Between two identitarian politics? 'Uncle Sam' poses with cardboard cut-outs of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, November 2016.Jane Barlow\/Press Association. All rights reserved. <\/i><\/p>\n
In a recent essay for AlterNet<\/em>, Many forms of identity politics amount to struggles for This may be true enough, but it seems that we are The growth of contemporary identity politics, with its Telling the inhabitants of the American Rust Belt or inner Of course, the extent to which any political action embodies The intersections of gender and race also produce needless A peculiar implication of cultural elitism surrounds many of It is not simply the ideologies of identity politics which Meanwhile, the archaic division of the world into 'men' and Many of the causes of contemporary identity politics grew It also doesn't help that many trans and race issues on the It may indeed be prolier-than-thou, but it is also sensible to It is not difficult to find further examples of To conclude, these social justice struggles need to be Perhaps the greatest current problem with identity politics The philosopher Richard Laurie Penny said Between two identitarian politics? 'Uncle Sam' poses with cardboard cut-outs of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, November 2016.Jane Barlow\/Press Association. All rights reserved. In a recent essay for AlterNet, Bill Fletcher defends the general concept of identity politics in the following terms: "What passes for identity politics should actually be understood as social justice struggles…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nBill Fletcher defends the general concept of identity politics in the following
\nterms: "What passes for identity politics should actually be understood as
\nsocial justice struggles that aim for consistent democracy and become, as a
\nresult, component parts of the larger class struggle. … This is not
\nself-indulgent activity by people who, for whatever reason, do not recognize
\nthe importance of economics."<\/p>\n
\ndifferent types of social justice, and are not simply concerned with personal
\nidentity. Despite the intensely self-oriented conception of politics
\npromulgated by these cultures, all politics is ultimately a form of identity
\npolitics. It's peculiar that only Hillary Clinton's campaign has been accused
\nof indulging too much in identitarianism by stressing Clinton's gender, whilst
\nDonald Trump's campaign is oddly not considered an example of identity
\npolitics, even though he ran explicitly as a tough, white alpha male. <\/p>\n
\nnevertheless increasingly moving towards a political culture in which transgender
\nbathroom and locker room access is viewed as a more urgent task than tackling
\ngrowing inequality and the deterioration of workers' rights through the
\npromotion of gig economies.<\/p>\n
\nexpanding range of genders \u2013 take the concept of 'aero-gender', in which an
\nindividual changes their gender based on their current environment \u2013 may reflect
\nless of a nuanced advance and more of an increasingly fragile sexual and racial
\nidentity, stretched to the point of collapse.<\/p>\n
\ncity Glasgow that they benefit from 'white privilege' is not simply inaccurate,
\nbut deeply insulting, and seems almost designed to alienate certain voters
\nsharply from those fellow members of the working-class who engage in virtue
\nsignalling (an Alt-Right term, but potentially appropriate nonetheless) and
\none-upmanship rather than compassion. <\/p>\n
\nvirtue signalling is ultimately impossible to gauge due to the inherently
\nperformative nature of moral actions, but the fact that the concept is invoked
\nso often surely indicates the prevalence of whatever cluster of psychological
\nmechanisms lies behind it.<\/p>\n
\nhypocrisies: such as promoting multiculturalism whilst railing against 'cultural
\nappropriation'; promoting freedom of sexual relations and casual hook-ups as a
\nform of political liberation whilst demonising those who engage in such
\nbehaviour.<\/p>\n
\nthese issues. Consider Black Lives Matter. The priorities of most American and
\nBritish workers do not centre on the rates of black arrests and police
\nshootings, but rather centre on employment along with mistreatment and exploitation
\nby managers. BLM is a very important movement, but placing it at the centre of left
\nprogressivism in the US (and to some extent in the UK) surely serves to
\nalienate many potential allies.<\/p>\n
\nare corrosive, but also the language. In Britain, the phrase 'coloured people'
\nis considered deeply racist, but the semantically identical term 'people of
\ncolour' is thought to be progressively tolerant, respectful to non-whites, and
\nuttered only by those with the utmost respect for all living creatures. <\/p>\n
\n'women' is thought by many to be extremely 'transphobic' and reactionary. The demand
\n(in Canada, now a legal demand) for people to refer to trans people using
\nparticular personalised pronouns (beyond 'he' or 'she') not only violates free
\nspeech (although it may confer personal respect), it additionally forces a
\nsharp reorientation in linguistic behaviour in a way that is not conducive to realistic
\nlexical change.<\/p>\n
\nout of movements that were initially highly urgent and legitimate. But, having
\nachieved most of their major demands (i.e. the major demands of the LGBT groups
\nof the 1990s), a small sector of these groups were compelled to hang on to their
\nmovements and so needed to find new enemies, new injustices, new forms of
\npreviously invisible oppression. Hence the rise of acutely sensitive
\nmicroaggressions targeting sexist air conditioning and similar obstacles to
\nworld peace. It should be possible to present and discuss genuine criticisms of
\ntrigger warning culture without the resort to personal insults. These forms of
\nmicroaggressions against <\/em>microaggressions
\nonly serve to bolster this culture.<\/p>\n
\nleft are couched in academic 'theory', political science jargon which views
\npolitics as an intellectual puzzle to be solved, rather than an actual state of
\naffairs to be tackled concretely. Suspicion of academic theory is known as 'anti-intellectualism',
\nwith the prominent British political theorist and 'broadcaster' Richard Seymour
\nmocking it for being 'prolier-than-thou', as if using an ironic label removes
\nany obligation to engage with the arguments presented.<\/p>\n
\ndoubt the wisdom of the recent claim by the British Medical Association that
\nusing the phrase 'expectant mother' is transphobic, since it could offend some
\ntransgender and intersex people. Oddly, even though they are in an overwhelming
\nminority, offence taken by trans people is somehow deemed more legitimate than
\noffence taken by cisgender people. Many cisgender women are offended by not
\nbeing able to call themselves, or be referred to as, expectant mothers.<\/p>\n
\nself-defeating identitarianism. The recent trailer for the new Netflix show Dear White People <\/em>has been met,
\npredictably, with the claim that the show is racist and divisive. The trailer
\non YouTube currently has 50,000 likes and 460,000 dislikes. The show involves a
\nyoung black woman calling out white people for, amongst other things, wearing
\noffensive Halloween costumes. The show includes a scene in which a group of
\nwhite frat boys don black face, but instead of educating them about its
\noffensive history a group of black men physically attack the white students and
\ntrash their party. It's unclear exactly how this is a positive message to
\nviewers \u2013 in fact, if anything the show reinforces the stereotype of young
\nblack men as unusually violent. Consider the response a non-black and non-white
\nviewer would have to this show. A young Indian man, for instance, could hardly
\nbe blamed if he opted against moving in next to well-groomed white students or
\nyoung edgy black activists. The show merely serves to cause further harmful
\ndivisions.<\/p>\n
\naccommodated by the left, but after a proper assessment. Race and trans issues
\nshould have their prominence modulated exclusively by the social context they
\nfind themselves in, rather than arbitrarily being assigned highest or lowest
\nprominence.<\/p>\n
\nis that it encourages people to think that their personal identity is somehow
\nrelevant when discussing facts and statistics. Many conversations about crime
\nand poverty begin with statements like "As a white man I believe that…"
\nor "As a woman of colour it is clear to me that…" as if personal
\nexperience – however relevant this may be to other conversations – somehow
\ninfluences these facts.<\/p>\n
\nRorty wrote that, "The heirs of the New Left of the Sixties have
\ncreated, within the academy, a cultural Left. Many members of this Left specialize
\nin what they call the 'politics of difference' or 'of identity' or 'of
\nrecognition.' This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money,
\nmore about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and
\nevident greed." As Rorty's comments suggest, preaching the gospel of
\nidentity and gender fluidity will only serve to increase the mood of
\nanti-politics spreading through the minds of many Trump and UKIP supporters.<\/p>\n
\nlast year that the reason she didn't want to publicly debate Milo Yiannopoulos
\nis because she knew she'd lose. Instead of debating their enemies like Milo,
\nmany leftists engage in no-platforming, refusing to 'normalise' reactionary
\nviews yet simultaneously failing to counter them directly. The socialist playwright
\nEdward Bond said that "If you can't face\u00a0Hiroshima\u00a0in the theatre, you'll eventually end up in\u00a0Hiroshima itself." Likewise, if
\nthe left is not prepared to face, debate and hold the alt-right to account, we
\nshouldn't be surprised when conservatism \u2013 as already predicted \u2013 becomes the
\nnew radicalism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"