Identity Politics: the impasse, the debate, the thread.

[LDC]

Radical herbalism?

Also, I meant 'politics' not politics.

 

[LDC]

This 'agreement' reminds me of of the declining years of The Lesbian Line when they stopped accepting volunteers who were not against S&M sex.

Awkward recruitment interview question that.

 

[friendofdorothy]

Awkward recruitment interview question that.

fairly everday in dykey circles in late 80s - things were fairly accrimonious amonst London's lesbians back then.

 

[ska invita]

This Facebook post I think is a good example, not necessarily of identity politics, but of the logic failures some people seem to be going through

Can't seem to embed the pic on my phone


It shows up the lengths people will go to challenge personal power relations (a good thing to challenge) without letting logic, facts, or the bigger picture get in their way

ETA, will try and repost it in a bit

 

[Idris2002]

It’s a euphemism for liberalism I think.

A euphemism for "it's the latest thing from America", you mean.

 

[Tom A]

More fucking ridiculous politics...

Leeds Radical Herbalism Network

(Insert GIF of Judge Judy shaking her head then facepalming here)

But seriously... good grief. Had to stop reading because of all the cringing this induced, nearly got a full house on Tumblr IDPol Bingo there, are these people for real? Anyway, moving on...

It’s genius! it is satire, isn’t it?

There's definitely a Poe's Law situation in place here. If it's satire it's very good satire, I would hope that 'herbalism' would be a dead give away, but sadly I wouldn't be surprised if these people really believed all this. (E2A: Having done an online search for "radical herbalism" it turns out that this is actually a thing, but a thing that's so up its own arse it's no wonder that things turned out the way they did.)

Radical herbalism?

But, you see, "modern" Western medicine messes with your chakras, maan! (Except that would probably be considered a safer space violation due to sexism and cultural appropriation).

On a side note, I find this entire concept, with its indulgence in quackery and pseudoscience, and its insinuation that 21st century medicine (you know, the thing that is able to treat many a life-threatening or life-limiting disease whereas your pot pourri would make scant difference) is somehow 'oppressive' and we need to "go back to nature" in order to liberate ourselves really grating. Even those who manage to get past the Safer Spaces Stasi will undoubtedly be in a position of true privilege purely by being in a situation where they can make these attacks on modern medicine, since they have never been faced with the threats to health that come from living where healthcare and sanitation is limited. At least they aren't advocating homeopathy, that's all I can say.

Roots.

Bloody roots...

 

[8ball]

...on a side note, I find this entire concept, with its indulgence in quackery and pseudoscience...

As opposed to white supremacist "science"!!

 

[Tom A]

As opposed to white supremacist "science"!!

True, it's all the work of Babylon...

 

[NoXion]

More fucking ridiculous politics...

Leeds Radical Herbalism Network

Apparently their gathering has been cancelled because they got criticised for turning down the help of two white guys with dreads. Fucking seriously?

 

[Celyn]

What's funny is that despite some long-winded inclusive types stuff, their flyer for the tragically cancelled event gives dates and venue. Fine, but someone living at the other end of town and with no connections to the University might not feel enormously confident heading off to this venue described only as Leeds University Union.

Why not give its location, mention nearby bus routes, emphasise all members of public welcome, use Bloggs St entrance and follow signs to room X on third floor, mentioning access for anyone with mobility problems etc? Am I being too nitpicking here? OK, but just blithely saying Student Union as though all residents know it is quite "in-group", I think. They do seem to be an amusing bunch.

 

[LDC]

Apparently their gathering has been cancelled because they got criticised for turning down the help of two white guys with dreads. Fucking seriously?

I think it's that they felt like they didn't have the capacity to put on the gathering and also deal with the fallout and issues around them banning the people from being on the panel.

One of the people banned has apparently kicked off a bit (as have some of his friends/colleagues) which of course has enabled the gathering organizers to go on about white privilege.

 

[Jeff Robinson]

 

[Tom A]

I think it's that they felt like they didn't have the capacity to put on the gathering and also deal with the fallout and issues around them banning the people from being on the panel.

One of the people banned has apparently kicked off a bit (as have some of his friends/colleagues) which of course has enabled the gathering organizers to go on about white privilege.

I am not surprised that being white and wearing dreads was enough to warrant shunning. It just seems to be part of the course in "social justice" circles these days. I would be interested to know what this "kicking off" entailed, I found nothing from a brief search of Twitter, and there isn't anything on their Facebook page (which has just over 100 members).

 

[bimble]

More schools in America taking to kill a mocking bird off the reading lists, because it contains the n word. Probably inevitable in current climate but seems sad, to me.

 

[Magnus McGinty]

That’ll be Huckleberry Finn gone too then.

 

[Idris2002]

That’ll be Huckleberry Finn gone too then.

They produced a schools edition with the relevant word ommitted a while back.

I'm not arsed about this at all. I well remember my granny, who voted FF her all life, explaining to me why you don't use that particular anagram of "ginger".

 

[Idris2002]

This was good. Shuja Haider explains himself to the poltroons who lambasted for saying that the left needs to deal with the problem of young white men getting radicalized in very wrong directions:

What makes life shitty? – Shuja Haider – Medium

 

[Magnus McGinty]

I'm not arsed about this at all. I well remember my granny, who voted FF her all life, explaining to me why you don't use that particular anagram of "ginger".

Not trying to invoke Godwin’s but nevertheless I’m not particularly down with book bannings.

 

[Idris2002]

Not trying to invoke Godwin’s but nevertheless I’m not particularly down with book bannings.

No one's talking about banning any books. bimble was talking about schools in America talking TKAM off reading lists. My guess is that they're doing that out of cowardice, but it's far from the same thing as banning it.

 

[butchersapron]

There's a v useful Walter Benn Michaels piece in the new issue of nonsite:The Political Economy of Anti-Racism I'm going to pull more quotes than normal as a) it's v important and utterly central to the discussion here and b) i think lot of people will not read it.

First, because—although we both respect Jacobin and have both published in it before—I was a little less sanguine about the magazine’s desire actually to make any kind of statement about where it stood on the left v identitarian issue. And, second, because part of my argument (as suggested below in a photo taken at a talk I gave at U.C. Riverside) involves a critique of the role played by elite universities in (to borrow a phrase from Adolph’s and Willie Legette’s note on V.O. Key) “suppressing working-class politics in the service of both black and white political elites.” But, of course, both the students at schools like the ones on my list and the more-or-less recent graduates of such schools make up a significant portion of Jacobin’s readership; why would Jacobin want to publish an attack on its audience?

What’s wrong with the identitarian version of the left is not that its roots are in money but that its identitarianism is a defense of that money.

Redistributing skin colors has nothing to do with redistributing wealth; a world where every race was proportionately represented at every income level would be exactly as unequal as the one we have now.

The problem with discrimination is that it generates what economists call “bad” inequalities. If a white male gets promoted over a Latina despite the fact that the Latina was doing a better job, that’s a bad inequality and it’s bad in two ways. It’s ethically bad because it’s unfair (the white man is being chosen for reasons that have nothing to do with merit) and it’s economically bad because it’s inefficient (since the white man wasn’t chosen for merit, the job is probably not being done as well as it could be). What anti-discrimination looks to do, then, is solve both the ethical and the economic problem—to make sure that all groups have equal opportunity to succeed and thus also to help make sure that the jobs are being done by the people who are best at doing them. Which has absolutely nothing to do with eliminating economic inequality.5 In fact, it’s just the opposite: the point of eliminating horizontal inequality is to justify individual inequality.

This is why some of us have been arguing that identity politics is not an alternative to class politics but a form of it: it’s the politics of an upper class that has no problem with seeing people left behind as long as they haven’t been left behind because of their race or sex.

As Karen and Barbara Fields put it in their book Racecraft, the discourse of anti-discrimination has so “impoverished Americans’ public language for addressing inequality,”9 that we either understand poor white people as victims of racism (which they obviously aren’t) or as trailer-trash responsible for their own plight but trying to blame someone else—black people or immigrants. So, in an economy where the bottom 80% has been falling farther and farther behind the top 20% (and where most of the top 20% has been falling behind the top 1%), we get large numbers of white people experiencing themselves as losing ground, while Trumpists tell them they’re the victims of racism and liberals tell them they’re racists.

There is also a long Adolph Reed piece in the new issue but i'm not sure it's the one mentioned by WBM but this from the conclusion suggests they are still thinking on same lines:

That is a crucial context within which we should understand antiracists’ tendency to align with Wall Street Democrats in denouncing calls for general redistribution and their insistence that Trump’s victory most meaningfully expresses the depth of commitments to white supremacy, sexism, and homophobia particularly among “white working class” voters. The contention that working-class disaffection from Clintonite neoliberalism most of all expresses backlash against blacks and others is an argument, as Clinton’s snide dismissal of Sanders indicates, that economic inequality is not a central concern for blacks, women, immigrants, LGBT or transgender people. A year into the Trump presidency and unimpeded Republican control of Congress and of most state governments has confirmed what many on the left have known all along, that the right’s agenda is an all-out attack on working people, no matter what their racial and gender classifications and identities or sexual orientations. The alliance of Democratic neoliberalism and an identity-based notion of social justice has contributed to this nightmarish outcome precisely by diminishing the significance of a policy orientation that abets upward redistribution and intensifying economic inequality and racializing the working class as white losers.

 

[Joe Reilly]

There's a v useful Walter Benn Michaels piece in the new issue of nonsite:The Political Economy of Anti-Racism I'm going to pull more quotes than normal as a) it's v important and utterly central to the discussion here and b) i think lot of people will not read it.

Neo-liberalism is the dominant ideology and identity politics is the left face of it.













There is also a long Adolph Reed piece in the new issue but i'm not sure it's the one mentioned by WBM but this from the conclusion suggests they are still thinking on same lines:

That is a crucial context within which we should understand antiracists’ tendency to align with Wall Street Democrats in denouncing calls for general redistribution and their insistence that Trump’s victory most meaningfully expresses the depth of commitments to white supremacy, sexism, and homophobia particularly among “white working class” voters. The contention that working-class disaffection from Clintonite neoliberalism most of all expresses backlash against blacks and others is an argument, as Clinton’s snide dismissal of Sanders indicates, that economic inequality is not a central concern for blacks, women, immigrants, LGBT or transgender people. A year into the Trump presidency and unimpeded Republican control of Congress and of most state governments has confirmed what many on the left have known all along, that the right’s agenda is an all-out attack on working people, no matter what their racial and gender classifications and identities or sexual orientations. The alliance of Democratic neoliberalism and an identity-based notion of social justice has contributed to this nightmarish outcome precisely by diminishing the significance of a policy orientation that abets upward redistribution and intensifying economic inequality and racializing the working class as white losers.

There's a v useful Walter Benn Michaels piece in the new issue of nonsite:The Political Economy of Anti-Racism I'm going to pull more quotes than normal as a) it's v important and utterly central to the discussion here and b) i think lot of people will not read it.













There is also a long Adolph Reed piece in the new issue but i'm not sure it's the one mentioned by WBM but this from the conclusion suggests they are still thinking on same lines:

That is a crucial context within which we should understand antiracists’ tendency to align with Wall Street Democrats in denouncing calls for general redistribution and their insistence that Trump’s victory most meaningfully expresses the depth of commitments to white supremacy, sexism, and homophobia particularly among “white working class” voters. The contention that working-class disaffection from Clintonite neoliberalism most of all expresses backlash against blacks and others is an argument, as Clinton’s snide dismissal of Sanders indicates, that economic inequality is not a central concern for blacks, women, immigrants, LGBT or transgender people. A year into the Trump presidency and unimpeded Republican control of Congress and of most state governments has confirmed what many on the left have known all along, that the right’s agenda is an all-out attack on working people, no matter what their racial and gender classifications and identities or sexual orientations. The alliance of Democratic neoliberalism and an identity-based notion of social justice has contributed to this nightmarish outcome precisely by diminishing the significance of a policy orientation that abets upward redistribution and intensifying economic inequality and racializing the working class as white losers.

Neo-liberalism is the dominant ideology and identity politics is the left face of it.

 

[butchersapron]

The Reed piece is very very strong. It's particularly interesting on something that has been under discussion on here recently - institutional racism.. He traces the material development of the concept (in the US at least) to an accommodation - or more bluntly, a sell out or buy off - by black elites to the growing divorce of black politics from class politics from the mid 60s onwards (Reed outlined how in his view this happened before this section) with the reward of a privileged position within the coming economic changes of policing the racial boundaries of neo-liberalism - in effect, acting as the guarantor of a racially representative inequality. Or as Benns would have it, in highlighting where the system is throwing up unexpected inefficiencies in its pursuit of the production of justified inequalities. Here lies the legitimating roots of liberal neo-liberalism (for example, it's why and how liberals, including CRI on here, can argue that universal health care and initiatives like free tuition are racist) - and why the choice isn't class politics vs identity politics today but the proper recognition of identity politics as a class politics.

Again, how far this maps onto the UK i'm not sure - certainly not directly - but there is surely no question as to where our home grown identarians/liberal neo-liberals/etc are taking their lead from.

 

[J Ed]

From the Reed article..

Black Politics After 2016

Antiracist reactions to Bernie Sanders’s challenge and its invigoration of a redistributionist left illustrate the extent to which this race politics is at bottom a class politics. Dismissal of Sanders’s agenda and assertions that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, living wage, and national health care, for example, somehow were not black issues underscores that this turn in black politics is committed to an agenda restricted to combating racial disparities within prevailing structures of inequality. Thus, in its purview economic redistribution seems racially inauthentic, but the annual controversies over group parity in awards of Oscars, Grammies, and other accolades appear as burning social justice issues. Only ideological blinders can block out the implication that a fair share of acclaim for Ava DuVernay, Nate Parker or Rihanna is, or should be, more important to black Americans than general access to decent, secure employment and retirement, health care and a vibrant public sector

 

[Fozzie Bear]

Interesting to see Austin Mitchell attacking Corbyn supporters on the basis of identity politics (and also the north/south divide - hardened northern proles vs effete Londoners etc).

Labour’s priority is Brexit. But it should be the left-behind | Austin Mitchell

 

[ViolentPanda]

Radical herbalism?

It's where you prescribe foxglove and belladonna for ALL ailments.

 

[butchersapron]

A line has been crossed

What happened on March 8th was a group of activists deciding that their concerns about identity politics were of more importance than an industrial dispute and taking it upon themselves to harass a union official because they didn’t like the fact she had concerns about changes to the Gender Recognition Act. As far as we’re concerned, a red line has been crossed with this incident and a stand has to be taken to stop the situation getting out of hand. That red line is a total lack of respect for a picket line, it’s purpose and what it represents. Attacking someone on a picket line is the action of a scab.

Also a new piece/reply from Shuja Haider in the new issue of Dissent.

From Identity Politics to Emancipation

There is also a political version of this experience. It is increasingly the experience of people of color on the left. In encounters with liberals or leftists whose politics are closer to the center, radicals of color can find themselves told to limit their political demands along the lines of race. Our politics, structured by our experience of inequality under capitalism as mediated through the white supremacist legal and cultural institutions of the United States, are too broad. When we demand universal emancipation, we are told to limit the scope to demographics. We should reduce our subjectivity to one that is defined by ethnicity, and consequently reduce our demands from the universal to the particular. This charge is often accompanied by a paradox—the denial of the radical person of color’s race.

 

[Sea Star]

I filled in an equal opps form yesterday that came with a job application for a large national organisation. The first three boxes they wanted you to tick were
Gender (female, male)
Gender identity (female, intersex, male, non binary, prefer not to say, trans)
Is your gender identity the same as the gender you were assigned at birth? (no, prefer not to say, yes)

twats!!

 

[Sea Star]

I guess if I self-identify as disabled I'd get to park in the disabled bays?

no. I am disabled - self identified or not - have a diagnosis for autism. It does not entitle me to anything apart from protection if I am discriminated against for being autistic, or my reasonable needs aren't met. Self ID is a good idea because I know autistic people who cannot get diagnoses due to cuts in the NHS or because they have a doctor who doesn't believe them. And yet they still have the sorts of difficulties that autistic people experience, so it enables them to access those reasonable adjustments, though probably not the protections. And it allows disabled people - or people who would otherwise be categorised disabled - to refuse that label (I can't say I understand why but I do know that in the autistic community many refuse to see it as a disability - I wish I was so fortunate!).

 

[The39thStep]

Interesting to see Austin Mitchell attacking Corbyn supporters on the basis of identity politics (and also the north/south divide - hardened northern proles vs effete Londoners etc).

Labour’s priority is Brexit. But it should be the left-behind | Austin Mitchell

Cant disagree with most of what he says tbh and I like the hyperthetical question 'what are you going to do for us?'. I once had a chat to him on a train from London to York I think it was. It was the period where although he said some good things and I think he was around the Campaign group in the Labour party for a while he also came out with a lot of anti SWP/Militant stuff. He was very anti Tony Benn and considered to be a Kinnock loyalist. However he was very polite in our conversation and was prepared to have a chat. I was in the SWP at the time and when I mentioned that half way through he said 'But you seem too sensible to be a Trot and you're not a student'.

 

[Joe Reilly]

From the Reed article..

Black Politics After 2016

Identity politics is about creating a black middle class (as a buttress to the white middle class) at the direct expense of a black working class.