Identity Politics and Political Identities

Spoiler: Elite Wealthy White Men were First to Weaponize Identity Politics

Wokeism is Destroying the Nation

Political rhetoric in the current millennium has trended towards the topics of political correctness and identity politics: the virtue-signaling Left focuses political discourse on marginalized identities(identity politics) in order to divide the country.

The essentialist treatment of identities has weakened the nation by forcing people to choose between a cohesive national identity and identity-specific advancements.

This logic around identity politics is not new or recent. But it does intentionally and maliciously twist a mythologized American history to continue preserving the default status of whiteness:

The fears, political desires, and critiques made by White Americans(usually male and wealthy) are well reasoned concerns and necessary civil engagement by patriotic citizens; those made by any of the Other are ungrateful, ignorant, and even traitorous mischiefs spread by a cabal of communist infidels

As American As Pie . . . And Slavery

Contrary to the popular usage of the term, “identity politics” have been pillars of American political tradition before the nation even existed. Why exactly did groups like the Quakers and Puritans flee Britain?

As the colonies developed and powered economic engines, wealthy colonial merchants grew incensed that their identity as colonials meant they did not have representation in the parliament of Great Britain (1701-1800). These men mobilized to place their new identities as revolutionary colonists directly opposite to the oppressive yoke of the crown.

What as the Boston Tea Party if not a coming out party for a new revolutionary identity saying “fuck you” to British authority?

This class of educated, networked, influential men convened across the colonies not just to construct a new constitutional order, but to create Political Identities over which their dominance was unquestioned and backed by state force.

Women, Natives, Blacks, any other Mixed/Mulatto child —with room to create new subordinate classes (like Queers, Disabled, non-christians), existed, suffered, and died at the whims of the only people who could vote.

Identity Politics Throughout American History

Accusations of political correctness around identity politics, wielded to minimize and infantilize oppositional voices, have resurfaced at all key moments in the nation’s history. The following timeline is not comprehensive nor hyper-specific. It aims to lay out the pattern:

1760s-1780s, Revolutionary War and Constitutional Conventions

• Revolution incited, mainly a conflict between Tories/crown loyalists and revolutionaries

  • For most, whether the crown or colonial elites taxed their unrepresented labor would not change much of their political realities, so they remained neutral to start.

  • The conflict between the two groups was one between two privileged classes that had weighed their advantages in the colonies and a sovereign state differently

• 1788, US Constitution ratified, with explicit wording tying the American Identity to Slavery

  • Colonial slaving customs enshrined in federal and state laws, with the growth of the nation dependent on the equal admission of “slave” and “free” states

  • Range of laws and institutions ensuring escaped “property” returned back to rightful owner.

  • Laws ensuring the reproduction of slave population through sexual violence: forceful breeding, rape, and tying slave status to mother’s (brutal example of the intersection of political identities)

• 1787, Three-fifths compromise

  • A clear demonstration of the convergence of whiteness, economic power, and political agency. The economic and political force generated by enslaved and abused people was wielded by their captors and torturers to further entrench, normalize, and protect this mass abuse of rights.

Slavery is not the result of solely Southern states and politicians. Northern states 1) acquiesced and 2) profited greatly, whether through endowments for their new universities, raw materials for processing up North, or any of the numerous cheap goods produced by tortured hands.

Late 1700s to mid 1800s, Growing Abolitionist Sentiments, Freedmen Slave Narratives, Native Extermination

• Growing abolitionist sentiment in the North was fueled by Free People who had escaped slavery and took great personal risk to speak its evils

  • Free People were often aided by literate Whites in sharing their stories, but being illiterate, their narratives were sanitized and softened by White people for White consumption

• Slave proponents argued that Black People were biologically and morally incapable of receiving and using full citizenship. They pointed to their lack of literacy, broken family structures, lack of wealth as proof

  • Making them citizens and integrating them into the national fabric was an attack on America itself, and a direct violation of numerous constitutional provisions.

  • By keeping secret the extent to which slavers denied Black People education, denied them stable family cohesion, and inflicted all sorts of trauma whose effects would be felt years and generations later, slavery/racism lays a self justifying/perpetuating framework.

• 1857, Dred Scott v. Sandford

  • The enslaved (read: Black People) were not citizens, were not entitled to federal protection, and the federal gov’t/congress did not have the authority to ban slavery in federal lands

    • Federal lands meant the land of 19 yet-to-form states, mostly in the interior and midwest: huge swathes of lands

    • An enslaved Black Person in “free states” was still property, subject to the absolute authority of their master and the State

• 1863, Emancipation Proclamation, start of Reconstruction

  • Official end to the Civil War, waged by Southern States to ensure the nation would forever enshrine the right of wealthy elite to deprive, traffic and abuse Black People.

  • Again the North acquiesced and allowed the South to restore racial logics on a foundation of 100 years of legal and social subordination (literacy tests, sharecropping, numerous rule dictating Black behavior in public space)

• 1868, 14th Amend/Equal Protection clause

  • In the opinion of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 1978, Powell himself acknowledges that it was not until the 1900s that the “Equal Protection Clause began to attain a genuine measure of vitality”.

• Throughout the 1800s, the US, as an official state entity and through hundreds of encounters with manifesting, westward expansionists, reneged on dozens of contracts with First Nations

  • 1870s-1890s, recognizing the importance of wild buffalo in the plains to native sovereignty and self sufficiency, the US Gov’t leads campaigns to exterminate the herds of buffalo already impacted by work on transcontinental rail (labored over by many Chinese immigrants who continued to be excluded while rail tycoons’ influence grew thanks to their labor)

    • Much meat and fur was sent west for new markets, and much was left to rot and spoil in the plains, the imagery stark: “there is no sustenance for you here, what remains of your identity is rot”

      
      

Mid 1800s - 1920, Women's Suffrage and Gender Mobilization

• In 1920, nearly 150 years after the nation’s founding, Women were finally federally granted the right to vote with the 19th amendment

  • The struggle was waged through a concerted effort in state legislatures, courts, academia, and public engagement. It took 40 years for the amendment to make its way to law after being introduced to Congress.

  • Same rhetoric used against Women today was employed then: irrational, illiterate, not suited for math or political intrigue, cannot process complex socio-political thought, cannot be trusted to vote

  • As with denying the Black vote, Power used the conditions of depravity it created to prove the incompetence of Women, not based on structural forces, but based on failings inherent to their identity as women.

Political Identities

Skipping through the Civil Rights Movement(1950s-60s) , a period of recent history too significant and vast to bullet point, I’d like to deconstruct Political Identities.

• Identities constructed by the state or society at larger, and then officially encoded through legal and judicial procedures

• Often created expressly to delineate a class of people that Power can apply the law to in precise, demeaning ways.

Black & White

The “White” identity is novel to the Medieval-Modern eras. The nations and kingdoms of the European continent hated one another. The French despised Britain so much it took on more debt in a risky investment to back the Revolutionary Army against the British crown. The identities of “White Europe” were more local and familial, based around patronage of a feudal lord, towns, or cities.

• The “European” or “White” identity did not exist or gain popularity until the nations of Europe began their savage invasion and conquest of the globe. Then a cohesive White identity provided clearer moral, cultural, legal advantages in these exchanges.

• Likewise, kingdoms and tribes of the African coast did not sort themselves under a unified race. Winning polities sold captives to European Slaving ships. In the “New World”, these captives were stripped of language, culture, family and identity to coalesce under the new Black Race.

  • Slavers intentionally split captured Africans from those they may have a common language or culture with, to increase the chaos, instability, and thus ease of control

• These identities were enforced socially and by state intervention. Namely through race mixing ideologies and the classification of the products(children) of rape and abuse endured by Native and Black peoples. It cannot be more obvious that white elites and the state originated identity politics than when staring as an insane sheet classifying the different kinds of slaves based on Black, Native, and White percentages.

  • Mulatto, quadroon, octaroon, mestee . . . the insanity of White Identity Politics created these and many other legal identities to categorize Black people.

    
    

    IDENTITY POLITICS ARE THE INVENTIONS OF WHITENESS, MEN, AND WEALTH

    
    

  • Seeds the colorist form of racism still wielded among non-white communities to this day. Lighter skinned, more white-mixed people were given preferential treatment both by society and their own families

Shifting Bounds of Whiteness, as Convenient to Power

• Slavs, Irish, Italian, etc; Bondage of indentured servants and waves of immigration

  • Again, their histories in this country escape bullet points, but I’d like to highlight that these people, who are now identified as White, had to deal with the realities of the internal European hatred I brought up earlier

  • As they arrived in the US, their movement and associations were monitored, their housing and labor was restricted so they would not compete with, or taint the lives of “White Americans”. The cruelty of society and government pushed people into crime for survival, spawning the notorious crime families of the US. Again, racism lays a self justifying framework.

  • As the population of non-european migrants/nationals grew, they threatened white men’s monopoly on power. White Men realized the political advantages of integrating “inferior europeans” into Whiteness: a united front against the Other.

  • Groups most recently integrated into Whiteness can project some of the most acute trauma in their dogmatic defense of Whiteness. Having just experienced social order from the bottom, they revel in their newfound access to power, which they reaffirm by persecuting those still “beneath” them

    
    

• Biracial People will almost always be referred to as Black by White people, while excluded from black spaces

  • Even when a person is clearly mixed, society will never refer to them as “white”. People will correct this violation of the one drop rule, lambast the white parents for poisoning the bloodline, and both black and white families will express negative sentiments about the racial mixing.

    
    

• Hispanics: picking up on the Iberian white supremacist rhetoric, much of Latin America adopted the delusion that their mixed race people were white

  • Until the 1930’s, the US Census Bureau held the same, Mexicans were white. It was not until the population of these mixed Mexicans began to grow that the US government (aka White Men) realized the danger in giving these mixed race people basic rights

    
    

Latino/Hispanic/Latinx

• Hispanic Ethnicity questions first appear in the 1970s census.

• Mixed race peoples, like those from nations that have undergone prolonged colonialism, occupation, and slavery, threaten the USA’s incredibly rigid and unnatural racial classifications

• Plainly put: latino means a person from Iberian controlled/influenced regions south of the US (see how Filipinos are not considered Latinos but Brazilians are).

  • Imagine census and demographics questions making you choose not just a race, but similarly constructed ethnic groups. What business does a white American steeped in American custom have in claiming all of Europe as part of their essential identity?

  • All the particularities, traditions, and languages of each continent, country, and region are collapsed under a single term.

• Personally, I was raised to check off the Hispanic/Latino boxes

  • Some DNA testing in high school confirmed that I was mostly native, with equal parts black and white mixed in, through the complex process of trade, slavery, and colonialism.

  • Despite the US’s unspoken continuation of the one drop rule, I cannot identify as black. Or white. Or native. I do not present as either, am not treated as either, and have no cultural or personal connections to those identities.

  • I reject identifying myself with a lingering imperial project. I do not partake in the religion, sexist/racist cultural fixtures, or the national hierarchy within the latino umbrella

  • Terms like “latino” do not exist for the benefit of the people they categorize, they exist to consolidate power.

    
    

Pitfalls of Identity Politics

There is truth that essentialist frameworks create many gaps that can be exploited by power. In pursuing legal action for identity-based discrimination, a person who embodies many marginalized classes (including those not protected), will be forced to choose a single protected class from which to argue their case. This creates a hierarchy of subordinate identities, usually subordinate to race or gender, and precludes discussion of intersectional experience and targeting.

This subordination is not a shortsighted error, it is a feature of the legal system. By splitting people to their essential legal categories, forcing them to choose within them or argue another aspect of their identity is meriting the same protected status, the hierarchy of identity is reinforced and legitimized. People will always strive to seek parity with whiteness, wealth, men, status.

The most clear example of the damage essentialist legal perspectives cause comes from the concentrated struggles of Black Women.

• Among black people, Black Men, by virtue of gender, are afforded most of the limited opportunities available.

• And among women, White Women, by virtue of race, are hired and accepted for most of the roles set aside for women.

• A statistical demographics review of a school, org., or leadership would show Black People and Women are present. Diversity has been achieved. In that sleight of hand, essentialist identity politics justify and normalize the exclusion of Black Women.

I could continue

by deconstructing the marriage equality movement for positioning wealthy white male queer interest above all else, as they seek parity with straight counterparts. Meanwhile, marriage equality fails to solve higher rates of violence, homelessness, suicide, and drug use among queer people/teens,

or the insanity and paranoia of the Cold War, in which Identity Politics was weaponized to neutralize and destroy political opponents, with a simple accusation of Communism,

but this project is already long enough. And I am tired.

My efforts here do not aim to debunk conservative talking points and revisionism alone. Liberal and conservatives alike wield identity politics and woke dog-whistling to achieve their political ends. Democratic party leadership wore kente cloths to Congress for photo-ops at the height of BLM protests. Many of the USA’s highest level officials, like Pelosi, are career politicians abusing office to profit.

Identity Politics serves the elite of both parties. They pay lip service to issues because undoing, dismantling, and rebuilding the structural frameworks that generate inequality means losing their power (Obama and Biden’s shift from opposing marriage equality once it became politically advantageous to advance it).

Power and injustice are inseparable under the USA’s(and West’s) socio-political superstructure. Leaders of the current system have shown they place power over the professed values of freedom, liberty, and democracy.

I wanted to overwhelm you with a truth Americans obscure: identities have always been tied to politics.

Identity Politics seem to be an issue only when oppressed classes gather around their shared identities to find power in solidarity and in the struggle for liberation.