A few hundred more words on Identity Politics
(mostly not mine, though)

This is it. I promise. Nothing more except in comments. Period.

Earlier this week I mentioned Todd Gitlin's The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars as a book that transformed how I look at identity politics. I didn't have the text in front of me at the time, so I did not pull out the relevant quotes. Today I have it, though.

What I remembered, almost word for word, was this:

From "the personal is political" it was an easy glide to "only the personal is really political"--that is, only what I and people like me experience ought to be the object of my interest. (152)

I was ready, at the moment I read that sentence, to hear it. It resounded with me, like this exhortation later in the book:

If there is not to be irresolvable conflict, then people have to agree to limit the severity of their differences [. . .]. They have to share a frmaework in which differences exist amid what does not differ [. . .]. If the value of thought were determined in a one-to-one fashion by the identity group, then there would be no way to adjudicate disputes but to cede--or secede. Not only would differences within the group be impossible, so would change. (209)

To paraphrase someone else, I was tired of being divided by identity politics. Can't we all, I wondered, be The Left again? This is especially true considering that I was thinking, and had it affirmed repeatedly by Gitlin, that the left (i.e., Democrats) had been so completely identified as being the party of special interests--we followed the "homosexual agenda" or we were powerless to stand up to "tree-hugging wierdos." At the same time, the right (i.e., Republicans) had become identified as the party that represented a uinified America. Hence the defection of so many blue-collar workers to Reagan; hence the votes against their own economic interests by Howard Dean's Confederate Flag wavers. All that talk about "the good old days" and restoring America to how it had been--in other words, removing those unwanted questions of white and male privilege--resonated with those afraid, consciously or not, of losing that privilege. Remember Michael Douglas in Crazy White Man Falling Down?

Business Week devoted a cover story to the complaints of white males who feel passed over in business. (The magazine has never run a cover story on job discrimination against blacks, women, Hispanics, or homosexuals.) (121)

Republicans were sure that identity politics would tear the country apart--unironically, of course:

Group self-enclosure was apparently acceptable when it was arranged by fraternities, sororities, and exclusive clubs, but in the hands of blacks and other minorities it is suddenly all the rage to denounce balkanization. The term was trundled out by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), never known for courageous fights against racial segregation in housing, schools, or hiring, when, in 1993, he denounced President Clinton's Justice Department nominee Lani Guinier as "an architect of a theory of racial preference that if enacted would push America down the road of racial balkanization. (154)

One thing I like about Gitlin's book, though, is that he gives us the identity politics history.

Politics in a multiracial society is alliance-making, and the work of alliance-making is not accomplished by adding up numbers. There is nothing automatic about it. (114)

The spirit of the New Left [in the 1960s] released long dammed-up forces of revolt. Subordination [. . .] became the basis for a liberationist sequence: first, the discovery of common experience and interest; next, an uprising against a society that had imposed inferior status; finally, the inversion of that status, so that distinct qualities once pointed to as as proof of inferiority were transvalued into the basis for positive distinction. It is only this third stage--where the group searches for and cultivates distinctive customs, qualities, lineages, ways of seeing, or, as they came to be known, "cultures"--that deserves to be called identity politics. (141)

There's a danger in that, he says, that we'll never get beyond helping only ourselves.

This whole mess started with an ill-considered post at Open Source Politics, and in that post and the discussion that followed, the writer could not fathom why anyone would need to build a racial identity. The unspoken end to that statement: a racial identity distinct from the default. As I discussed below, and in those threads, whiteness is that default, and I think we can all understand that non-whites may take umbrage at being asked to assume that default, or, as the writer literally said, that their non-whiteness "can and should be masked on the internet." It is only through an inversion of inferior status, achieved by celebrating the "culture," that we can begin to reach equality. Note: The privileged group has to recognize this also, that those "cultures" are worth equality. That's the idea behind multiculturalism, buzzword though it may be:

Serious multiculturalism is not a children's party where party favors are passed out to everyone to "celebrate" his or her "contribution"; it is reintegration into superior syntheses. (145)

Speaking of history--well, I was!--Gitlin acknowledges the importance of considering history when thinking about racial identity, or identity in general:

Identity does more than exclude. It transcends the self, affirms a connection with others. [. . .] Identity expands through space, binding a person to fellow travelers in the human project. But identity also extends through time, linking the individual with past and future, extending beyond the mortal body. (127)

Later, he writes:

All thought begins with person, and all persons are situated--in times, places, societies, cultures. That is to say, all thought begins within boundaries. [. . .] We consider the itemizing of "context" a necessary part of the full understanding of human beings. (203-4)

Now, my biggest problem, almost a decade removed from the epiphany the book wrought, is that Gitlin's a white guy. There is very little call among non-whites for the kind of setting-differences-aside work that has to be done to achieve real change. Gitlin one last time:

Advocates of identity politics will insist that the issue is not simply the leusiveness of categories or the American tradition of self-naming, but oppression and persecution. [. . .] But what follows from the categories once they are imposed? Identity is no guide to accuracy, to good judgment or political strategy. [. . .] Today's popular line of argument to the effect that people can only comprehend people like themselves does not convince. (208)

I invoked Howard Dean earlier, another white guy, making much the same argument--only, of course, blaming the divide on Republican policy. Either way, this is a discussion worth having this year, another year with the threat of defection by Democratic constituencies (cough-Nader-cough). In the end, I have to agree with many of the others who've said that this discussion, started badly, has been satisfying.