Some Thoughts on Identity Politics

I WAS ONCE on a panel with a counselor who proudly claimed her identity as a woman as the reason for her feminist approach to counseling. Toward the end of the discussion, she told the story of a client who frustrated her. A highly educated middle-aged mother of three, this woman (the client) had stepped off the career track to take care of her children. The children were now grown, and she had come to counseling to think through her next steps. My fellow panelist encouraged this client to claim her identity powerfully and express it in public fiercely. The client liked this idea. Some weeks later, she told her counselor that she had gone back to the Catholic church of her childhood and started to attend pro-life rallies.

“That wasn’t what I meant when I told her to claim her identity and express it in public,” the counselor deadpanned, and the liberal university audience laughed along with her.

The exchange left me feeling queasy. Here was a counselor purporting to empower the identity and expression of a client in a period of transition and then being disappointed that her client hadn’t chosen the identity and expression the counselor desired. And the public affirmation of the counselor in a room full of people who clearly shared her worldview felt doubly unsettling.

Like many of you, I’ve been closely following the raging debate among progressives about “identity liberalism.” There was Mark Lilla in The New York Times writing that it was the reason that Hillary Clinton lost the election. And there was Michael Eric Dyson writing that actually it hadn’t gone far enough.

What’s been missing for me is a way of distinguishing between constructive diversity work and the kind that I understand to be counterproductive. I’d qualify the story above as an example of the latter.

In my mind, constructive diversity work calls upon the broader society to recognize that race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexuality are identity markers that matter a great deal to a great many people and consequently pattern much of personal, social, and political life. Multicultural efforts are about achieving pluralism, which I define as ensuring that diverse identities are recognized by our legal system and respected by our social institutions; that there are positive relationships between different communities; and that concrete partnerships are built to advance the common good. These aims are at the heart of the American project. Martin Luther King Jr. characterized it as “the American dream, the dream of [people] of all races, creeds, national backgrounds, living together as brothers [and sisters].”

Identity politics very importantly added a power analysis into the conversation. People who for centuries were not allowed to vote, own property, marry, write their own history, or simply express themselves are manifestly not on equal footing with those who were afforded such advantages. This shift was essential in recognizing that all identity categories are not starting from the same place in access to power and self-determination.

But some of the radical elements of identity politics advanced dogmas that may well be undermining the very values that undergird the movement for multiculturalism. These dogmas include, but are not limited to:

• highlighting certain very important identities (race, gender, religion, sexuality) while de-emphasizing others that clearly matter in personal lives and social patterns (education, health, geography);
• assigning the preferred identity categories a set of predetermined politics, suggesting that all people should think the same way as they do; and
• dividing people into the roles of oppressed and oppressor based on their race, gender, or sexuality without much regard to their other identities or even how they understand themselves.

The work of the multicultural movement is too important to allow it to be undermined by these less-productive influences of identity politics.