Three Kinds of Identity Politics: Traditional, Socialist, and Neoliberal
1. Traditional identity politics
For most of human history, identity politics were the politics of the powerful. They promoted a hierarchy that put men above women, people of their tribe above people of other tribes, and people of the ruling class above people of the working class.
Rebels and freethinkers who believed in the equality of all humans opposed them. In ancient times, these universalists were prophets and philosophers. A line from the Christian Bible illustrates that:
Galatians 3:28 There is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male or female, for you are all one…
By the 19th century, socialists had joined the universalist ranks. Karl Marx proclaimed, “The emancipation of the productive class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex or race.”
In the United States, the struggle to end slavery and legal segregation was a fight between traditional identitarians who championed the white race and universalist socialists who rejected the idea that race mattered. At the height of the Jim Crow era, Eugene Debs announced, “As a social party we receive the Negro and all other races upon absolutely equal terms. We are the party of the working class, the whole working class, and we will not suffer ourselves to be divided by any specious appeal to race prejudice.”
When legal segregation ended in the 1960s, the universalists thought identitarianism would wither away and leave us fighting a pure class war. In 1965, Malcolm X declared, “I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice, and equality for everyone, and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe there will be that kind of clash, but I don’t think that it will be based on the color of the skin.” In 1967, Martin Luther King announced, “There are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.” In 1970, Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, said, “Working class people of all colors must unite against the exploitative, oppressive ruling class. Let me emphasize again — we believe our fight is a class struggle, not a race struggle.”
But identitarianism did not die. It mutated.
2. Socialist identity politics
Leftists in the 1970s had a problem: The legal fight for equal rights was being won, yet women and people of color continued to be oppressed. How should that be addressed?
In 1977, a group of black lesbian socialists gave their answer in “The Combahee River Collective Statement” which contains the first use of the term, “identity politics”. They declared,
“We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work. 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.”
That sounds selfish and isolationist, but it was meant as a call for self-determination within a greater supportive community. Another part of the statement makes that clear:
“We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.”
“Guarantee” in the concluding sentence is the key to understanding the identitarian socialism that sprang from the Combahee River Collective. The socialist goal has always been universal liberation, but many socialist movements have been dominated by men or white people, so some socialist women and people of color have had to insist that they should be heard too.
Barbara Smith, one of the writers of the Combahee statement, clarified their definition:
“What we meant in 1977 by “identity politics” is that black women have a right to determine our own political agendas, period. That’s all that we meant. All the things that have been attached to the term “identity politics” in succeeding decades, that’s not what we were talking about.”
3. Neoliberal identity politics
Neoliberalism is the reason for “things that have been attached” to the Combahee River Collective’s concept of identity politics. In the same year they issued their statement, the US’s neoliberal era began with Jimmy Carter taking advice from economists like Paul Volcker. While opponents of racism like King, Malcolm X, and Bayard Rustin criticized capitalism, many antiracists who came after them were privileged liberals who thought the only thing wrong with capitalism was the prejudice of white people.
The most influential of these pro-capitalist antiracists were Derrick Bell, aka the father of Critical Race Theory, and his protege, Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined “intersectionality”. Neither ever expressed any interest in socialism. Bell said,
“I think there must be value in Marxist and other writings, but I did not really read them in college and have had little time since.”
Critical Race Theorists believed all white people are racist and blamed white racism for the fact the racial statistics of US poverty have not changed since King’s day. (Then and now, there are twice as many white people as black in poverty despite the much greater numbers of white people in the general population.) That the racial statistics of US privilege have changed enormously is irrelevant to neoliberal identitarians. Adolph Reed noted,
“I was at a conference a number of years ago at Harvard Law School when Derrick Bell was still on the faculty there. Bell was on a panel at this conference, and he insisted that nothing really had changed for black Americans since 1865. And I’m looking at this — here he was, a full professor at Harvard Law School, making the assertion that nothing had changed. Well, obviously something had changed, because he was in Harvard Law School without a broom in his hand.”
Crenshaw’s “intersectionality” is a favorite term of neoliberal identitarians. In her paper that established the term, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination. Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, she named something everyone who cares about racism and sexism has known since Sojourner Truth’s day or earlier: black women are oppressed by both racism and sexism.
The intersectionality model works with all forms of oppression based on social identity, but it fails when applied to economic class because social identity is based on who society sees you as while economic class is purely about your relationship to the means of production. Two points should make that clear:
- We all want respect for our social identities, but the poor do not want to be respected for being poor — they want an end to poverty.
- Our economic class can change in an instant if we win or lose a fortune, but our social identities cling to us no matter how hard we try to change them — see how transgender people struggle for acceptance and how Rachel Dolezal is mocked for identifying with a race that’s not the one society assigned her.
Neoliberal identity politics have become the dominant ideology of wealthy liberals. It trickled down from Harvard’s Critical Race Theorists and now can now be heard wherever neoliberals talk about race or feminism. Even Hillary Clinton adopted it — she speaks of intersectionality and once famously waved away doing something Wall Street would have hated with a question that seems like a non sequitur to most of us but which comes naturally to identitarians: “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism? Would that end sexism?”
The answer is of course not, but creating a national bank would help working class Americans. The questions no one asked her, which neoliberal antiracists never answer, are “What would end racism? What would end sexism?”
4. The path through neoliberal identitarianism to universalist socialism
Younger Americans are taught that neoliberal identitarianism is the righteous path to justice. They don’t know it by that name — they think of it as social justice or intersectional feminism — but their discussion of “structural” racism and sexism that ignores capitalism’s class structure comes straight from Critical Race Theory and third wave feminism.
When people who have been grounded in neoliberal identitarianism learn about democratic socialism, their first reaction is to merge the criticism of capitalism with their identitarianism. They effectively follow the path that Malcolm X took, first blaming white people, then blaming capitalism. Age and experience eventually bring them to the step Malcolm X took after he left the Nation of Islam.
“I have made sweeping indictments of all white people. I will never be guilty of that again.” — Malcolm X
“We must approach the problem as humans first, and whatever else we are second.” — Malcolm X