Is Identity Politics Good or Bad?
This morning I read a good article by David Remnick in The New Yorker.
There were many thought-provoking paragraphs in the article – kind of what you would expect in an article by one of our great current events writers who is also the editor of one of the smartest magazines in the world….
One of the interesting and alarming paragraphs in this article was this one:
“Shortly before the end of Obama’s second term, the President was in Lima, Peru, being driven to an event with some of his aides. Along the way, he confided that he’d just read an opinion column implying that, in electing Trump, tens of millions had rejected liberal identity politics. “What if we were wrong?” Obama said. “Maybe we pushed too far,” he went on, according to a memoir by one of his advisers, Benjamin Rhodes. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.” “
This made me think about “identity politics.”
“Identity politics” is one of those things we hear people argue about and fight about and get angry about and yet, I almost never hear anybody explain what they MEAN by “identity politics.”
When I think about “identity politics” I am thinking about the process of looking at each group in our society SEPARATELY so we can see how they are doing.
We do this to make sure that each group in our society, even groups we don’t belong to, and hardly ever think about, is sharing in the equality, and opportunity, and legal protections that EVERYBODY in America is supposed to have.
To me that seems like a good thing to do….
To see why that is a good thing to do let’s imagine a white American man in 1850.
If we asked him, “Is America a free country?” he would probably say, “Of course America is a free country!”
But then we could ask him, “So the Indians are free?”
(They didn’t say Native Americans back then….)
He would have to admit that Native Americans were not free in 1850.
In fact, they were being systematically driven off their ancestral lands by force, and those who resisted were killed….
And then we could ask him, “So the black people are free?”
(I don’t know if they said “black people” back then. Maybe they used more scurrilous words that I don’t want to use now….)
He would have to admit that black people were not free in 1850.
In fact, millions of them were being bought and sold and OWNED as slaves….
And then we could ask him, “So women are free?”
This one might shock him, but if he thought about it for a minute he would realize that women were not allowed to vote and had all sorts of legal restrictions on their activities that men did not have so no; in 1850 women were not free either.
After our conversation this man might say, “OK. So now I see that SOME people in America are free, but we still have a lot of work to do if we want EVERYBODY to be free and equal.”
But this man never would have noticed the problem unless he looked at each group separately.
If we want true freedom in a country, we have to make sure EVERBODY has it.
And looking at each group separately to make sure they are free, is exactly what I mean by “identity politics.”
People who HATE identity politics… I don’t know what they mean by it.
We will have to ask them….
I’ve seen lots of movies or TV shows where there is a car crash or some other kind of accident and someone will shout out, “Is everybody OK?”
To me, identity politics is just how our society shouts out, “Is everybody OK?”
And that is a very good thing to do!
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/11/18/it-can-happen-here
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