wiseMusings

I’ve had a fascinating relationship with the concept of identity politics over the years. I oscillate between seeing the value of its existence and bemoaning that politics has to be chalked up to identity.

I soon discovered a resource that would show me that I’ve been thinking about identity politics all wrong this entire time.

Ezra Klein’s book, Why We’re Polarized, is a great book that seeks to explain why political affiliations in the United States have led to greater divisiveness over the years. Lazy cover aside, the book is engaging in its accessibility without losing any of the rigour that makes Ezra Klein a clear conveyor of complex ideas. And while he writes in the context of the United States, many of the overarching themes are of universal relevance.

One particular paragraph hooked me as soon as I read it, and continued to do so for weeks and months:

“Identity is present in politics in the way gravity, evolution, or cognition is present in politics; that is to say, it is omnipresent in politics, because it is omnipresent in us. There is no way to read the literature on how humans form and protect their personal and group identities… and believe any of us is immune.

It runs so deep in our psyches, is activated so easily by even weak cues and distant threats, that it is impossible to speak seriously about how we engage with one another without discussing how our identities shape that engagement.”

 

Let’s unpack that for a moment.

Most South Africans can agree that when the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, Julius Malema, says that the EFF is a political party predominantly for poor and working-class black people, he is playing identity politics. In other words, he is galvanizing those who have that social identity around him and his political party.

But here’s the kicker.

When a group of white men, for instance, form an interest group to protect (their) minority rights in South Africa, that is also identity politics. They are using their shared identities as racial minorities to influence government decisions.

Of course, there can be good forms of identity politics and bad forms of identity politics. The Nazi Party was definitely the latter. However, this surely does not mean that all identity politics are inherently a net negative.

The issue with identity politics is its association with marginalization, and the idea that identity politics can only manifest itself in such a setting.

One would believe that marginalized individuals are more likely to form interest groups and organisations to better promote their interests. One cannot run away from the fact that a petition or a protest summons mass attention far more than a “lone voice of reason” shouting into a void ever could.
Not only because numbers translate into potential votes for the party that can take up the cause, but because media coverage will stimulate discussion around the group and its objectives among nonplussed citizens who may find themselves joining the cause as well.

And if you believe that your rights are not being realised to their fullest extent, you’ll likely find others like you and organise yourselves so that government (and to a lesser extent, political parties) can take notice of you and see the importance of your cause.

To me, that’s incredibly neutral.

So why this obsession with “identity politics” as a tool used only by marginalized people?

The term is a conservative talking point by now: “look at those people who think being part of a group is better than being an individual. They are trying to trample on our liberty with their identity politics, and I won’t have it. Not on my lawn!” (This, of course, would be followed by strongly written letters to the editor and requests to speak to the manager).

This is called the strawman fallacy. The person in question is assuming that people who participate in interest groups value the group identity more than their agency as an individual, which is a false, if not absurd, assumption. They then use this false assumption to conclude that interest groups are inherently anti-individual liberty. This, too, is false.

Firstly, there is more internal disagreement regarding strategies and frameworks within interest groups than is made public. Of course, this might lend itself to the impression that a strategy used was agreed upon, unanimously.

However, there is a contestation of ideas in almost every political organization (I now use the term in its broader sense, to include people that organise themselves for political objectives).

For instance, the #FeesMustFall movement in South Africa during 2015 and 2016 had class divides that slowly but surely simmered to the surface, first manifesting themselves in seemingly innocuous decisions such as conducting a meeting on a Sunday afternoon when most students lived far from campus to debates over whether or not to protest a multinational corporation coming onto campus to recruit students to work for them. Rekgotsofetse Chikane’s book, Breaking a Rainbow, Building a Nation is a good but non-exhaustive account of this.

Secondly, as I brought up in a recent Facebook thread, people come to interest groups with different motives even when their identity is shared. I used the example of the LGBTQ+ rights movement lobbying for same-sex marriages to be legal. After this goal was achieved countrywide in the United States in 2015, many people left the movement. For them, their goal was complete. They could get married to their partners, and that was that.

But for others, there were many more issues that the LGBTQ+ rights movement had to lobby for, such as how race and class influence how much rights one is afforded, the increased visibility of transgender and non-binary individuals, and so on.

This clearly shows that for some, the war began and ended with marriage equality, while for others, there were more issues that were of equal importance to the broader movement.

None of these viewpoints are wrong or right in the normative sense. This is to show that individual agency was not sacrificed in their participation in the movement, even though they organised around a single unifying identity.

Lastly, as I’ve already mentioned, everybody has an identity – even those who don’t think they do. The extent to which one prioritizes one identity over the other is a matter of preference more than anything else.

For instance, I identify as a man (admittedly, some of the time). It would not seem out of place for me to be a Men’s Rights Activist, and use my platform to speak about how men face “structural injustice” in the form of false rape accusations and so on.

But I value certain identities more.

I am also a brother, an uncle, a friend – all to women. I am also an academic who actually knows what structural injustices are (sorry, Men’s Rights Activists who will read this, but no).

 

This would lead me to join an organisation that aligned with the social identity I deemed as most important, and which I felt warranted the most political activism on my part. That hardly seems like a decision made with a group identity as the main determinant in my thinking.

The truth is that one can value individual agency and liberty while engaging in the scary-sounding “identity politics”. It’s not an either-or.

Some people even engage in identity politics as a way to advance individual liberty, funnily enough. They’ll rarely admit that they’re engaging in identity politics, but that’s what they are doing.

One could say that the very existence of interest groups (and by extension, identity politics) is unnecessarily divisive, and, if led to its logical conclusion, would cause inequality that is devoid of any merit. This would imply that a group of people organising themselves in terms of individual liberty have chosen the lesser evil – organising in terms of a shared identity – in order to defeat a greater evil – divisiveness and a decline in standards for everyone.

A good response to that would be to ask whether there was any real unity in the first place. If meritocracy is maintained by producing standards that some people, by virtue of their social identity, cannot reach – then that “meritocracy” isn’t meritocratic at all. It would just seem to be so for the people who can reach that far, having been bolstered by their social identity.

And in such a scenario, how can there ever be unity, in any meaningful way?

If a person can afford to get by on merit alone, then of course they will prop up individual liberty as the #1 value. Of course, they will project their ability to forget they even have a social identity onto others under the guise of “personal responsibility”. Of course, they will perceive any attempts to reveal anything contrary to be “divisive”, because if somebody else’s identity is a disadvantage in one social reality, what’s to stop their identity from being a disadvantage in a different social reality?

What they fail to acknowledge is that division is a feature, and not a bug, of a social order that makes interest groups necessary in the first place. While the illusion of unity may allow their fiction of individual liberty at all costs to continue, the reality of identity politics – the reality of people wanting their rights to be upheld, in law and in practice – shatters that fiction into shreds.

That is not enacting a “soft bigotry of low expectations”, as some conservatives would argue. That is a misrepresentation of identity politics and its goals. It is not a tool to promote mediocre people into positions of power – even the framing of marginalized people as inherently inferior, and therefore having to use underhanded means to get ahead, is ungenerous at best, and downright problematic at worst.

Most of the time, our identity politics can seem so invisible to us that we mistake any mention of identity from somebody else as an affront to us. It is in recognising our own identity politics, and the way we use them for our own benefit, that we can remove the unnecessary stigma surrounding the term.

And so, the way we think about identity politics matters. Maybe much more than the actual identities we hold, themselves.