I was thinking that one of the problems with criticising identity politics is that feeling that actually you are just not wanting to include marginalised groups, or are criticising them, or even silencing them.
I’ve just read another article that DLR sent me. It was kinda putting identity politics in the context of the last 150 years of socialist movements.
Anyway, among a (fair amount!) of another stuff it made the following points. That identity politics emerged in the 1960s and 70s and was a response to what I think was termed reductionism. Basically the idea of the worker being a white male factory worker, and socialism thought not therefore being inclusive of black people or women and the more specific struggles they faced. Both outside and inside the home in the case of women.
How that reductionism was challenged by movements like the Black Panthers, the Young Lords (Puerto Rican), and feminists the Combahee River Collective (a group of pretty badass sounding black feminist lesbians). And the idea that the personal was political came along.
But over time, although it didn’t start out like that, there was a homogenisation within groups. A kind of assumption that members of a group would have the same political aims just based on that identity. And the issue of representation, that the aim is to get a member of the identity group in a position of power, and then the interests of that group would be represented. That seems to me where it went wrong? That assumption that based on identity you share political aims.
And then the different identities seemed to get lost. There was no unifying goal, no objective, no shared understanding of how their oppression was linked. And so instead of doing what was set out to be done- to widen socialism to include these groups using these ideas- the very opposite is occurring. Identity politics is being used to divide and exclude.
Now, I may have paraphrased that to the point of being wrong. So is that a reasonable understanding?
