The day after the defeat of Kamala Harris’ historic candidacy, I heard a colleague assert, over the drinks we were sharing at a mid-afternoon department meeting, that “identity politics is dead.” He assumed Harris was put forward because of her identity as a woman and a woman of color, and that this gambit failed. The consideration of social identity in elections has long been dismissed by conservatives as “woke.” Trump calls it “identitarianism,”  a term that in Europe refers to ethnonationalism. Yet now, even liberal New York Times columnists like Maureen Dowd are suggesting that identity politics alienated half the country and lost the election. Dowd says we need a “wake for woke.” 

The other theme of the post-election chatter is that Latino and Black men are to blame for the rise of fascism in the United States, despite the fact that massive numbers of white men and women got Trump elected. 

Hmm, I don’t think identity politics is dead. 

However, there are certainly grounds for debate. The effort to push “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) policies in every major institution has morphed into a public-relations campaign to protect institutional brands and maintain the status quo as far as possible. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has called it a way to rebrand privilege, aiming for maximum benefits with minimal change.

Consider Harvard. With a current endowment of $53 billion and a current enrollment of only 21,000 full-time students, Harvard cannot DEI its way to legitimacy. It cannot justify itself as a private educational institution that pays no taxes and has minimal public oversight. Diversification is a cover for the structural injustice manifested in Harvard’s very existence. The same is true of every private educational institution in this country.

Full disclosure, I went to Brown University for my PhD on a full fellowship. The irrational Ivy-League imprimatur no doubt played a role in my successful search in the tough job market of philosophy. But more than that, I got a good education at Brown, even in Marxist theory. Yet we don’t need private institutions to get a good education. 

I did learn a lot about class by attending an Ivy League school after having gone to two poorly funded public colleges in the South. I learned, for the first time, what trust funds are. Brown did not just have one library; it had five. It had ample computer support for every student, which was critically important before personal computers. And when I attended, its student population was around 6,000. I came to realize in a visceral way how class is reproduced. When I taught there as a graduate student, my  students would come to class after having read The New York Times as well as all of their assignments. Their vocabularies were better than mine. 

But these gated educational communities are not justifiable in a democracy. Brown was founded with the money of ­enslavers, and it took a Black president with a poor background, Ruth Simmons, to force the institution to research this history and face up to it. 

However, Brown’s response to this sordid past was cosmetic and minimal. They just hung a new sign on the gates, without unlocking them. When identity politics is used to put lipstick on a pig (apologies to our porcine friends), the truth shines through. No one is really fooled that we have achieved meaningful social justice when Brown wrings its hands and holds onto its money.

Origins of Identity Politics

The concept of identity politics emerged in the 1970s from a statement written by the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black, working-class, mostly lesbian feminists. Frustrated with the limited political sensibilities in both male-dominated Black liberation groups and white-dominated radical feminist groups, they created a group where they were the majority for once. They could then set the agenda and develop a more thorough understanding of their own specific forms of structural oppression. And also develop skills of leadership and organizing without competing with others who, perhaps, had private-school educations. 

Considerations of a broad range of forms of diversity — including class as well as other forms by which groups are disempowered — is good for advancing knowledge, not just disseminating it or repainting the brand.  Diversifying scientific research teams, in both the natural and the social sciences, has led to significant advances in our understanding of the gender gap in wages, same-sex behavior among animals and insects, obstacles to vaccine delivery, and intergenerational wealth transfer. New questions are being asked, new hypotheses are generated and pursued, evidence from the data are assessed in new ways, and patterns can be detected that were previously missed. The results have changed medicine, biology, economics, botany, anthropology, climate science and all the STEM fields. The National Research Council has taken up DEI programs for decades to assist institutions to diversify in meaningful ways. 

DEI was created by social movements and has had an impact in many sectors of society, but it has had no impact on corporate power. As my CUNY colleague Paisley Currah put it, Goldman Sachs flies the rainbow flag. 

The Harris candidacy was a perfect example of this. Of course she was competent; neither identity politics nor DEI need to sacrifice competence. But corporate power needs to find people who will play their part, up to and including the continuation of genocidal wars. Harris was perfect. 

The fact that her gender and ethnicity were used to discredit her and that these were the reasons some voted against her shows we need identity politics. But we need to craft a more radical version. 

Ongoing educational inequity in poor communities has not been solved by diversifying the Ivies. Nor is impoverishment in general going to be addressed by DEI policies at Goldman Sachs. But if we refuse to acknowledge the way in which social identities still operate as vectors of social oppression, disregard and violence, social-justice movements will fail. 

And we’ll jump to the conclusion that Latinos and Black men are to blame for the rise of fascism. 

White Voters

What is astounding about this charge is the way it lets the white vote off the hook. But it also indicates a refusal to engage with the white supporters of Trump, the majority who, according to exit polls, did not attend college. For many liberals, this group is considered intractable and unchangeable, incapable of reason. This has been the Democratic Party playbook for decades: 

Focus on people of color, on cities, on those who already self-identify as liberals. Let the white male worker go to the fascists. 

Identity here, too, is playing a role, my friends. The intersection of race, class and gender — in this case white, male workers — is generating disregard and fear. 

Identities affect how we experience this society and how it experiences us. These differences create different assumptions, realms of affect, judgments of credibility, trust and, sometimes, knowledge (or ignorance) about group histories. Identity cannot be left out of politics. It never has been, and it remains salient. The left has to be smarter about how it works, how it is used against social justice and how we can reclaim it. In fact, identity politics is essential. 

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