A RECENT Washington Post article describes a group of 200 people of color rallying in front of the White House on immigration policy. They carried signs about President Trump and chanted slogans related to the Dreamers. Can you guess the content of their signs and slogans?
The article explains that the chants at the rally included “Indians Love Trump,” and the signs called for legislative movement on DALCA, not DACA. (The “L” stands for legal, and speaks to the residency situation of this group of largely highly educated tech workers.)
This is a group that likes the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. Actually, based on the article, it appears that they like a lot of policies being advanced by the Trump administration.
When is the last time that you associated a group of people of color protesting outside the White House with support for President Trump? Well, there they were.
I found myself especially offended at this group because they carried signs that said things such as “Indians Love Trump.” I’m an Indian, and I certainly don’t love Trump. What right did they have to implicate me in their retrograde views?
But if I didn’t like them carrying signs that implicated me, shouldn’t I be opposed to all identity politics? After all, wasn’t this group simply following the logic of identity politics to the letter? Because they hold identity X, they claimed a special authority to speak on issue Y, with the understanding that their position Z should be taken especially seriously.
And they used language in a way (“Indians Love Trump”) that implicated not just the group who showed up, but all the people who happened to share identity X. In the case of Indians, that number would be north of a billion.
Frankly, I’m so used to this identity-politics logic model when it is used to support progressive conclusions (conclusions I generally share) that I wouldn’t have even looked twice at this article if the group had been protesting Trump immigration policies instead of supporting them. And I probably wouldn’t have minded so much that their signs implicated me.
This is, after all, the model so many discussions on campus follow these days.
“Latinos believe that Trump’s immigration policies discriminate against their communities.” “Black people believe the criminal justice system is racist.” “Women want to control their own bodies and are therefore pro-choice.” One’s identity confers authority, both to speak for a wider circle and to take a position on an important issue.
What happens when that same identity-politics logic model is followed—but in a direction you don’t like, toward a conclusion that you find repugnant? What happens, in other words, when your favored group speaks on a topic of intimate concern, implicating you, but does not hold your preferred worldview?
Latinos who call for a border wall? African Americans who support stop-and-frisk? Women who are pro-life? Indians who worship Trump because he saves them money on taxes?
It’s not like such people don’t exist. Do we say that they are not true Latinos or African Americans or women or Indians? Do we find ourselves in the uncomfortable (and, I believe, untenable) position of saying that the only true Indians/Latinos/etc. are the ones who both share the ethnic category and agree with our progressive worldviews?
Do we call into question the logic model of identity politics?
Eboo Patel (@EbooPatel), founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, writes about social justice from his perspective as a Muslim American of Indian heritage.
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