Identity Politics

Whenever I begin discussing race, the double bind of hyphenation in the U.S., I am often told by some extremely smart person who is inevitably Euro-American (read: white) who scoffs and says s/he just hates identity politics.

And the other day, I was having a conversation with a woman who teaches Anti-Bias Curriculum to budding teachers and therapists, as well as classes on how to deal with identity issues in K-12 classrooms. So I asked her how she would respond to such scorn in re: identity politics. She replied that it is not something that you can have a single conversation about and change another person's mind. Rather, she would point out inherent particularities in that other person, who is most likely white, has in his/her identity. They aren't just "white," but they are from Idaho. Their parents immigrated from Ireland. And so on and so forth. Because normally these people don't have to think about their identities, because they are part of the dominant culture. Actually, that's my observation because she seemed to think that white people are not. But so long as they are in control of all the institutions in our society, so long as they dictate the rules, they are the dominant culture. Hey, I don't like it, I just tell it like it is.

So anyway, her point was that over time, this person would realize that his/her identity was also particular, and that just because s/he doesn't have to defend him/herself by explaining that yes, actually, I'm American and my family is a fourth-generation fill-in-the-blank, that they, too, have a quite possibly contested identity.

This answer struck me as fundamentally unsatisfactory. It was, for one, far too touchy-feely. It had no strength behind it. No academic credentials behind it. No one like Susan Stanford Friedman arguing for the fluidity of constructing identity. A constructed narrative of identity that is simply that: a construction. And it is a relational construction defined in terms of the other. Consisting of intentional deletions, insertions and highlights. No one like Ella Shohat to give us a resounding, often extremely, painfully incisive summary of the problems of equating Euro-American definitions of self, agency with authoritative, either when trying to understand people from other countries and especially those in this country but who have different racial, cultural and ethnic backgrounds. No one invoking Anne McClintock or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

So now, I'm doing it. To reject identity politics is to reject the idea of a dominant white culture. To reject that is to not understand that there is privilege in the ability to ignore that identities are constructions. After all, if you're part of the dominant culture, no one questions your identity. But identities are narratives that depend upon not just a careful selection of what gets included in that narrative, but also upon systemic, institutionalized constructions of self and other. And those, in turn, rely on the silencing of minority narratives. They rely on the false assumption that identity is fixed, rather than fluid. Indeed, if it were fixed, not so many people who wanted to silence the Obama presidential run would have been quite as threatened as they were.

I intend to keep refining my understanding of identity construction. And next time, if some friend tells me s/he hates it, I will have a few things to say.