I know there is someone out there, reading the headline above and sighing, “Why, Esul, why? Gender, race, political correctness–come on. Can you please talk about the Iran Deal or the Pope or the Syrian refugee crisis? Something that doesn’t concern identity politics. Please, Esul, I beg you. Talk about real politics.”
However, politics that are just “politics” are implicitly identity politics. Certain conservatives may not talk about their whiteness or straightness, but when they support prayer in schools, hawkish foreign policies, stringent immigration control, and the end of welfare, they are defending the quintessential American identity: the religious, unrelenting, white, self-reliant participant in the American Dream.
If you want to talk about the separation of church and state, foreign policy, immigration, and Social Security, you’ve entered the realm of identity politics. When I talk about the issues that affect me, my peers shouldn’t dismiss me because I am talking about my identity. People tell me that I am “putting my identity” into conversations that “aren’t about identity.” They don’t seem to understand that they too, are talking about identity – they just don’t know.
Yet, most people don’t believe this. While some people eagerly talk about their identities, others easily get tired of the subject. They don’t want to keep hearing about someone’s blackness or bisexuality, so they refer to these issues as “identity politics,” making it easier to tune out their voices in the future. They want to move on to the more “important” politics of money and war, and they expect their candidates to have similar priorities. As Matthew Yglesias wrote recently in Vox, “But those with the right identities have the privilege of simply calling [those issues] politics while labeling other people’s agendas ‘identity’.”
There is a misguided idea that focus on certain identities–usually race and gender–detracts from the “real” issues. Real issues are supposedly issues that aren’t connected to identity, but, there is no such thing as an identity-free issue. For example, economics and foreign policy are often considered identity-free issues. That’s a false assumption because if you want to discuss economic policy, you are almost always doing so from a particular perspective with a particular identity. Fiscal conservative or fiscal liberal–those are identities, because they are labels by which we chose to define our values and ourselves. The same thing applies to foreign policy–you can be an aggressive hawk or a peaceful dove, to use political terminology. While our social identities are constructed by identifiers such as socioeconomic class and gender identity, the identities that we are born into aren’t our only ones. Identity politics isn’t a special realm of politics for race and gender issues–it’s everything.
As a friend and ally to other people of color, I don’t want to see their issues being dismissed as “identity politics.” A conversation about mass incarceration shouldn’t turn into a conversation about “black issues” or “black politics.” When a young black man is convicted of a crime, largely because of the color of his skin, and is sentenced to spend years of his life in a jail cell, disenfranchised and silenced, that should be considered a national issue, not a “black” issue. Black communities shouldn’t be politicized to the point where candidates throw around “black-on-black”crime when it is clear that the root of the problem is how justice is administered in our country. When people of color at the school talk about police brutality, immigration, or being a woman of color at Choate or in this country, don’t stop listening because you think the conversation has shifted to being about identity. It’s still a conversation about politics – politics rooted in identity, but politics nonetheless. It’s a conversation that deserves to be heard, just like conversations about the Iran Deal or the economy are.
Furthermore, as a biracial woman, I should have the right to have my identities seen as the “correct” identity – an identity that is worth talking about, that is worth being treated as legitimate politics, I want candidates to talk about issues that affect Asian-American communities, women’s rights, discrimination against gender, sexual and romantic minorities (GSRM).
However, this often isn’t the case. Women’s rights are seen as a fringe issue, not a national issue, and when women are talked about, it is often in the context of abortion and religious rights. The fact that there are women in Texas who live several hours away from the nearest women’s health clinic and lack access to proper reproductive shouldn’t healthcare only concern women and it shouldn’t be treated as a “women’s issue.”
Looking forward, there is going to be a lot of talk about politics. If we want to engage in those conversations as a community, that doesn’t mean only engaging in conversations about the “real” politics; it means engaging in conversations about race and gender because they are also real politics. So, person-out-there, you’ll probably see more headlines containing the words “identity,” “race,” “feminism,” or a combination of the three. I am making my politics heard. I am making my voice count.
