Two cheers for identity politics

Over on Bluesky, Nils Gilman reflected:

Thesis:

For the left, the Oppressor / Oppressed binary is a kind of Vulgar Schmittianism (wherein friend / enemy agonism is the essence of politics) inflected through Nietzschean Sklavenmoral (whereby the weak are considered at least morally equal if not morally superior to the powerful).

Thoughts?

I responded with a thread trying to get at some things about social justice advocacy culture which I have long talked around but have been very overdue to treat directly in a post. I have been daunted by the subtleties involved … and realized that my Bluesky reply was Good Enough to serve as a rough introduction to a few essentials.

The left?

We must register two interlocking but conceptually distinct projects lurking in what we are talk about when we talk about The Left. Socialism and social justice are not the same thing. In the US one finds profound tensions & distinctions between socialist advocacy and social justice advocacy, despite many individuals having an investment in both.

The “Oppressor / Oppressed” binary Gilman references here is a framework from social justice advocacy culture. I’ll use the more commonly-used version of that binary: privileged – oppressed.

For those who chafe at the word “privilege”, I take the point about sincere confusion which emerges from its use as a social justice term of art significantly distinct from its ordinary meaning. It was the right word to reach the bourgeous white feminists which the famous knapsack essay addressed back in the ’90s, and the usage stuck.

Social justice ideologies

I find it clarifying to make two cuts between broad social justice ideologies, naming some things which social justice advocacy culture usually does not articulate well.

First, I distinguish the liberal versus identity politics schools of social justice. Here too, the terms of art tend to produce confusion. I lack better substitutes, so I stubbornly insist on using these terms rather than differently-confusing alternatives, since they have deep origins.

Liberalism

“Liberal” is a multi-valent term in any context. Here I mean not liberal as in the policy objectives of the Democratic Party but rather liberal as in an approach to governance & society which grounds political claims in universal egalitarian rights.

The liberal school of social justice vigorously rejects institutional discrimination, and usually to at least some degree exercises institutional power to counter private discrimination as well. It says to treat people equally.

Identity politics

“Identity politics” is an even more fraught term, most often invoked as a bogeyman by opponents of any efforts toward social justice. This is one of many examples of opponents of social justice coöpting a SJ term of art — like “woke”, “politically correct”, and “social justice warrior”. The term “identity politics” was first used in print in the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement, which articulates the fundamentals of the ideology.

Identity politics as starts from a critique of liberalism much like Anatole France’s famous jape that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread”, then offers a box of analytical tools to address this problem with liberal universalism. It says to address people’s differences in a way which delivers equity. This famous cartoon offers a metaphor:

Identity politics attends to categories which shape how individuals & groups interact with society at large: race, gender, class, et cetera. With each axis of identity (like race) we see inequites between privileged positions (white people) and oppressed positions (people of color). Those inequities do not only rest on discrimination; they have a deep systemic inertia from financial & social capital, unconscious bias, et cetera. Identity politics asserts that it is possible and desirable to enact vigorous policy to correct all of those inequities.

To this quick thumbnail sketch of identity politics, I’ll add the concept of intersectionality, which names the way that people occupy positions on mutliple axes which interact in complex ways. No one is simply privileged or oppressed; a gay Black man experiences privilege along the axis of gender and experiences oppression across the axes of sexuality and race. Each position complicates the others; a gay Black man experiences racism differently than a Black straight man or a Black lesbian woman does.

Hard vs soft identity politics

I find it not just illuminating but important to distinguish “soft” from “hard” identity politics. This little taxonomy is my own coinage, but I find that it helps make sense of where a lot of people stand.

The soft school understands itself as a partner to the liberal approach to social injustice, with the two approaches acting as counterweights to each other’s limitations.

The hard school believes that the identity politics toolkit is the only legitimate approach to social justice, rejecting liberalism as nothing other than an instrument for maintaining & justifying inequities.

There is not an entirely bright line between these camps. Among the soft school, people may lean more or less on liberal or identity frameworks, often changing their priorities in different contexts. Among the hard school people still sometimes invoke liberal language about rights et cetera despite their rejection of the liberal framework. Et cetera.

I stand with soft identity politics

Social justice is not my primary political project, but it is important to me and I roll with people who have it as their focus. I know

I am deeply committed to liberal ideals in governance & society and I find the core identity politics critique of the limits of that approach unmistakably correct. The identity politics toolkit not just useful but necessary to understand and address social injustice. And I find the liberal sensibility equally valuable as a counterweight to the failings of the identity politics framework. The two are complimentary.

Criticism

Critique is tricky

Thinking about social justice is legitimately difficult. Reasonable people of good conscience can come to significantly different conclusions. I don’t want to attempt to grapple with all of that, but a few key points are clarifying.

There’s a form of pseudo-liberalism which is just opposition to social justice in disguise, pointing to legitimately tricky questions to rationalize doing nothing at all. Such people say such things as “equal rights, not special rights” and “equality of opportunity, not opportunity of outcome”. They rest a dread of efforts to correct inequities on the impossibility of perfect equity, as if any corrections would lead to a dystopia worse than of Soviet communism. Usually they have an implicit claim that only inequties which result directly from overt discrimination have moral weight … and somehow no evidence of discrimination ever satisfies them.

Many hard identity politics folks presume that boosters for liberal social justice — whether as soft IP or as strictly liberal remedies — is nothing other than apologetics for that kind of opposition to social justice. I respectfully disagree, but see a lot of room for reasonable people to differ. Some even go so far as to imply that they represent the only legitimate school of social justice advocacy that has ever existed; considering that the Civil Rights Movement in the US has the word “rights” in the middle of it, I find that absurd.

Criticizing the logics of identity politics school thoughtfully is very tricky. Much smarter people than me have gone badly wrong attempting it. The questions are subtle on the merits. There is a lot of chaff in the air from opponents of social justice speaking in bad faith … including dishonest versions of Gilman’s pointed question. I want to respond to that question by naming two ways identity politics can go sideways.

Absolutism

Consider how, when trying to understand an axis of identity, people in an oppressed position tend to have a much more sophisticated read of its dynamics than people who occupy the corresponding privileged position, because the oppressed need that understanding in order to navigate their lives, while the system tends to actively conceal much of how it works from the privileged. So white people need to regard our own perceptions of how racism works with skepticism, and generally defer to Black people in understanding racism and deciding what to do to correct it.

Some hard IP social justice advocates tend to describe these patterns not just as strong tendencies but as absolutes. The lived experience of Black people becomes the only ground for understanding racism so that one may, for instance, end up dismissing useful insight from a white historian because it differs from Black cultural memory.

This is tricky to think about. Errors like over-relying on Black cultural memory will still get you a generally better understanding of how racism works than credulously listening to white historians. Correcting such errors at the margins may not be worth the effort. People in privileged positions tend to over-read the oppressed as making bad moves, so the privileged need skepticism about their own reactions. In decisions where the stakes are higher for the oppressed, the oppressed have a moral claim to making the call about what to do.

And absolutist hard identity politics can curdle into truly ugly implications.

Vulgar Fanon-ism

The privilege-oppression framework inherits a lot from the work of Franz Fanon. One might summarize his thinking as saying that one must always check one’s politics against whether at the bottom line it supports the oppressed in overcoming their oppression. He coined the famous aphorism that the oppressed have a right to overthrow their oppression by any means necessary.

If one actually reads Fanon, he cautions about the dangers in reducing that analysis to a campism which justifies brutality in the name of liberation, embracing any means possible, not just whatever means are necessary. I have encountered people who use vulgar Fanon-ism to claim a moral impunity for frightening ruthlessness which parallels Schmitt’s fascist “friend-enemy distinction”.

Against too much worry

I have a little sympathy for the tendency to misread the worst of social justice advocacy culture as its core truth if one lacks intimacy with the movements. It is very easy to misread loud voices as important. As in any radical movement, smug, noisy assholes rationalize themselves with so-called political principle. Social justice advocacy culture does not police those moves as well as I think it should. I have substantial concerns.

But the problem is not nearly as bad as opponents of social justice assert. Indeed, that chaff they throw up presents the biggest obstacle to a better culture of social justice advocacy. Yeah, I have deep frustrations with social justice advocacy culture, even think that a few advocates need to be kept far from the levers of power. But the worst ideas and people do not hold significant power on balance, and will not any time soon.

We must not allow problems with the particulars of social justice advocacy culture get in the way of working for a more just world. Despite real flaws, social justice advocacy culture provides a powerful and necessary toolkit.