the last several decades been told they must never, ever do so.

People want to see their own tribe as exceptional, as something to be deeply proud of; that’s what the tribal instinct is all about. For decades now, nonwhites in the United States have been encouraged to indulge their tribal instincts in just this way, but, at least publicly, American whites have not.

On the contrary, if anything, they have been told that their white identity is something no one should take pride in. “I get it,” says Christian Lander, creator of the popular satirical blog Stuff White People Like, “as a straight white male, I’m the worst thing on Earth.”

But the tribal instinct is not so easy to suppress. As Vassar professor Hua Hsu put it in an Atlantic essay called “The End of White America?” the “result is a racial pride that dares not speak its name, and that defines itself through cultural cues instead.”

In combination with the profound demographic transformation now taking place in America, this suppressed urge on the part of many white Americans – to feel solidarity and pride in their group identity, as others are allowed to do – has created an especially fraught set of tribal dynamics in the United States today.

Just after the 2016 election, a former Never Trumper explained his change of heart in the Atlantic: “My college-age daughter constantly hears talk of white privilege and racial identity, of separate dorms for separate races (somewhere in heaven Martin Luther King Jr is hanging his head and crying) … I hate identity politics, [but] when everything is about identity politics, is the left really surprised that on Tuesday millions of white Americans … voted as ‘white’? If you want identity politics, identity politics is what you will get.”

From Political Tribes by Amy Chua. Published by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2018 by Amy Chua.

Illustration by Joe Magee

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Identity Politics

The laden phrase “identity politics” has come to signify a wide range of political activity and theorizing founded in the shared experiences of injustice of members of certain social groups. Rather than organizing solely around belief systems, programmatic manifestos, or party affiliation, identity political formations typically aim to secure the political freedom of a specific constituency marginalized within its larger context. Members of that constituency assert or reclaim ways of understanding their distinctiveness that challenge dominant characterizations, with the goal of greater self-determination.

1. History and Scope

2. philosophy and identity, 3. liberalism and identity politics, 4. contemporary philosophical engagement with identity politics, references cited, other important works, other internet resources, related entries.

The second half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of large-scale political movements—second wave feminism, Black Civil Rights in the U.S., gay and lesbian liberation, and the American Indian movements, for example—based in claims about the injustices done to particular social groups. These social movements are undergirded by and foster a philosophical body of literature that takes up questions about the nature, origin and futures of the identities being defended. Identity politics as a mode of organizing is intimately connected to the idea that some social groups are oppressed; that is, that one’s identity as a woman or as African American, for example, makes one peculiarly vulnerable to cultural imperialism (including stereotyping, erasure, or appropriation of one’s group identity), violence, exploitation, marginalization, or powerlessness (Young 1990). Identity politics starts from analyses of such forms of social injustice to recommend, variously, the reclaiming, redescription, or transformation of previously stigmatized accounts of group membership. Rather than accepting the negative scripts offered by a dominant culture about one’s own inferiority, one transforms one’s own sense of self and community. For example, in their germinal statement of Black feminist identity politics, the Combahee River Collective argued that

as children we realized that we were different from boys and that we were treated different—for example, when we were told in the same breath to be quiet both for the sake of being ‘ladylike’ and to make us less objectionable in the eyes of white people. In the process of consciousness-raising, actually life-sharing, we began to recognize the commonality of our experiences and, from the sharing and growing consciousness, to build a politics that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression. (1982: 14–15)

The scope of political movements that may be described as identity politics is broad: the examples used in the philosophical literature are predominantly of struggles for recognition and social justice by groups of citizens within western capitalist democracies, but Indigenous rights movements worldwide, nationalist projects, or demands for regional self-determination use similar arguments. Predictably, there is no straightforward criterion that makes a political struggle into an example of “identity politics.” Rather, the term signifies a loose collection of political projects, each undertaken by representatives of a collective with a distinctively different social location that has hitherto been neglected, erased, or suppressed. It is beyond the scope of this essay to offer historical or sociological surveys of the many different social movements that might be described as identity politics, although references to this literature are provided in the bibliography; instead the focus here is to provide an overview of the philosophical issues in the expansive literature in political theory.

The phrase “identity politics” is also something of a philosophical punching-bag for a variety of critics. Often challenges fail to make sufficiently clear their object of critique, using “identity politics” as a blanket description that invokes a range of tacit political failings. From a contemporary perspective, some early identity claims by political activists certainly seem naive, totalizing, or unnuanced. However, the public rhetoric of identity politics served useful and empowering purposes for some, even while it sometimes belied the philosophical complexity of any claim to a shared experience or common group characteristics. Since the twentieth century heyday of the well-known political movements that made identity politics so visible, a vast academic literature has sprung up; although “identity politics” can draw on intellectual precursors from Mary Wollstonecraft to Franz Fanon, writing that actually uses this specific phrase, with any of its contemporary baggage, does not begin until the late 1970s. Thus it was barely as intellectuals started to systematically outline and defend the philosophical underpinnings of identity politics that we simultaneously began to challenge them. At this historical juncture, then, asking whether one is for or against identity politics is to ask an impossible question. Wherever they line up in the debates, thinkers agree that the notion of identity has become indispensable to contemporary political discourse, at the same time as they concur that it has troubling implications for models of the self, political inclusiveness, and our possibilities for solidarity and resistance.

From this brief examination of how identity politics fits into the political landscape it is already clear that the use of the controversial term “identity” raises a host of philosophical questions. Logical uses aside, it is likely familiar to philosophers from the literature in metaphysics on personal identity—one’s sense of self and its persistence. Indeed, underlying many of the more overtly pragmatic debates about the merits of identity politics are philosophical questions about the nature of subjectivity and the self (Taylor 1989). Charles Taylor argues that the modern identity is characterized by an emphasis on its inner voice and capacity for authenticity —that is, the ability to find a way of being that is somehow true to oneself (Taylor 1994). While doctrines of equality press the notion that each human being is capable of deploying their practical reason or moral sense to live an authentic life qua individual, the politics of difference has appropriated the language of authenticity to describe ways of living that are true to the identities of marginalized social groups. As Sonia Kruks puts it:

What makes identity politics a significant departure from earlier, pre-identarian forms of the politics of recognition is its demand for recognition on the basis of the very grounds on which recognition has previously been denied: it is qua women, qua blacks, qua lesbians that groups demand recognition. The demand is not for inclusion within the fold of “universal humankind” on the basis of shared human attributes; nor is it for respect “in spite of” one’s differences. Rather, what is demanded is respect for oneself as different (2001: 85).

For some proponents of identity politics this demand for authenticity includes appeals to a time before oppression, or a culture or way of life damaged by colonialism, imperialism, or even genocide. Thus for example Taiaiake Alfred, in his defense of a return to traditional Indigenous values, argues that:

Indigenous governance systems embody distinctive political values, radically different from those of the mainstream. Western notions of domination (human and natural) are noticeably absent; in their place we find harmony, autonomy, and respect. We have a responsibility to recover, understand, and preserve these values, not only because they represent a unique contribution to the history of ideas, but because renewal of respect for traditional values is the only lasting solution to the political, economic, and social problems that beset our people. (Alfred 1999: 5)

What is crucial about the “identity” of identity politics appears to be the experience of the subject, especially their experience within social structures that generate injustice, and the possibility of a shared and more authentic or self-determined alternative. Thus identity politics rests on the connection between a certain undergoing and the subject-position to which it is attributed, and hence on unifying claims about the meaning of politically laden experiences to diverse individuals. Sometimes the meaning given to a particular experience will diverge from that of its subject: thus, for example, the victim of sexual violence who is told they caused their own fate by taking risks, when they believe their attacker is culpable. Making sense of such interpretive gaps depends on methods that recognize the divergence between dominant epistemic accounts and subjugated knowledges (Alcoff 2018). Thus concern about this aspect of identity politics has crystallized around the transparency of experience, and the univocality of its interpretation. Experience is never, critics argue, simply epistemically available prior to interpretation (Scott 1992); rather it requires a theoretical framework—implicit or explicit—to give it meaning (Heyes 2020). Moreover, if experience is the origin of politics, then some critics worry that what Kruks (2001) calls “an epistemology of provenance” will become the norm: on this view, political perspectives gain legitimacy by virtue of their articulation by subjects of particular experiences. This, critics charge, closes off the possibility of critique of these perspectives by those who don’t share the experience, which in turn inhibits political dialogue and coalition-building. Nonetheless, skepticism about the possibility of experience outside a hermeneutic frame has been juxtaposed (or even reconciled) with phenomenological attempts to articulate a ground for experience in the lived body (Alcoff 2000; see also Oksala 2004 and 2011; Stoller 2009; Heyes 2020), or in related accounts of complex embodiment (Siebers 2017). Recent work in Black feminist philosophy has also returned to identity political language by seeking to ground political perspectives in storytelling: for example, Kristie Dotson (2018) argues that a Black feminism starting from personal narrative provides a practice that can undercut unknowing in settler colonial contexts.

From these understandings of subjectivity, it is easy to see how critics of identity politics, and even some cautious supporters, have wondered how it can meet the challenges of intersectionality (Hill Collins and Bilge 2016). Intersectionality is both an ontology and a method, with origins in women of color feminisms, especially Black feminisms (Crenshaw 1989, 1990; Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013; Hancock 2016). Its central tenet is that no axis of identity can be understood as separable from others—whether in terms of individual experience or the political structures that underlie social stratification. To speak of “people of color” without distinguishing between class, gender, sexuality, national and ethnic contexts, for example, is to risk representing the experience of only some of the group’s members—typically those who are most privileged. To the extent that identity politics urges mobilization around a single axis, it will put pressure on participants to identify that axis as their defining feature, when in fact they may well understand themselves as integrated selves who cannot be represented so selectively or reductively (Carastathis 2017). Generalizations made about particular social groups in the context of identity politics may also come to have a disciplinary function within the group, not just describing but also dictating the self-understanding that its members should have. Thus, the supposedly liberatory new identity may inhibit autonomy, as Anthony Appiah puts it, replacing “one kind of tyranny with another” (1994: 163). Just as dominant groups in the culture at large insist that the marginalized integrate by assimilating to dominant norms, so within some practices of identity politics dominant sub-groups may, in theory and practice, impose their vision of the group’s identity onto all its members.

For example, a common narrative of U.S. feminist history points to universalizing claims made on behalf of women during the so-called “second wave” of the feminist movement in the late 1960s and 1970s. The most often discussed (and criticized) second wave feminist icons—women such as Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem—are white, middle-class, and heterosexual, although this historical picture itself too often neglects the contributions of lesbian feminists, feminists of color, and working-class feminists, which were less visible in popular culture, perhaps, but equally influential in the lives of women. For some early radical feminists, women’s oppression as women was the core of identity politics and should not be diluted with other identity issues. For example, Shulamith Firestone, in her classic book The Dialectic of Sex , argued that “ racism is sexism extended ,” and that the Black Power movement represented only sexist cooptation of Black women into a new kind of subservience to Black men. Thus for Black women to fight racism (especially among white women) was to divide the feminist movement, which properly focused on challenging patriarchy, understood as struggle between men and women, the foundational dynamic of all oppressions (Firestone 1970: esp. 103–120).

Such claims about the universality of gender have therefore been extensively criticized in feminist theory for failing to recognize the specificity of their own constituencies. Friedan’s famous proposition that women needed to get out of the household and into the professional workplace was, bell hooks pointed out, predicated on the experience of a post-war generation of white, middle-class married women limited to housekeeping and child-rearing by their professional husbands (Friedan 1963; hooks 1981). Many women of color and working-class women had worked outside their homes (sometimes in other women’s homes) for decades; some lesbians had a history of working in traditionally male occupations or living alternative domestic lives without a man’s “family wage.” Theorizing the experience of hybridity for those whose identities are especially far from norms of univocality, Gloria Anzaldúa, for example, writes of her mestiza identity as a Chicana, American, raised poor, a lesbian and a feminist, living in the metaphoric and literal Borderlands of the American Southwest (1999 [1987]). Some women from the less developed world have been critical of Northern feminist theory for globalizing its claims. Such moves construct “Third World” women, they argue, as less developed or enlightened versions of their “First World” counterparts, rather than understanding their distinctively different situation (Mohanty 1991 [1984]); or, they characterize liberation for Northern women in ways that exacerbate the exploitation of the global poor—by supporting economic conditions in which increasing numbers of western women can abuse migrant domestic workers, for example (Anderson 2000). The question of what a global feminism should make of identity political claims, or how it should conceive solidarity among women from massively different locations within the global economic system remains open (Weir 2008).

Further complicating intersectional methods, the very categories of identity that are taken to intersect may themselves be thought of as historically contingent and variable. To take the example of “race,” despite a complex history of biological essentialism in the presentation of racial typologies, the notion of a genetic basis to racial difference has been largely discredited; the criteria different societies (at different times) use to organize and hierarchize “racial formations” are political and contingent (Omi and Winant 1994 [1986]). While some human physical traits are in a trivial sense genetically determined, the grouping of different persons into races does not pick out any patterned biological difference. What it does pick out is a set of social meanings with political ramifications (Alcoff 1997, 2006). The most notorious example of an attempt to rationalize racial difference as biological is the U.S. “one-drop rule,” under which an individual was characterized as Black if they had “one drop” or more of “Black blood.” Adrian Piper points out that not only does this belief persist into contemporary readings of racial identity, it also implies that given the prolonged history of racial mixing in the US—both coerced and voluntary—very significant numbers of nominally “white” people in the U.S. today should be re-classified as “Black” (Piper 1996). In those countries that have had official racial classifications, individuals’ struggles to be re-classified (almost always as a member of a more privileged racial group) are often invoked to highlight the contingency of race, especially at the borders of its categories. And a number of histories of racial groups that have apparently changed their racial identification—Jews, Italians, or the Irish, for example—also illustrate genealogical theses (Ignatiev 1995). The claim that race is “socially constructed,” however, does not in itself mark out a specific identity politics. Indeed, the very contingency of race and its lack of correlation with categories that have more meaning in everyday life (such as ethnicity or culture) may circumscribe its political usefulness: just as feminists have found the limits of appeals to “women’s identity,” so Asian-Americans may find with ethnicities and cultures as diverse as Chinese, Indian, or Vietnamese that their racial designation itself provides little common ground. That a US citizen of both Norwegian and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage will check that they are “white” on a census form says relatively little (although in a post-Trump U.S., it arguably says more [Jardina 2019]) about their experience of their identity, or indeed of their very different relationship to anti-Semitism. Tropes of separatism and the search for forms of authentic self-expression are related to race via ethno-cultural understandings of identity: for example, the U.S. Afrocentric movement appeals to the cultural significance of African heritage for Black Americans (Asante 2000).

Critical engagement with the origins and conceptualization of subjectivity also informs poststructuralist challenges to identity politics. They charge that it rests on a mistaken view of the subject that assumes a metaphysics of substance —that is, that a cohesive, self-identical subject is ontologically (if not actually) prior to any form of social injustice (Butler 1999 [1990]). This subject has certain core essential attributes that define her or his identity, over which are imposed forms of socialization that cause her or him to internalize other nonessential attributes. This position, they suggest, misrepresents both the ontology of identity and its political significance. The alternative view offered by poststructuralists is that the subject is itself always already a product of discourse, which represents both the condition of possibility for a certain subject-position and a constraint on what forms of self-making individuals may engage in. There is no real identity—individual or group-based—that is separable from its conditions of possibility, and any political appeal to identity formations must engage with the paradox of acting from the very subject-positions it must also oppose. Central to this position is the observation that any claim to identity must organize itself around a constitutive exclusion:

An identity is established in relation to a series of differences that have become socially recognized. These differences are essential to its being. If they did not coexist as differences, it would not exist in its distinctness and solidity. Entrenched in this indispensable relation is a second set of tendencies, themselves in need of exploration, to conceal established identities into fixed forms, thought and lived as if their structure expressed the true order of things. When these pressures prevail, the maintenance of one identity (or field of identities) involves the conversion of some differences into otherness, into evil, or one of its numerous surrogates. Identity requires differences in order to be, and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty. (Connolly 2002: 64)

The danger of identity politics, then, is that it casts as authentic to the self or group a self-understanding that in fact is defined by its opposition to a dominant identity, which typically represents itself as neutral. Reclaiming such an identity as one’s own merely reinforces its dependence on this Other, and further internalizes and reinforces an oppressive hierarchy. This danger is frequently obscured by claims that particular identities are essential or natural, as we saw with race. For example, some early gay activists emphasized the immutable and essential natures of their sexual identities. They were a distinctively different natural kind of person, with the same rights as (white, middle-class) heterosexuals (another natural kind) to find fulfillment in marriage and family life, property ownership, personal wealth accumulation, and consumer culture. This strand of organizing (associated more closely with white, middle-class gay men) with its complex simultaneous appeals to difference and to sameness has a genealogy going back to pre-Stonewall homophilic activism (see discussion in Terry 1999, esp. 353–7). While early lesbian feminists had a very different politics, oriented around liberation from patriarchy and the creation of separate spaces for woman-identified women, many still appealed to a more authentic, distinctively feminist womanhood. Heterosexual feminine identities were products of oppression, yet the literature imagines a utopian alternative where woman-identification will liberate the lesbian within every woman (e.g., Radicalesbians 1988 [1970]). The paradigm shift that the term “queer” signals, then, is a shift to a model in which identities are more self-consciously historicized, seen as contingent products of particular genealogies rather than enduring or essential natural kinds (Phelan 1989 and 1994; Blasius 2001). Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality famously argues that “homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species” (Foucault 1978: 43). Although Foucault is the most often cited as the originator of such genealogical arguments about homosexuality, other often neglected writers contributed to the emergence of this new paradigm (e.g., M. McIntosh 1968). Such theories still co-exist uneasily with popularized essentialist accounts of gender and sexual identity, which purport to look for a particular gene, brain structure, or other biological feature that is noninteractive with environment and that will explain gender-normative behavior (including sometimes trans identity) and same-sex sexual desire.

At stake are not only epistemological and metaphysical questions about how we can know what kind of thing “sexual orientation” might be, but also a host of moral and political questions. Some gay activists thus see biological explanations of sexuality as offering a defense against homophobic commentators who believe that gay men and lesbians can voluntarily change their desires. Indeed, much of the intuitive hostility to genealogical or poststructuralist accounts of sexuality within gay and lesbian communities even today seems to come from the dual sense of many individuals that they could not have been other than gay, and that anything less than a radically essentialist view of sexuality will open the door to further attempts to “cure” them of their homosexuality (through “conversion therapy,” for example). Nonetheless, it is perfectly possible to argue that the experience of one’s bodily feelings and concomitant sense of self having an origin solely inside oneself is both deeply felt and in this sense real, and an experience with a history larger than the individual (Heyes 2007; Salamon 2010). Furthermore, as Eve Sedgwick argues, no specific form of explanation for the origins of sexual preference will be proof against the infinitely varied strategies of homophobia (Sedgwick 1990: esp. 22–63). That sexual orientation takes on a metaphysical life of its own elides the fact that it is generally sexual behavior—not an abstract “identity”—that is the object of moral disapprobation. Queer politics, then, works to trouble the categories “gay” and “lesbian,” as well as “heterosexual” (or indeed other categories of social thought in general), and point out that the homo/hetero dichotomy, like many others in western intellectual history that it arguably draws on and reinforces, is not only mutually implicated, but also hierarchical (heterosexuality is superior, normal, and originary, while homosexuality is inferior, deviant, and derivative) and masquerades as natural or descriptive.

These conflicting positions within gender and sexual politics are exemplified in the history of the expansion of gay and lesbian organizing to those with other queer affiliations. Those describing themselves as “gay” and “lesbian” wondered if bisexual and transgender (and then intersex, Two Spirit, asexual, and more) people shared sufficiently similar experience and interests to make an identity political movement. Indeed, this suspicion sometimes worked in the opposite direction: not all trans or intersex people have understood themselves to be queer, or to share the same political goals as gay and lesbian organizers, for example. The debate finds a parallel in a form of challenge to the inclusion of transwomen in women-only spaces (or indeed, their identification as “women” in the first place). The possibility of feminist solidarity across cis and trans lines hinges on the centrality of sex and gender identities—and how those are understood—to political spaces and organizing (Heyes 2003). Traditions of trans, mestiza, and cyborg feminist politics have resisted the claim of sameness and recommended models that embrace the historicity of subject-positions and intrasubjective plurality (Stone 1991; Haraway 1991; Lugones 1994; see Bettcher 2014 for an overview).

While the common charge that identity politics promotes a victim mentality is often made glibly, Wendy Brown offers a more sophisticated caution against the dangers of ressentiment (the moralizing revenge of the powerless). She argues that identity politics has its own genealogy in liberal capitalism that relentlessly reinforces the “wounded attachments” it claims to sever: “Politicized identity thus enunciates itself, makes claims for itself, only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics; it can hold out no future—for itself or others—that triumphs over this pain” (Brown 1995: 74). The challenge that identity politics retains attachments to hierarchized categories defined in opposition to each other and over-identifies with artifactual wounds has been met with more discussion of the temporality of identity politics: can an identification be premised on a forward-looking solidarity rather than a ressentiment -laden exclusion (see Zerilli 2005; Weir 2008; Bhambra and Margee 2010)? It also invites consideration of whether pain is always a regressive, fixed ground of identity claims, or whether it might be a legitimate reality for mobilization, as Tobin Siebers suggests of disability (2017: 322–3). Some proponents of identity politics have suggested that poststructuralism is politically impotent, capable only of deconstruction and never of action (Hartsock 1998: 205–226). There are, however, political projects motivated by poststructuralist theses. For example, Judith Butler’s famous articulation of performativity as a way of understanding subject-development suggests to her and others the possibility of disarticulating seamless performances to subvert the meanings with which they are invested (Butler 1999 [1990]). Drag maybe constituted such a disarticulation, although other critics have suggested other examples; Adrian Piper’s conceptual art seeks to disrupt the presumed self-identity of race by showing how it is actively interpreted and reconstituted, never determinate and self-evident. Linda Zerilli discusses the “world-building” work of the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective—a feminist group that rejects a subject-centred view of women’s injured status in favor of a protensive practice of freedom (2005: chapter 3).

Institutionalized liberal democracy is a key condition of possibility for contemporary identity politics. The citizen mobilizations that made democracy real also shaped and unified groups previously marginal to the polity, while extensions of formal rights invited expectations of material and symbolic equality. The perceived paucity of rewards offered by liberal capitalism, however, spurred forms of radical critique that sought to explain the persistence of inequity. At the most basic philosophical level, critics of liberalism suggested that liberal social ontology—the model of the nature of and relationship between subjects and collectives—was misguided. The social ontology of most liberal political theories consists of citizens conceptualized as essentially similar individuals, as for example in John Rawls’ famous thought experiment using the “original position,” in which representatives of the citizenry are conceptually divested of all specific identities or affiliations in order to make rational decisions about the social contract (Rawls 1971). To the extent that group interests are represented in liberal polities, they tend to be understood as associational, forms of interest group pluralism whereby those sharing particular interests voluntarily join together to create a political lobby. Citizens are free to register their individual preferences (through voting, for example), or to aggregate themselves for the opportunity to lobby more systematically (e.g., by forming an association such as a neighborhood community league). These lobbies, however, are not defined by the identity of their members so much as by specific shared interests and goals, and when pressing their case the marginalized subjectivity of the group members is not itself called into question. Finally, political parties, the other primary organs of liberal democratic government, critics suggest, have few moments of inclusivity, being organized around party discipline, responsiveness to lobby groups, and broad-based electoral popularity. Ultimately conventional liberal democracy, diverse radical critics claim, cannot effectively address the ongoing structural marginalization that persists in late capitalist liberal states, and may even be complicit with it (Young 1990; P. Williams 1991; Brown 1995; M. Williams 1998; Mills 2017).

On a philosophical level, liberal understandings of the political subject and its relationship to collectivity came to seem inadequate to ensuring representation for women, gay men and lesbians, or racial-ethnic groups (M. Williams 1998). Critics charged that the neutral citizen of liberal theory was in fact the bearer of an identity coded white, male, bourgeois, able, and heterosexual (Pateman 1988; Young 1990; Di Stefano 1991; Mills 1997; Pateman and Mills 2007). This implicit ontology in part explained the persistent historical failure of liberal democracies to achieve full inclusion in power structures for members of marginalized groups. A richer understanding of political subjects as constituted through and by their social location was required. In particular, the history and experience of injustice brought with it certain perspectives and needs that could not be assimilated through existing institutions. Individuals are oppressed by virtue of their membership in a particular social group —that is, a collective whose members have relatively little mobility into or out of the collective, who usually experience their membership as involuntary, who are generally identified as members by others, and whose opportunities are deeply shaped by the relation of their group to corollary groups through privilege and oppression (Cudd 2006). Liberal democratic institutions have persistently grappled with the challenge of recognizing such asymmetries of identity while stressing procedural consistency and literal equality in institutions. Thus for example the twentieth-century U.S. discussion of the categories of race organized around color-blind versus color-conscious public policy (Appiah and Gutmann 1996). Color-blindness—that is, the view that race should be ignored in public policy and everyday exchange—had hegemony in popular discourse. Drawing attention to race—whether in a personal description or in university admissions procedures—was characterized as unfair and racist. Advocates of color-consciousness, on the other hand, argued that racism would not disappear without proactive efforts, which required the invocation of race. Affirmative action requires statistics about the numbers of members of oppressed racial groups employed in certain contexts, which in turn requires racial identification and categorization. Thus those working against racism face a paradox familiar in identity politics: the very identity they aim to transform must be invoked to make their case.

Critics have also charged that integration (or, more provocatively, assimilation) is a guiding principle of liberalism (see Callan 2005). If the liberal subject is coded in the way Young (1990) suggests, then attempts to apply liberal norms of equality will risk demanding that the marginalized conform to the identities of their oppressors. For example, many commentators on the politics of gender and sexuality objected to campaigns defending “gay marriage” or otherwise representing queer people as living up to heterosexual (white, or middle-class) norms, on the grounds that these legal developments assimilate same-sex relationships to an existing dominant model, rather than challenging its historical, material, and symbolic terms (e.g., Card 2007; Puar 2017). If this is equality , they claim, then it looks suspiciously like the erasure of socially subordinate identities rather than their genuine incorporation into the polity. One of the central charges against identity politics by liberals, among others, has been its alleged reliance on notions of sameness to justify political mobilization. Looking for people who are like you rather than who share your political values as allies runs the risk of sidelining critical political analysis of complex social locations and ghettoizing members of social groups as the only persons capable of making or understanding claims to justice. After an initial wave of relatively uncompromising identity politics, proponents have taken these criticisms to heart and moved to more philosophically nuanced accounts that appeal to coalitions as better organizing structures. On this view, separatism around a single identity formation must be muted by recognition of the intersectional nature of social group memberships. The idea of a dominant identity from which the oppressed may need to dissociate themselves remains, but the alternative becomes a more fluid and diverse grouping, less intent on guarantees of internal homogeneity.

Finally, the literature on multiculturalism takes up questions of race, ethnicity, and cultural diversity in relation to the liberal state (Levy 2000; Kymlicka 2001). Some multicultural states—notably Canada—allegedly aim to permit the various cultural identities of their residents to be preserved rather than assimilated, despite the concern that the over-arching liberal aims of such states may be at odds with the values of those they claim to protect. For example, Susan Moller Okin argued that multiculturalism is sometimes “bad for women,” especially when it works to preserve patriarchal values in minority cultures. If multiculturalism implies a form of cultural relativism that prevents judgment of or interference with the “private” practices of minorities, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, compulsory veiling, or being deprived of education may be the consequence. Okin’s critics countered that she falsely portrayed culture as static, internally homogeneous, and defined by men’s values, allowing liberalism to represent a culturally unmarked medium for the defense of individual rights (Okin et al. 1999). For many commentators on multiculturalism this is the nub of the issue: is there an inconsistency between defending the rights of minority cultures, while prohibiting those (allegedly) cultural practices that the state judges illiberal (Eisenberg and Spinner-Halev 2005; Phillips 2007)? Can liberalism sustain the cultural and value-neutrality that some commentators still ascribe to it, or to what extent should it embrace its own cultural specificity (Taylor 1994; Foster and Herzog 1994; Kymlicka 1995)? Defenders of the right to cultural expression of minorities in multicultural states thus practice forms of identity politics that are both made possible by liberalism and sometimes in tension with it (see Laden and Owen 2007). Increasingly it is difficult to see what divides anything called “liberalism” from anything called “identity politics,” and some commentators have suggested possible rapprochements (e.g., Laden 2001).

Since its 1970s origins, identity politics as a mode of organizing and set of political philosophical positions has undergone numerous attacks by those motivated to point to its flaws, whether by its pragmatic exclusions or more programmatically. For many leftist commentators, in particular, identity politics is something of a bête noire , representing the capitulation to cultural criticism in place of analysis of the material roots of oppression. Marxists, both orthodox and revisionist, and socialists—especially those who came of age during the rise of the New Left in western countries—have often interpreted the perceived ascendancy of identity politics as representing the end of radical materialist critique (see discussions in McNay 2008: 126–161, and Kumar et al. 2018). Identity politics, for these critics, is both factionalizing and depoliticizing, drawing attention away from the ravages of late capitalism toward superstructural cultural accommodations that leave economic structures unchanged. For example, while allowing that both recognition and redistribution have a place in contemporary politics, Nancy Fraser laments the supremacy of perspectives that take injustice to inhere in “cultural” constructions of identity that the people to whom they are attributed want to reject. Such recognition models, she argues, require remedies that “valorize the group’s ‘groupness’ by recognizing its specificity,” thus reifying identities that themselves are products of oppressive structures. By contrast, injustices of distribution require redistributive remedies that aim “to put the group out of business as a group” (Fraser 1997: 19). If Fraser’s argument traces its intellectual roots to Marx through critical theory, similar arguments come via Foucauldian genealogy. In her 2008 book Against Recognition , for example, Lois McNay argues that identity claims that are at the heart of many contemporary social movements are represented as demands for recognition in the context of an over-simplified account of power. Although theorists of recognition typically start from a Hegelian model of the subject as dialogically formed and necessarily situated, they too quickly abandon the radical consequences of such a view for subject formation, McNay argues. The subject of recognition becomes both personalized and hypostatized—divorced from the larger social systems of power that create conditions of possibility for particular “identities” (2008: esp. 1–23). In this way, the debates around subject-formation that are at the heart of philosophical discussions of identity politics parallel conversations between Habermasians and Foucauldians about the possibility of a transcendental subject that can ground practices of critique (see Allen 2008). This varied debate has a long half-life (see Fraser 2010; 2013) and contemporary manifestations. For example, Glen Coulthard (2014) argues that the shift in colonial state-Indigenous relations in present-day Canada from unabashed assimilationism to demands for mutual recognition (especially of cultural distinctiveness) cannot be an adequate decolonization strategy. Reading the intellectual history of the politics of recognition through Hegel to Sartre to Fanon to Benhabib, Coulthard argues that this discourse is a reiteration (and sometimes a cover-up) of the patriarchal, racist, and colonial relations between Indigenous people and the Canadian state that it purports to ameliorate. Instead, he defends a paradigm of critical Indigenous resurgence that draws on cultural history and economic practices that are neither essentialized nor romanticized, but that also do not rest on concession-oriented relation-building with the existing Canadian state. Audra Simpson makes a similar argument, suggesting that the politics of recognition in the context of settler dispossession denies its own history, assuming that recognition for Indigenous people can occur within the context of such “largely state-driven performance art” as reconciliation, which casts the injustices of settler colonialism as having occurred “in the past” and requiring apology, rather than acknowledging the wide-ranging material political consequences of land theft and Indigenous sovereignty (2017, 6–7).

From the early days, the presentation of a dichotomy (or a choice) between recognition and redistribution, or the cultural and the economic, was challenged by those who pointed out that the intersectional politics of gender, sexuality, and race had always been engaged and understood through the structures of capitalism (Butler 1997; Upping the Anti 2005; Walters 2018). Given how many contexts these debates must generalize, it is hard to see how one can draw any conclusions about the merits of a thing called “identity politics” over and above any other kind. Nonetheless, in the post-2016 political world, after the Brexit referendum in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US, as well as following the rise of nationalist and/or austerity right parties in many other countries, recrimination from diverse political perspectives has again focused on the alleged over-emphasis on “identity politics.” The decline of class-based politics, the growth of economic inequality, and the disaffection of working-class white men, critics suggest, was neglected by both political party leaderships and grassroots organizers, in favor of campaigning around issues attaching to feminism, queer politics, and anti-racism. For example, Francis Fukuyama argues that the twentieth century was the century of the economic in politics—a contest between a left defined through workers’ rights, social welfare, and robust redistribution, and the right’s drive to reduce government by shrinking the public sector and selling publicly owned services and replacing them with private market delivery. By contrast, he suggests, the twenty-first century has seen the left focus “less on creating broad economic equality and more on promoting the interests of a wide variety of marginalized groups, such as ethnic minorities, immigrants and refugees, women, and LGBT people. The right, meanwhile, has redefined its core mission as the patriotic protection of traditional national identity, which is often explicitly connected to race, ethnicity, or religion” (Fukuyama 2018, 91). This allegedly renders the left less able to address trending inequality, and redirects its focus to “cultural issues,” and validating interiority and achieving recognition—all of which racist nationalists can easily co-opt:

Today, the American creedal national identity, which emerged in the wake of the Civil War, must be revived and defended against attacks from both the left and the right. On the right, white nationalists would like to replace the creedal national identity with one based on race, ethnicity, and religion. On the left, the champions of identity politics have sought to undermine the legitimacy of the American national story by emphasizing victimization, insinuating in some cases that racism, gender discrimination, and other forms of systematic exclusion are in the country’s DNA. (108)

Identity politics, Fukuyama concludes, is the lens through which politics in the US is refracted, with a turning-away from economic inequality on the left providing a convenient evasion for the right.

Fukuyama writes with a hostile outsider’s dismissal of the social movements he labels as identity politics, yet the bifurcation he describes between the economic and the identarian is echoed in a 2018 special issue of the Marxist journal Historical Materialism , in which the editors’ introduction describes approvingly subsequent articles that show how

the Left has abrogated the notion of identity as being materially rooted, and contingent on historical and geographical context. In its place, we see the hegemonic acceptance of an inherently reactionary alternative: one which perceives race, gender and sexuality as dearly-held, self-fashioning, and self-justifying essences. Such a concession has not only reinforced the class/identity binary, but also led to a stifled political imagination in which identity-based politics can only be conceptualised within a liberal-capitalist logic. (Kumar et al. 2018, 5–6)

In response to this challenge, defenders point out again how political organizing through contemporary feminism and anti-racism—by way of movements like #MeToo or Black Lives Matter, for example—has not shied away from the economic components to their analyses. The binary between economic critique that marks discussion of “redistribution,” and discussion of group identity that characterizes “recognition,” may in moments be conducted as if the two were separate. The idea, however, that proponents of treating gender, sexuality, or race as intersecting axes of individual meaning and social stratification have consistently neglected the economic aspects of their analyses is hard to sustain. As Suzanna Danuta Walters points out, “the critique of identity politics is dependent upon seeing identity as only the province of the disenfranchised and marginal” as well as upon seeing white men (including the working-class, straight men who are the imagined community of the neonationalist right) as somehow not having “identity” (Walters 2018, 477). Described by Paul Joshua as “anti-identity identity politics,” this position, as exemplified in his description of the “All Lives Matter” response to Black Lives Matter, “is predicated on the taken-for-grantedness of a pre-established racist system which from centuries of de jure and de facto practices is now fixed almost silently into the socio-political infrastructure…. Despite its universalist pretentions, it remains a cloaked identitarian politics which through a hegemonic narrative (re)presents itself as a radically inclusionary counter-narrative” (2019, 16).

Every time this article is revised, it is tempting to write that “identity politics” is an out-moded term, over-determined by its critics and part of a reductive political lexicon on both the Marxist left and the neoconservative right. Yet in 2020, still, there are recent iterations of the recognition versus redistribution debate, ongoing arguments about the demands of intersectionality, and new forms of political resistance to the movements that circulate under the sign “identity politics.” Both flexible and extensible, identity political tropes continue to influence new political claims: an extensive literature approaches disability, for example, as a diverse and dynamic set of experiences of social injustice that sediment self-understandings among the disabled and motivate a politics that insists dominant cultures change their exclusionary social practices (Davis 2017 [1997]; Silvers 1998, Siebers 2006, 2008; Kafer 2013). Perhaps most important for philosophers, any idea of identity itself appears to be in a period of rapid evolution. Attempts to decode human genetics and shape the genetic make-up of future persons (Richardson and Stevens 2015), to clone human beings, or to xeno-transplant animal organs, and so on, all raise deep philosophical questions about the kind of thing a person is. As more and more people form political alliances using disembodied communications technologies, the kinds of identities that matter seem also to shift. Behaviors, beliefs, and self-understandings are increasingly pathologized as syndromes and disorders, including through the identification of new “types” of person (in turn generating possibilities for new forms of identity politics).

Increasingly, this long list of confounding variables for identity political thought is finding philosophical cohesion in anti-identarian models that take somatic life, affect, time, or space as organizing concepts. For example, both new materialisms and neo-vitalist philosophies, in their political contexts, share an emphasis on becoming over being , a “posthumanist” reluctance to award ontological priority to any shared characteristics of human beings (Wolfe 2010), a skepticism about discourses of authenticity and belonging, and a desire to focus on generative, forward-looking political solutions (Bhambra and Margee 2010; Coole and Frost 2010; Connolly 2011). The lines between humans and other animals (Haraway 2007; Donaldson and Kymlicka 2014, 2016), between the living and the non-living (Sharp 2011), and between objects and subjects (Bennett 2009) are radically challenged. The COVID-19 pandemic shows more clearly than ever how the edges of human bodies are porous with our environments. To varying degrees these emphases are echoed in other process ontologies—whether Annemarie Mol’s work in medical anthropology (2002), the reintroduction of bodies as socially and biologically dynamic and intra-active forces in forming political subjectivities (Protevi 2009), or the ways indirect, technologically mediated experience shapes so much of our contemporary “identities” (Turkle 2011). This mass of shifts and contradictions might be thought to mark the end of the era of identity politics. Whatever limits are inherent to identity political formations, however, the enduring rhetorical power of the phrase itself indicates the deep implication of questions of power and legitimate government with demands for self-determination that are unlikely to fade away.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Is Race “Real ,” a web forum organized by the Social Sciences Research Council.
• Kimberlé Crenshaw, 2016, “ The Urgency of Intersectionality ,” TED Talk on youtube.com.

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The author would like to thank Jeanique Tucker, who provided research assistance for the 2020 revision.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Identity Politics

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Identity Politics by Vasiliki Neofotistos LAST REVIEWED: 13 August 2018 LAST MODIFIED: 29 October 2013 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0106

Identity politics, also commonly referred to as the politics of identity or identity-based politics, is a phrase that is widely used in the social sciences and humanities to describe the deployment of the category of identity as a tool to frame political claims, promote political ideologies, or stimulate and orientate social and political action, usually in a larger context of inequality or injustice and with the aim of asserting group distinctiveness and belonging and gaining power and recognition. Additionally, identity politics refers to tensions and struggles over the right to map and define the contours and fixed “essence” of specific groups. The phrase has become increasingly common in political anthropology since the second half of the 20th century with the emergence of a wide diversity of social movements, including the women’s movement, the African American civil rights movement, and the gay and lesbian movement, as well as nationalist and postcolonial movements. Central to the practice of identity politics are the notions of sameness and difference, and thus the anthropological study of identity politics involves the study of the politics of difference.

The monographs and edited volumes in this section offer a wide range of perspectives, and cover a wide breadth of issues, pertinent to the study of identity politics. Gledhill 1994 offers a general overview of the politics of identity in everyday life. Hall and du Gay 1996 , Martin Alcoff and Mendieta 2003 , and Martin Alcoff, et al. 2006 open up fruitful lines of inquiry and reflection. Sociologist Craig Calhoun ( Calhoun 1994 ) helps to build a bridge between the fields of identity politics and social theory and is frequently cited by anthropologists writing about the politics of identity. Gupta and Ferguson 1997 traces the distinctive interconnections between place-making, subject formation, and practices of resistance. Rutherford 1998 explores the opportunities and challenges, which are presented by the ever-growing diversity of communities, cultures, and identities, for a new radical democratic politics. Cohen 2000 underscores the significance of boundaries in the politics of identity. Mach 1993 addresses the symbolic aspects of identity formation.

Calhoun, Craig, ed. 1994. Social theory and the politics of identity . Oxford: Blackwell.

An important volume, consisting of eleven chapters. Its aims include addressing the need to conceptualize identity struggles from the perspective of contemporary social theory.

Cohen, Anthony, ed. 2000. Signifying identities: Anthropological perspectives on boundaries and contested values . New York: Routledge.

The contributors to this volume explore how relationships between groups are informed and underpinned by understandings group members have regarding their own distinctive identities and the nature of the boundaries dividing them from other group members. Topics include, among others, the political construction and (re)appropriation of aboriginality by colonists and indigenous peoples.

Gledhill, John. 1994. Power and its disguises: Anthropological perspectives on politics . London: Pluto.

Uses case studies from around the world, including Guatemala, South Africa, and Sri Lanka. Explores issues of domination and resistance, local-level politics, and the politicization of gender, among others. Suggests that anthropology relate the local to the global in a more radical way than ever before.

Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson, eds. 1997. Culture, power, place: Explorations in critical anthropology . Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.

The essays in this collection emphasize that the so-called structures of feeling that connect people, in ways that are meaningful to them, to particular locales, and the formation of locality, involve the delineation of “self” and “other” through the process of identification with larger collectivities.

Hall, Stuart, and Paul du Gay, eds. 1996. Questions of cultural identity . London: SAGE.

A collection of ten influential essays by leading scholars, including one anthropologist. Explores various issues pertaining to identity politics, such as the question of identification, the European context of Turkish cultural transformation, negotiations of cultural difference, and the aesthetics of popular music.

Mach, Zdzislaw. 1993. Symbols, conflict, and identity: Essays in political anthropology . Albany: State Univ. of New York Press.

Explores the role of symbols, such as the national and symbolic forms or rituals and myths, in the process of group identity formation and maintenance and in the definition and legitimation of the social order. Discusses the deployment of symbols to signify exclusion in a system of unequal power relations between social groups.

Martin Alcoff, Linda, Michael Hames-Garcia, Satya P. Mohanty, and Paula M. L. Moya, eds. 2006. Identity politics reconsidered . New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

A collection of essays by contributors from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, including anthropology. Published in the Future of Minority Studies Research Project book series. Assesses anew the viability of identity politics for identity-based social movements, research programs, pedagogy, and democratic politics.

Martin Alcoff, Linda, and Eduardo Mendieta, eds. 2003. Identities: Race, class, gender, and nationality . Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Provides selections from the work of influential theorists, including, but not limited to, Hegel, Marx, Beauvoir, Fanon, Hall, Wittig, and Said. Presents analyses of key categories of identity politics, such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nationality.

Rutherford, Jonathan, ed. 1998. Identity: Community, culture, difference . London: Lawrence and Wishart.

A collection of eleven essays, focusing on the emergence of social movements and new political actors that do not fit the traditional Left/Right dichotomy. Explores a variety of related issues, including the articulation of identities in the context of black feminism, the politics of identity in the age of AIDS, and multiculturalism.

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Friday essay: identity politics and the case for shared values

Honorary Principal Fellow, The University of Melbourne

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Peter Tregear does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Recently, a group of respected academics, including Melbourne-born philosopher Peter Singer, announced that they were launching a new academic journal called the Journal of Controversial Ideas . In it, authors will have the option of remaining anonymous.

The editors say they wish to

enable academics – particularly younger, untenured, or otherwise vulnerable academics – to have the option of publishing under a pseudonym when they might otherwise be deterred from publishing by fear of death threats… threats to their families, or threats to their careers.

This is a justification that should trouble us all, not just those of us who happen to work in and for universities. Scientific advance, as well as the health of our society and the political and cultural freedoms that underpin it, depends on our capacity to accept that ideas, when properly and rigorously argued, are capable of being judged with a reasonable degree of objectivity, regardless of who is positing them.

We should expect academics in particular to be willing to assess an idea on the basis of what is being argued, not who is arguing it. Failing to do this is traditionally understood as committing an ad hominem fallacy.

True, we know that all human knowledge is subject to a myriad of visible and hidden prejudices that shape how we think. But reasoned argument gives us various tools that we can use to expose these prejudices, and thus also the possibility of rising above them.

Thus academics are trained to judge an idea primarily on the basis of the cogency, originality and rigour of the arguments that support it. We can assess the underlying validity of those arguments by scrutinising their inherent reasoning and by comparing them against bodies of pre-existing knowledge.

The peer review process is one particular tool we use to uphold these standards. It involves the “blind” assessment of submissions to academic publications. The recent “ grievance studies ” hoax, however, has drawn public attention to some of the weaknesses of the peer review system. It also helps us understand the wider context that has motivated the creation of a Journal of Controversial Ideas.

In this hoax, three academics concocted articles that parodied a certain style of academic argument . Several of the fake articles were accepted for publication despite their dubious content. Their titles included Human Reaction to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon and An Ethnography of Breastaurant Masculinity: Themes of Objectification, Sexual Conquest, Male Control, and Masculine Toughness in a Sexually Objectifying Restaurant.

The hoaxers argue that the fact such articles were accepted for publication points to the corrupting influence of “identity politics” on academia. The righteousness of one’s personal experiences of, or feelings about, an issue (and, more broadly, the identity groups with which one identifies) are, they suggest, increasingly valued as a source of authority over abstract reasoning or generalised observation.

When our identity becomes the principal filter through which we understand the world, however, we can no longer presume that notions like truth and objective facts actually exist. We must instead accept that we live in a world of multiple competing truths, with no agreed consensus about how we might choose between them.

Rejection of expert advice

Both the election of Trump and the result of the Brexit referendum in the UK have been in part attributed to the success of political campaigns so conceived. Both involved an explicit rejection of reasoned advice from academic experts such as political scientists, climate scientists, and economists. Instead, appeals for support targeted particular sections of the electorate based on voters’ race and ethnicity - identity politics at its purest.

This is not a phenomenon restricted to the political right. As the New York Times observed last year , the right has itself been responding to a form of political thinking already common to so-called “progressive” political movements.

For instance, if you happen to be white, male, cis-gendered, working class, and so on, you are likely to look for a tribal allegiance of your own. Or, as Mark Lilla put it in his 2017 book The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics , “as soon as you cast an issue exclusively in terms of identity you invite your adversary to do the same”.

Lilla argues that we must instead reassert the importance of appeals to a “universal democratic ‘we’” (as opposed to “I”) “on which solidarity can be built, duty instilled and action inspired”.

One of the reasons this is so difficult to do is that our identity does matter when we confront many genuine political grievances. Racism, poverty, misogyny, homophobia are, alas, very real problems. They affect us individually very differently depending on how others perceive us - or we perceive ourselves - in terms of race, gender, class, sexuality and the like.

To effectively solve the injustices that arise out of these social phenomena, it is necessary to recognise that the significant forms of disadvantage and discrimination they cause are not natural, but socially constructed. They need to be contested and addressed as such.

Lilla is right to argue, nevertheless, that we risk taking our focus on identity too far. The emergence of a Journal of Controversial Ideas is only one particular sign that our once generally accepted belief in the possibility of disinterested political, theoretical, or even scientific, knowledge may be threatened by an over-focus on identity.

Other signs include the rise of an “alternative facts” discourse and the now widespread lack of trust in public broadcasting and other forms of so-called “mainstream” media.

New forms of social media, on the other hand, are perfectly made for identity politics because they allow us easily to inhabit identity-based silos. Safe in these communities of shared background and interest, we risk never having to meet, let alone debate with, people who might think or act differently to us.

Cultural value

The influence of identity politics is felt in my own academic field of music. Here, questions of musical value are increasingly being understood as little more than a reflection of an individual’s contingent cultural appetites. Experience-centred methodologies such as autoethnography and action research , which license a researcher to make themselves the principal subject of research, lend this shift in perspective scholarly respectability.

But by focusing on the centrality of personal experience over shared knowledge, we can avoid having to consider a more inclusive or idealistic understanding of what our musical culture is. Or, indeed, ought to be.

We also risk becoming less concerned to learn about, or seek out, cultural experiences or perspectives that would seek to push us beyond the immediate limits of our own experiences and imagination.

Indeed, we start actively to avoid or suppress such perspectives altogether. The organisers of the Horne Prize in effect did this when they sought to disqualify “writing that purports to represent the experiences of those in any minority community of which the writer is not a member”. Judges David Marr and Anna Funder both resigned in protest and in the end the organisers backtracked .

The protests that erupted earlier this year concerning Opera Australia’s casting of the role of Maria for its forthcoming production of West Side Story is another example. Here it was argued Australian-born Julie Lea Goodwin, who has been cast as Maria, should instead have been of the same ethnic origin as Maria herself. This is despite the fact that West Side Story is itself a reworking of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (c.1595) by two Jewish-American men (Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim). Maria’s identity will always be more complex than the politics of identity would seem to allow.

Such a focus on identity may also distract us from considering the underlying economic forces that might be shaping particular forms of cultural or social behaviour, including identity politics itself. It is surely no coincidence that it is flourishing at the very same time we are being encouraged by online businesses to bracket ourselves by ethnicity, political affiliation, cultural tastes, sexuality, class, and so on. Just whose interests are ultimately being served?

To be sure, our identity unquestionably shapes (and can limit) how we interact with the world but it should not become the only foundation upon which we build our understanding of it. Claims to scholarly or political authority made on the basis of identity should also be subject to the same rigorous scrutiny and critique as any other form of public knowledge.

It is our rational systems of enquiry, and our underlying belief in the possibility of objective truth, that ultimately requires bolstering and defending by our universities, not narrow forms of knowing that would instead give primacy to our lived experience.

Without a continuing trust in such shared values we run the risk of being unable to convince people different from ourselves why they might wish to think or feel, let alone vote or act, like we do.

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Theorizing About Identity Politics in Education and School Leadership

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• Carol A. Mullen   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4732-338X 2 &
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Theorizing about identity politics in education and school leadership is the subject of this conceptual essay. Identity politics is the underlying construct. The chapter addresses social justice theories in education to aid in theory building, research-informed practice, cultural pedagogy, and social movement. Whether in formal or informal educational settings or through twenty-first century social movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM), this writing educates about important and influential theories for action. Situated in identity politics, this scholarly text is organized around Critical Race Theory (CRT), Black Feminist Theory (BFT), and identity theory. All three theories are described at length and illustrated mainly through higher education situations and/or school leadership. Additional frameworks are associated with each theory. The frameworks described have relevance in and beyond the classroom and through social movements against racial discrimination, systemic inequity, and so forth. African American females in education are the main stakeholder and influencer throughout and in their various roles as innovators, pioneers, activists, scholars, students, mentees, leader, etc. Educating for critical consciousness in leadership preparation (section “ Educating for Critical Consciousness ”) is considered in relation to (a) developing activist identities, (b) heeding civic callings, and (c) naming social identity platforms. Anchored in theory, research, and application, the chapter looks to informed action in educational leadership programs.

• Black Feminist Theory
• Critical Race Theory
• Identity theory
• Higher education
• Doctoral education
• Antiracist school leadership
• Social justice
• Educational leadership

This chapter is an extensive revision and update of select aspects of the authors’ book (Mullen and Robertson 2014 ; see references for citation)

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Mullen, C.A., Robertson, K.C. (2021). Theorizing About Identity Politics in Education and School Leadership. In: Mullen, C.A. (eds) Handbook of Social Justice Interventions in Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35858-7_135

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Identity politics essay.

Identity politics refers to political activism of various social movements including, but not limited to, the civil rights movement, feminist movements, gay and lesbian movements, ethnic separatist movements for political recognition, self-determination, and elimination of discrimination. The term suggests that people who have suffered from actual or perceived social injustice can share a collective consciousness that stimulates them to take further action to advance their particular group’s interests. In the social sciences, identity politics refers to any social mobilization related to politics, identity, and culture. Depending on the school of thought, the term sometimes means cultural activism, other times political activism, and sometimes both. In any case, however, identity politics focuses on the contrast between the assumed social, political, and occupational privileges of the dominant group as compared with perceived discrimination against the oppressed group.

Historical Synopsis

During the 1960s, unprecedented large-scale political movements—such as second wave feminism, civil rights movements, gay and lesbian liberation activism, and the American Indian movements—launched their attack on the systemic injustices and inequalities that alienated them. These social movements developed a rich literature of questions about the nature, origin, and future of the particular identities traditionally left out of studies. Identity politics as a base for collective behavior was closely connected to the idea that some social groups were historically oppressed because of their particular identities; for example, one’s identity as a woman or as a Native American made him or her vulnerable to cultural imperialism (including stereotyping, stigmatizing, erasure, or labeling), violence, exploitation, marginalization, or powerlessness.

Defenders of identity politics called for new analyses of oppression and gave voice to those long silenced as they sought to reconstruct, redescribe, and transform the dominant discourse that stigmatized particular minority group(s). Intersections of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and ethnicity were the bases of new identities that began to draw the attention of social scientists. Although the description of identity politics goes back to intellectual writings of famous critics such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Frantz Fanon, sociologist Renee R. Anspach first employed the term in 1979. For the past several decades, however, the phenomenon of identity politics attracted numerous scholars. This focus on cultural identities marked a significant shift from the economically and politically based analyses that had long dominated the social sciences. Identity-based movements became the “new social movements” in sociology literature and drew the interest of both U.S. and European scholars. Works of Alain Touraine and Alberto Melucci, for example, hypothesized that the new social movements were “identity oriented” rather than “strategy oriented,” and these “expressive” movements were partially a product of the information age and postindustrial era of the Western, developed societies.

Critics of Identity Politics

Identity politics as a base for organized behavior and a set of political philosophical positions draws criticism from various divergent schools of thought, including liberalism, Marxism, and post-structuralism. Criticism of identity politics dates back to the 1970s when scholars began systematically outlining and defending the philosophical underpinnings of identity politics.

Obscurity of the Term

Critics argue that use of the phrase identity politics as popular rhetoric belies more possible analytical explanatory power of the term. Because the term is primarily descriptive rather than explanatory, rigorous empirical analyses of identity politics are absent in the field. Using or misusing identity politics as a blank term invokes a range of tacit political implications, making identity claims by some early political activists seem lacking in analytical content, misleadingly totalizing, and un-nuanced. As the notion of identity has become indispensable in contemporary political discourse, even as the public rhetoric of identity politics empowered the new social movement activism, it failed to produce coherent theoretical analyses on political inclusiveness and models of the self. In this regard, identity politics increasingly became a derogatory synonym for anti-racism, feminism, and anti-heterosexism.

Critics From the Right

Critics from the political right claim that it is inappropriate for an identity-based group to expect an enumeration of unprecedented rights. Particularly for Enlightenment liberal democratic theory, if a “right” extends to only a portion of society, it is no longer a right but a “privilege.” Thus, from the point of view of the political right, identity politics does not contend for “rights” as certain minority groups claim; instead, it functions as rhetoric to strengthen the discourses of some interest groups that demand special privileges.

Critics From the Left

Marxists, both orthodox and revisionist, often interpret the perceived ascendancy of identity politics as representing the end of radical materialist critique. For these critics, identity politics is factionalizing and depoliticizing, drawing attention away from the ravages of late capitalism toward superstructural cultural accommodations that hinder the reality of unchanged economic structures. A parallel criticism of identity politics comes from the radical leftists, who argue that identity politics unnecessarily divides the working class, who are the agents of the revolution against capitalism. As a result, identities are pitted against identities, creating an ideal condition for the ruling class.

“Queer” Dissent

Some lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists criticize the identity politics approach on the basis of the argument that identity politics has marginalized LGBT people rather than emancipating them. Although LGBT activists employed an “identity politics” approach to gain mainstream culture’s full recognition of sexual orientation freedom, their strategy essentially declared themselves as outside of the mainstream. These activists contend that identity politics is a counterproductive strategy, perpetuating discrimination and societal prejudices against LGBT people.

Post-Structuralist Challenge

Post-structuralist criticism of identity politics is perhaps the most philosophically developed and profound challenge to date. Post-structuralists claim that identity politics fallaciously regards actors as metaphysics of substance; that is, cohesive, self-identical subjects that can be identified and reclaimed from oppression. This essentialist position, they suggest, misrepresents both the psychology of identity and its political significance.

The alternative view offered by post-structuralists is that the subject is constantly reconstructed and redefined as a product of discourse. The post-structuralist view of agency reiterates the mutual construction of the opposites, as self versus other and identity versus difference. The danger of identity politics, then, is that it reifies “self” as a category of analysis, which is, rather, a category of practice, fluid, and always subject to interpretation.

Future Directions

Research on identity politics raises significant questions on individual experiences, cultural mobilization, and sociopolitical movements. Scholars of collective action have recently paid more attention to the complex nature of relationships between actors’ perceptions, preferences, and strategies and their identities. Analysts of identity politics, as Mary Bernstein suggests, should be careful when they assume that social movement actors’ strategic deployment of their identities shows the revelation of the identity in essentialist ways. The depiction and reconstruction of essentialist identities might not indicate that the actors are naive to realize that these identities are socially constructed; rather, it can reveal the dynamic of relationship between identities and strategies. In this regard, post-structuralist criticism of identity politics is in need of reassessment. In any case, the debate over identity politics invites scholars of all sorts to investigate how local discourses are produced, perceived, and consequently realized in the actors’ life-worlds, which only in-depth case studies can explore.

Bibliography:

• Bernstein, Mary. 2005. “Identity Politics.” Annual Review of Sociology 31:47-74.
• Butler, Judith. [1990] 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
• Calhoun, Craig, ed. 1994. Social Theory and Politics of Identity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
• Larana, Enrique, Hank Johnston, and Joseph R. Gusfield, eds. 1994. New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• Monroe, Kristen R., James Hankin, and Renee B. Van Vechten. 2000. “The Psychological Foundations of Identity Politics.” Annual Review of Political Science 3:419-47.
• Ryan, Barbara, ed. 2001. Identity Politics in the Women’s Movement. New York: New York University Press.
• Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. 1998. The Disuniting of America. New York: Norton.

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Fascism: a Mosaic of Power, Identity, and Crisis

This essay is about reevaluating fascism through a nuanced lens that considers its multifaceted nature and historical context. It challenges simplistic portrayals of fascism as solely oppressive, highlighting its complexities as a response to societal crises. By examining factors such as economic upheaval, identity politics, and power dynamics, the essay reveals fascism as a mosaic of influences rather than a monolithic ideology. It also emphasizes fascism’s appeal to marginalized communities and its enduring relevance in contemporary discourse. Moreover, the essay interrogates the conventional narratives surrounding fascism, urging a critical engagement that transcends moral judgments and dichotomies. By understanding fascism’s continuities and legacies, the essay underscores the importance of confronting authoritarianism and oppression in the pursuit of democracy and social justice.

On PapersOwl, there’s also a selection of free essay templates associated with Fascism.

How it works

Fascism, often depicted as a dark chapter in human history, warrants a deeper examination beyond conventional narratives. Rather than a singular ideology or movement, fascism emerges as a mosaic, woven from the threads of power dynamics, identity politics, and societal crises. As a historian, I offer a non-standard perspective that delves into the complexities of fascism, revealing its multifaceted nature and enduring relevance in contemporary discourse.

At its core, fascism represents a response to the tumultuous currents of the early 20th century, characterized by economic upheaval, social dislocation, and cultural anxieties.

Contrary to simplistic portrayals of fascist leaders as demagogues, their rise to power often reflects a convergence of factors, including popular discontent, elite collusion, and geopolitical maneuvering. Mussolini’s Italy, for instance, witnessed a fusion of nationalist fervor, corporatist ideology, and charismatic leadership, which propelled the Fascist Party to prominence amidst post-war turmoil.

Moreover, fascism’s appeal transcends traditional left-right dichotomies, drawing support from diverse social groups disillusioned with liberal democracy’s perceived failures. While fascist regimes are often associated with totalitarian control and repression, they also offer a sense of collective identity, purpose, and belonging to marginalized communities. In this sense, fascism functions as both a mechanism of domination and a site of resistance, reflecting the complexities of power relations within society.

Furthermore, fascism’s relationship with nationalism and race remains a contentious issue, with implications for understanding contemporary forms of authoritarianism and xenophobia. Rather than dismissing fascism as a relic of the past, we must confront its legacies embedded within modern nation-states and global power structures. From the resurgence of ethnonationalism in Europe to the specter of white supremacy in the United States, fascism continues to shape political discourse and mobilize support around exclusionary visions of identity and belonging.

However, reimagining fascism also requires us to interrogate conventional narratives that essentialize and demonize the phenomenon. By situating fascism within broader historical contexts and comparative frameworks, we can better grasp its contingent nature and contingent nature and contested meanings. For instance, the distinctions between fascist and non-fascist regimes become blurred when examining policies of authoritarianism, censorship, and mass mobilization across different political systems.

In conclusion, rethinking fascism demands a nuanced approach that goes beyond simplistic dichotomies and moral judgments. By acknowledging its complexities and continuities, we can better understand the conditions that give rise to authoritarianism and oppression. Moreover, by critically engaging with fascism’s legacies, we can confront contemporary challenges to democracy, human rights, and social justice. Ultimately, the study of fascism serves as a cautionary tale and a call to action, reminding us of the enduring struggle for freedom, equality, and dignity in an ever-changing world.

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