A compelling argument for the need to tackle identity questions before moving
on to those universalist ones, particularly that of class . . . Although
along with bell hooks I think questions of class are more important than
those of race, gender, sexuality, etc., I do think Duberman presents a valid
argument that those other categories often stand in the way of achieving
human rights, especially as long as "human" is defined de facto (as well as,
often, de jure) as white, straight, able-bodied, and male . . .

In These Times
July 9, 2001

In Defense of Identity Politics
Martin Duberman

http://www.inthesetimes.com/web2516/duberman2516.html

In recent years there has been a mounting attack on "identity politics,"
political groupings that push agendas based on race, ethnicity, gender and
sexual orientation. Such politics, it has been argued, hardens boundaries
between oppressed groups and, further, prevents them from mobilizing
collectively around the more important issues of class division and economic
inequity.

In his 1995 book, The Twilight of Common Dreams, Todd Gitlin characterized
"identity politics" as "groups overly concerned with protecting and purifying
what they imagine to be their identities." Not only are these groups
self-deluded, but, according to Gitlin, "Identity politics is an American
tragedy ... a very bad turn, a detour into quicksand."

Since 1995, Gitlin's thesis has found wide currency among straight white men
on the left. Their common argument goes along these lines: No substantial or
unified left exists today. Instead there are "several small lefts" and
"disconnected shards." (No quarrel yet.) Among these fragments are remnants
of the '60s civil rights movement, some segments of organized labor, some
environmentalists and various activists for the disabled, the aged and the
homeless. Towering above all these, the vanguard, as it were, are the
"identity movements," the multiculturalists, each group out for itself, none
with an analysis of what unites people.

The critics of identity politics  (including some gay critics, like Andrew
Sullivan) insist that multiculturalists must "stretch beyond" their cultures
and identities, beyond a shaky coalition of outgroups, beyond the demands
that have, according to Michael Tomasky, "nothing to do with a larger concern
for our common humanity and everything to do with a narrow concern for
fragmented and supposedly oppositional cultures." Others who have inveighed
against identity politics usually do so in comparably patronizing terms.
Ralph Nader told us, for example, that "gonadal politics" are a trivializing
distraction from the genuinely important agenda of economic issues.

Those on the left who inveigh against identity politics assume that "class"
is the transcendent category, and issues relating to gender, race and
sexuality are marginalized as comparatively insignificant. Among the many
confusions in attempting to establish a hierarchy of what is the "most" or
"least" important social issue is a bottom-line unawareness of how these
struggles intersect.

The labor movement itself can quite reasonably be described as historically
based on identity politics: For a long period it exclusively defended "its
own." Class solidarity was reduced to protecting union members against the
great unwashed, unorganized mass of female and nonwhite workers. Indeed,
racism, sexism and homophobia in the workplace inescapably affect how and
whether workers will see their grievances as ones held in common. Until the
CIO came along in the '30s, black workers were essentially barred from union
membership, and are still not fully welcome in some industries like
construction. Many working-class whites have long since chosen to identify
with their skin color rather than with "alien others" (especially blacks) who
share their class oppression; it has been more important to declare their
superiority to blacks--and their primary bond with fellow whites of all
classes--than to collaborate with "inferiors" in a protest movement based on
class.

In other words, long before identity politics purportedly pushed the white
working class to the right, its own conservative cultural views had long
since solidly planted it there. "Class," in other words, is inherently a
cultural issue; solidarity based on economic issues can never come about
until divisions based on gender, race and sexuality are recognized (even if
not resolved) as central to achieving such a goal. As Amber Hollibaugh has
argued in her recent book, My Dangerous Desires: "I don't think the union
movement can survive if people don't see it as part of their culture. ...
Issues that are specific to their individual social experiences have to
emerge ... but gay people are working-class people ... they need to be able
to bring their queer, working-class selves out to the union. ... Does the
union movement want its children or not? That's the real question."

To which I would add a second "real question": Is the gay movement ever going
to be willing to take on the class dimensions of its own struggle? To date,
it has not. And that is why most national gay organizations push for agendas
(gay marriage, gays in the military) that do not resonate for, say,
working-class dykes concerned about issues relating to shrinking real income
or dead-end jobs or HIV or substance abuse or domestic violence.

If we in the gay movement need to recognize class-based issues more, the
critics of identity politics need to understand that issues relating to
gender and sexuality are not trivial, but central to people's lives.

Instead of such recognition, we are subject to lectures about the relative
unimportance of our issues, chastising us for our "narrow" concern with our
"supposedly" oppositional cultures. Our critics continually refer to identity
politics as a "distraction." They refer to "faux-radical multiculturalism"
and its "superficially transgressive ideas."

But declaring certain ideas superficial does not make them so--especially
since it is far from clear that these critics have remotely understood them.
They need to draw their chairs in closer and listen harder to the intricate
conversations taking place on the multicultural left. The radical
redefinitions of gender and sexuality that are under discussion (and
contention) in feminist and queer circles contain a potentially
transformative challenge to what has been called "regimes of the normal."

The critics of identity politics give no sign that they have actually read,
let alone absorbed, the work of queer theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
Jeffrey Weeks, Michael Warner, Wayne Koestenbaum or Judith Butler--to name
only a few of the more prominent. A large body of work now exists that, taken
together, presents a startling set of postulates about such matters of
universal importance as the historicity and fluidity of sexual desire, the
performative nature of gender, and the complex multiplicity of attractions,
fantasies, impulses and narratives that lie within us all.

These are not small, narrow, superficial matters of concern only to the
self-absorbed few--ignorance alone allows them to be so characterized. Were
the anti-identity politics crowd to open its ears and refuse to settle for
Reader's Digest versions of feminist and gay analysis, it would have to come
to grips with any number of discomforting notions.

To understand how and why sexual and gender identities get socially
constructed is, in fact, to open up a new way of talking about politics, of
talking about how relations of power get established, about the role of the
state in reinforcing and policing that set of relations in the name of
maintaining the stakes of the already privileged. Try to imagine the
consequences, for example, of reconsidering, as feminist and queer theorists
have been asking us to do, traditional definitions of gender. Is it fair to
men (we know it isn't fair to anyone else) to be viewed as inflexible, driven
engines of action, accumulation and domination? A freer definition of the
male self, the heightened ability of men to embrace the varied impulses
within, could loosen their iron drive for control, their over-representation
in positions of power, their unmodulated resort to violence as the preferred
means for resolving conflict. These are emancipatory possibilities--for
everyone. They could lead us back to that unfinished dialogue from the '60s
about the nature of "human nature," about the need for personal
transformation to precede or accompany any lasting social transformation.

This is hardly an ersatz sideshow. It is instead a matter of the
non-feminist, non-queer left not bothering to listen, not taking seriously
the foundational work being done on gender and sexuality. If it were
listening, it would find potent tools at hand for informing the struggle
against entrenched class (and race and gender) hierarchies of privilege and
power about which they care so much.

The ideas being generated on the multicultural left are not "supposedly"
oppositional;  they are fundamentally so. They have everything to do with the
"larger concern for our common humanity" that our critics loudly insist is
absent from identity politics. Perhaps henceforth, when we talk about
"re-envisioning the left," we need to put high on the agenda (it is now
nowhere in sight) the patronizing inability or unwillingness of many on the
left to take seriously the far-reaching work being done in feminist and queer
circles.

Moreover, a long-standing debate has been going on among multiculturalists
themselves about the inadequacy, incompleteness or possible transience of
identity labels like "black" or "gay" or "Latino." Many minority
intellectuals are troubled about the inability of overarching categories or
labels to represent accurately the complexities and sometimes overlapping
identities of individual lives. We are also uncomfortable referring to
"communities" as if they were homogenous units rather than the hothouses of
contradiction they actually are. We're concerned, too, about the inadequacy
of efforts to create bridges between marginalized people and then extensions
outward to broader constituencies.

Yet we hold on to a group identity, despite its insufficiencies, because for
most non-mainstream people it's the closest we have ever gotten to having a
political home--and voice. Yes, identity politics reduces and simplifies.
Yes, it is a kind of prison. But it is also, paradoxically, a haven. It is at
once confining and empowering. And in the absence of alternative havens,
group identity will for many of us continue to be the appropriate site of
resistance and the main source of comfort.

The anti-multiculturalists' high-flown, hectoring rhetoric about the need to
transcend these allegiances, to become "universal human beings with universal
rights," rings hollow and hypocritical. It is difficult to march into the
sunset as a "civic community" with a "common culture" when the legitimacy of
our differentness as minorities has not yet been more than superficially
acknowledged--let alone safeguarded. You cannot link arms under a
universalist banner when you can't find your own name on it. A minority
identity may be contingent or incomplete, but that does not make it
fabricated or needless. And cultural unity cannot be purchased at the cost of
cultural erasure.

Martin Duberman teaches history at CUNY. This article was adapted from an
essay in his most recent book, Left Out (Basic Books). His play on the life
of Emma Goldman will be produced this coming season at Rattlestick Theater in
New York. He is completing a novel on the Haymarket Affair.