Limitations of Identity-based Politics

by Shane Creepingbear

 

There was a time when conversations about privilege and identity-based oppression were strong and important tools towards defining political movements. In particular, these conversations were often used in higher education to get white people to talk about whiteness, as a 101 conversation towards a broader understanding of oppression. Understanding how your interactions and the unchecked ways you can marginalize people you are interacting with in social, professional and classroom settings is undeniably important, but not as an end unto itself. The end is the liberation of all nationally oppressed peoples. Unfortunately, privilege discourse has become its own, nearly ubiquitous political line, its hamster wheel politics. Its the same conversations over and over again. Its constant struggle with no progress. Talking about privilege is a legitimate method to catalog some of the ways some individuals tend to benefit over others, but it can’t go much further than that.

 

 

While we should recognize the importance of a basic understanding of identity-based oppressions, it's also important to understand the limitations of the discourse. Framing identity-based oppression as the main political line does not allow for the adequate deconstruction of oppressive structural issues built to maintain white supremacy and disrupt national liberation of the oppressed. Identity discourse alone cannot fix structural problems because rather than opening up to a wider critique, it atomized the issues to their smallest level: the individual’s responsibility to “check themselves” when they marginalize another person from a “more oppressed” identity group. These privilege politics have observably stalled progress towards breaking down white supremacy.

 

 

It’s time to stop centering our discourse around identity-based privilege politics. Call-out culture and privilege-checking, as political tools, ultimately amount to little more than a series of underwhelming interpersonal confessions. Discussion of skin privilege, for example, places whiteness at the focal point; the discourse of identity politics will group as many people into the category of white as possible, which is in no way a new phenomenon. This is largely where the term “white passing” has developed— and although this wasn’t a term used until recently, the discourse around it is very similar to how grouping as many indigenous peoples as white was used as a tool for colonial and cultural genocide. In many cases when someone uses the term “white passing,” they are actually describing a situation of colorism or shadeism, although not necessarily accurately. These terms are prescribed to any discriminatory behavior anywhere in the world, as long as it has to do with skin tone. There is a paper by Solomon Leong that explores the notion of “fair skin” and its social construction in Hong Kong as a basis of a social hierarchy that gave birth to the design and marketing of skin whitening products. In the paper Leong describes skin tone as “as a visual agent in defining the boundaries of cultural identity, and in identifying a person's place in a local social hierarchy." The acute reality is that there are benefits to being lighter skinned, but this is not “white privilege.”   

 

 

“White privilege” cannot and does not exist monolithically and as such is an inadequate framework for analysing whiteness, a concept that varies drastically based on context. “White privilege” is a moving target that cannot discern geographic location, socioeconomic status or the effects of colonialism and settlerism. Ironically, it’s the same homogenous definition that settler scumbags have been wielding for hundreds of years to justify the theft of land and resources from Indigenous peoples. Four hundred years of European colonization in the Americas has widened the gene pool, allowing for native peoples with the possibility of lighter skin, hair and eye color. Andrew Jackson, the seventh U.S. president, used that effect as justification for the removal of Cherokee peoples from their lands, saying they were now really “white” and hence their lands were not entitled to them. Natives Americans were valued for their land so it makes sense from a colonial lens to group as many to be as white as possible.

 

This is a good example of how privilege rhetoric becomes increasingly confusing and obfuscating. People describe privilege with rubrics that say things like, “you do not get followed around in stores,” or “no one questions you when you get a great job.” This understanding of privilege becomes a way to selectively describe oppression as interpersonal discrimination, a kind of idealistic reductionism that gets nowhere near the real issue. The issues at play are structural, not individual. Colorism is real—light skin does come with its benefits—but both colorism and racism were born out of white supremacy, the structural basis for a huge portion of the oppression that exists in the United States today.

 

 

The term and idea of “whiteness” is new to our history. When Europeans settlers came to the U.S. they came with distinct identity categories: Irish, Dutch, English, and so on. Elite rich white planters developed colonies in the south with slavery as the economic foundation. Virginia had about 50 families that fit within this “elite” category, and the whites in the south were vastly outnumbered by large numbers of black slaves and indigenous peoples in the area. Class lines began to harden. As the distinctions between rich and poor became more apparent, the elites began to fear an uprising from below. As slaves revolted, the rich began to worry that discontented whites—the urban poor, indentured servants, tenant farmers, soldiers, and the property-less—would join forces with black slaves in rebellion based on class alliances. In 1676, Bacon’s Rebellion—in which white frontiersmen and indentured servants revolted with black slaves—shook the planter elite to the core. Revolts spread throughout the colonies, from New York to South Carolina. The elites’ solution was to divide and control this broad working-class alliance. Certain privileges were given to white indentured servants;they were allowed to join militias, carry guns, acquire land, and have other legal rights not allowed to slaves. But to gain these privileges, one had to be legally declared white on the basis of skin color and continental origin. This solidified poor whites as legally "superior" to Blacks and Indians. Thus, whiteness was deployed as an apparatus to prevent lower-class whites from joining people of color, especially Blacks, in revolt against their shared class enemies. Even today, unity across color lines remains the biggest threat in the eyes of a white ruling class.

 

The context of the history of “whiteness” begins to show the limitation of identity politics. When these conversations take shape they rarely take any aspect of economic position into account. Identity politics have the tendency to emphasize matters of culture, language, ethnicity, ability, and so on while avoiding underlying issues of economic exploitation and oppression. The role of imperialism in sustaining the system of social oppression is rarely considered, even though it’s the systemic root of racial oppression in the U.S. today. “Whiteness” developed as a class alliance to undermine any attempts by lower and working classes to liberate themselves, and simply cataloging privileges is not enough to deconstruct a system of racial oppression that has intentionally constructed us in opposition to each other in order to decrease our chances of revolutionary success.

 

 

Building and maintaining class solidarity is one of our strongest assets as we challenge and deconstruct white supremacy, and we must leave space for solidarity outside of a particular national and cultural groups. We are working towards queer liberation, and the liberation of all oppressed national groups, but liberal identity politics have become embedded in the minutia of discourse, and discourse alone. It will take a deep examination of the history of oppression and how it is currently maintained, and the creation of a strong and unified political line across these struggles if we’re going to tear them down.