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 On "denying how important identity in politics is", or: "even what is identity really?"

“Q: You noted the importance of defining racism, but unless I missed it, which is possible, I didn't hear your personal definition. Is there one you would offer us, like how do you define racism?”

“A: I would define it as a collection of racist policies, that lead to racial inequity, that are substantiated by racist ideas." [Laughter] "...And anti-racism is a collection of anti-racist policies leading to racial equity that are substantiated by anti-racist ideas.".   Ibram X Kendi (2019) at "the Aspen Institute of Ideas"

"Do I believe in God? Can’t answer, I’m afraid. I’m not being flippant, but I don’t understand the question. What is it that I am supposed to believe or not believe in? Are you asking whether I believe there is something not in the universe (or the universes, if there are (maybe infinitely) many of them), and that somehow stands above them? I’ve never heard of any reason for believing that. Something else? What?"

Forum post by Noam Chomsky, c 1990s

Marxists and Marxians (like myself) are every now and again asked whether we truly go to the extremes  as to "deny how important identity in peoples lives is" Of course, no correct-think person will ever deny something as obvious as identity?

Jacobin recently interviewed with a Democratic Socialist upstart who checks all of the "identity boxes:"

Jacobin: “How do you think your disability has informed your politics?”

Justin Farmer: "Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man, talks about how the communist movement kind of failed black people because we were afraid to talk about identity politics (idpol). As a black, disabled, working-class son of an immigrant, the issues are just more personal to me. I have a brother who is undocumented; he’s not my blood brother, but I can empathize with that. I have a church family, I have a trans sister — these issues are so much closer to me."

And I have a disability. Often, people see me wearing headphones and a tie, and they’re confused about why I’m in a space. Then they’ll ask me about my story and they’ll share with me some of their challenges and that’s been something beautiful to kind of break down barriers. In many ways, rooms that I should have never been in, and walking out with people saying “this is the type of person we need in these conversations.”

Obviously Ralph Ellison couldn't have talked about identity politics (idpol) since the term "identity politics" didn't exist back then. Here's what Ellison really thought of "black identity"

Ralph Ellison disliked the term African American. “I am an American.” he would say

Ralph Ellison, who after purging his Communist leanings turned into a conservative anticommunist, had as much contempt for the identitiarian black radicals of 1960s as he had for the CPUSA. 

The CPUSA, though wasn't just in the vanguard to fight Jim Crow. The CPUSA went so far as to demand an autonomous black republic within the confides of the "black belt." 

Ralph Ellison ended up seeing the Communist anti-racism as cynical pandering that was done by a political movement that was fundamentally "un-American" . He would without a doubt hold the "black democratic socialists" of our day together with their demands for reparations and Liberal 2.0 pseudo prison ‘abolishment’ — in much the same contempt. Ellison would see the demands for the woke white Liberal 2.0ers to become even more woke as a bizarre plea for increasingly cynical pandering.

Having dispensed with this risible ventriloquizing of Ralph Ellison in the name of progressive idpol, what should be made of the commonly heard demand to "affirm how identity is important?"

When people say such things, what are they implying? What is identity and why how is identity "important"?

Jacobin's interviewee Justin Farmer lists all of his "identities": black, disabled, migrant, working class, from a religious family

Is there anything that is not an "identity"? We now have people seriously honestly "discussing" being out of shape or in good health as "identities." I postulate who is to say that they aren't?

Literally any and all things can be an identity and a person can be identified in numerous ways. Your Social Security number is your identity. Identity like that is only a label: one that is ascriptive and tautological. Yes people can invest an identity relation with more added on meaning, police the boundaries of it and deploy it for political reasons. The politicization of identity is in reality the entire point in a nutshell, or instead the one and only point, of the discourse of contemporary identity.

So the question is similar to asking "are you opposed to stuff" or "are you going to deny that me and me and you are you"? This often leads to "are you denying that me and people similar to me exist and are valid"?

The curious thing about people that would ask these types of questions is that it is those people who do refuse to research and understand the historical specificity and the political role of "identity." 

Or to say it this way, they wish to assert the importance of it without explaining it. You'll come to see that these people are in the business of asserting such things without them explaining or examining them, and they enjoy ascribing "identity" exactly for this such a reason:

"I am X, so you are X also, so therefore we both are part of the X community. How come? Because we're both X.  X is what we are. It's super important because it's of high importance for people. What’s left here to discuss?" It’s like a collective identity prison where identifies define people and they are trapped in their identity  

Like they kick out of telling their non woke targets, it's not their "job to educate you." Indeed, they assert how identity is important, even its sanctity, while at the same time treating identity as an utter banality.

This is due to the fact that any type of interrogation of the historical and social specificity of ascribed identity exposes its political payload. Idpol supporters desire "identity" to be viewed as pre-political, ahistorical and in full anodyne exactly for the sake of insulating themselves from political criticism. 

Though identity is political, but political not in the sense that "everything is political." Identity is political in the sense that it is entangled with idpol: identity and idpol ultimately are one in the same.

As people like Eric Hobsbawm and Marie Moran have pointed out, "identity" — as an all-purpose sociological label and too as a sort of synonym for "group belonging" — emerged during the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

Hobsbawm has said that the rampant use of "identity" and "community," typically in the same sentence, came at the precise time when real communities, along with the shared cultural practices and traditional roles within them, was disintegrating within the US.

Thus identity and idpol are a recent phenomena. It sounds nuts to refer to the Crusades as "idpol," does it not?

Widely,the historical foundations of identity are what I am about to write, and the US was front and center in each situation:

1) Racial categories in the US , in particular the one-drop rule: When the supposedly defining biological notions of race stopped being a thing, race then morphed into an ascriptive "identity." 

Before that time, it was posited through a prism of whiteness that races had radically different genetic differences from each other which in turn dehumanized non white races, with different "scientific proofs" being adduced. 

Though some races, like blacks were also black, and this made classifying them a breeze, without knowing anything other things about particular individuals or groups. 

Later on, blacks became black, but only black. "Black" still had to mean something, though nobody actually knew precisely what that something was anymore, other than the fact that there was a group of people that easily could be identified as "black" upon visual inspection. 

Vitally, the one-drop rule remained and this significantly shapes "identity" in today’s world. 

With the one drop rule, the question of how black someone is rendered irrelevant (unless of course you want to raise such a question). If you're black, you're black. It is the same notion with other identities. You can have light ADHD, or you can even have a fictional disorder, and you can still identify yourself as disabled, with no more questioning being allowed lest it erases or denies you your "disabled" identity. 

A hint of disability is suffice. The one drop rule was able to streamline the process of identification.

2) The development of modern day sub marketing which was targeted and which generated more and more tailored markets.

The aforementioned disintegrating of authentic community and tradition: Identification requires no maintenance of any specific social bonds. It only asserts the existence of "identities" and "communities." 

The millions of people who are identified don't need to have any specific social relation to one another. They even don’t need to accept the "identities" they are pigeon holed into. 

You only got to assign to them a common identity, and presto, you now have found yourself a "community." And if you and that community share the same identity, you could "join" this "community." No other thing is required. This is the reason that you can have a community at low cost, without the need to have a real community.

So then what is the payload of "identity"?

Privatize the community by reducing the community to the level of the individual. This is how the majority of identities that are deployed by idpol today are not "cultural", even though there are common notions contrary to this. 

Cultural "identities" ask of you to do something instead of just being something. 

They also require deep traditions and societal bonds, more than only an ad hoc club. Racial-Ethnicity, gender, fetish, orientation etc. identities require nothing of the sort. 

Indeed with the one-drop rule, they pretty much don’t require anything at all, with the exception of a bit of some trait. They are low cost and mobile.

Reduce class down to one identity along with many. Since all things can be an identity, so too can class be an identity. It is important to state here that the majority of the identities we speak of today are posited as castes. 

or to put it differently, they all allegedly have something to do with power distribution and resources. 

"Identity" entices people to see their material circumstances though this myriad of castes, in contrast to viewing it mainly through the prism of class power. 

As Professor Adolph Reed has said, idpol "displaces the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do."

Idpol follows inexorably from the analysis by Professor Adolph Reed that I mentioned above, of identity. 

Just like "identity" permits you to conjure up and to join some "community" by mere assignment, so also does it permit you to conjure up some political constituency that has an interest that you can proceed to stake a claim in representing. That is the entire game.

Identity a mechanism for privatizing community, at low cost. Idpol is a mechanism for privatizing political constituency, at low cost. If you are X, you could serve as a power broker on the behalf of X constituency. What right have you gotten for this? The truth that you are X obviously. Doesn't matter if the constituency in question exists in a type of materially coherent form. Doesn't matter which role you have in regard to what this constituency is. 

You share the same essential trait as this supposed constituency, and so you and this supposed constituency share the same interests with each other, correct? Not so obviously, but that the sleight of hand. Because you share the same interests, by the very nature of your existence, you can rep these interests within the gates of power and revel in all of the material benefits that comes with it.