What We All Lose When Society Plays Identity Politics
It isn’t just stupid. It’s reckless and dangerous too.
Pretty much every time I release a story somebody takes offence at the fact that they don’t know who I am. It is often framed as an act of cowardice on my part that somehow hiding my identity equates to — you don’t believe what you’re saying or you’re too cowardly to say it.
Quite a lot of time people who want to denigrate my viewpoint expend a huge amount of energy trying to identify me first. When I refuse to play the game, they infer what they like and then make their judgments regardless
Often I turned out to be a middle-aged white male Republican. The sort of man who goes to church every weekend but enjoys a spot of casual racism during the week. I’m the sort of uptight guy who can only sustain an erection if I’ve shouted at a trans-person for half an hour prior to coitus.
Yesterday I was mistaken as a modern day nefarious Black Panther calling out my BIPOC brothers and sisters to an all-out race war and white genocide. I’m delighted. These two projected characters couldn’t even co-exist in the same city, let alone within the same person.
My detractors are often so busy trying to work out why my identity makes me wrong, that they don’t read what I’m writing. So let me be explicit. This article explains why I’m so negative about identity politics and believe its doomed to fail attempt at combatting raicsm..
I think identity politics harms BIPOC and the middle class liberal left are doing BIPOC a disservice by playing into it.
You split the working class vote
The working class in the US is a complicated thing to define. There are three main ways of doing so. You can do it by occupation, income or education. Each of these has some problems and some advantages.
So let’s take a look at some of the definitions.
“people who, when they go to work or when they act as citizens, have comparatively little power or authority. They are the people who do their jobs under more or less close supervision, who have little control over the pace or the content of their work, who aren’t the boss of anyone.” (Michael Zweig)
This is sometimes difficult to define, it’s quite nebulous. The economic model is much simpler. You say that anyone earning under a given amount is ‘working class’. Great in principle but $45,000 is a good salary in rural Nebraska and a terrible salary in Manhattan.
When you throw in zero-hours contracts, changing jobs and multiple income streams it can be a little harder to define. I might be earning $44,000 from writing Medium articles once a week with only a cat to support. I could be making the same amount working three jobs with eight children to support.
I’m neither of those things. But if I were, I’d fit into the bracket of working class. Problematic huh?
The third way is to look at educational attainment. Having a college degree has been, historically at least, one of the quickest ways to differentiate class in the US. When many manufacturing jobs went abroad, those with college degrees were elevated into middle-class positions.
The latter end of the twentieth century moved the working class from ‘making stuff’ into ‘serving people’. Making stuff is done with machines or abroad now. Robots are coming for the ‘serving people’. Big problems are looming for an increasingly obsolete working class.
Places in colleges can be granted under scholarships and this further complicates an already complicated picture. Here’s a simple way of considering what constitutes working class in America.
60% of the population work hourly jobs. Of that 60%, eight in ten of those people didn’t go to college. That’s as good a definition gets.
So we’ve defined the working class. Now what?
It is important to understand that most of these people are white. This isn’t a race loaded statement, it’s a statement of fact. For much the same reason working-class people in India are mostly brown.
In the US, there are some advantages to being white and working-class rather than BIPOC and working class. Since 1970, the number of white working class has steadily decreased whilst POC continue to expand representation within the group.
This is in part due to immigration and in part due systemic racism. Understanding this is key.
Why woke doesn’t work
Woke rhetoric is largely espoused by the intellectual middle class. The sort of people you find writing on Medium. The people writing are generally well educated, well informed and are benevolent. They come in all flavours of skin tone — the general uniting factor being their economic class.
There will be working-class writers on Medium but comparatively with their representation in society, they are an under-represented voice on Medium.
The evidence that all white people are racist is fairly clear if you accept the dictat of white supremacy. Highly motivated, erudite middle-class white and BIPOC authors on Medium point it out regularly. Many of them professional journalists.
They try to explain with growing exasperation to everyone, that all white people are default racist.
Middle class white people take that on board. They get it. They read it and they understand it. Many of the easily impressed ones fall over themselves to apologise, to learn and to be ‘better’ — without really defining what they’ll do.
A giant circle jerk of progressives all promising to be better creates exactly zero change. Professional journalists write endless articles that point out that racism is awful. Everyone agrees.
The emergent question becomes ‘so….what now?’
Sure, there’s a semantic argument to be made that a white homeless drifter living in his car has far more privilege than say Oprah Winfrey. You can make the case and I’d agree with you.
But many people in the working-class won’t because it doesn’t make any sense. White privilege is a two part thing. White. A description of skin colour. And privilege, which to the majority of working class people looks like access to finance and better jobs with more security.
In short, telling white poor people they’re more privileged than every BIPOC has the opposite effect to the one that you intend. The privilege you’re affording them by virtue of their skin colour does not equate with real privilege they perceive in their day to day lives. The argument put forward by woke people is both correct and meaningless.
It falls into the gap between semantic understanding and lived experience.
And along came Donald…
Identity politics doesn’t make a class argument to raise the standard of all people in poverty. It insists on a different divide. It takes a subsection of those poor people, lumps them together with people who have the same skin colour but who are economically more advantaged — and then insists this is the new disadvantaged group.
How easy do you think it is for a demagogue to drive a truck through that argument? Identity politics focuses the minds of the working class on the differences between them. It leave them ripe for demagogic hijack. Whilst the white middle class rolled over and played ‘I’m not racist’ possum, the white working class and lower-middle class turned out in their droves for Trump.
Whoops.
When a given demographic represents around 50% of your entire working-class population. And your working class represents around 60% of your entire electorate — it’s not a group you want swinging against you.
So we have four years of Trump.
Identity politics plays perfectly into the hands of upper-middle class white people. There’s a perfect advantage in turning members of lower economic classes to infighting.
Inciting middle class liberals to get poor people to hate each other represents no threat to the status quo and the middle class fell for it.
It’s not that identity isn’t important. It just exists in a cerebral space that most working class people have neither the time or inclination to explore. Holding onto identity politics as the defining fight of our era wins the battle, but it’s a pyrrhic victory.
It comes at the cost of losing the war.
Identity politics only pretends to be inclusive, in reality it turns into a niche-interest group pissing contest. You’re morally right but so what? Meaningful change for the most vulnerable members in society won’t come without moving the demos left for all. That’s what inclusivity means.
Socialism doesn’t care what colour your skin is.
Woke and its adherents achieve little more than to move the white working-class, the latino-working class and conservative moderates into the arms of the alt-right. It moves the whole process away from a push towards traditional economic betterment for all.
Economic betterment for all looks like universal health care, maternity leave, minimum wage and anything else that takes the pressure off living paycheck-to-paycheck. Poverty breeds protectionism, it breeds promotion of self-interest as a survival strategy, it breeds ‘us vs them’ thinking.
This is the fuel of racism.
Progressives aren’t making progress. They’re backing the wrong horse and doing far more harm than good. By getting caught up in an ever increasing clusterfuck of identity based disputes they draw attention from a simple economic argument.
The left will eat itself by a misplaced adherence to identity politics and social justice. It’s a Foucaultian-Marxist Frankenbaby lacking intellectual rigour but one that looks good on paper. It’s online activism, keyboard warriors, half-assed white people buying virtue signalling capes to wear at the weekend.
It looks like running society via the maxim of fear-based pluralistic ignorance. Letting the Dunning-Kruger brigade run the conversation from their positions of confident stupidity. It’s the careful and never-ending categorisation of everything into an increasingly large bin marked ‘oppressive’
People always assume I’m some sort of right-wing leaning racist and try to prove it. They fail to understand I’m not. I’m a lefty. A liberal lefty calling out my ‘own side’ for intense stupidity. Identity politics fuels racism with its lofty idealism and lack of practical application.
Imagine showing up for a war and executing half the people on your own side as your opening gambit. That, in nutshell, is identity politics.
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