“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …”
—Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
Identity politics used to take the equal-rights approach. That includes the antislavery movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, and the gay rights movement. The new identity politics includes such diverse concepts as microaggressions, triggers, intersectionality, queering and feminist glaciology (sic). The equal-rights approach to identity politics brought two centuries of progress. The new “identity politics” approach mainly helps Trump.
Equal Rights
Perhaps the most important idea of the Enlightenment was that ordinary people—not just nobles and clergy—had basic human rights. Our Declaration of Independence marked a turning point.
In 1791, Thomas Paine published The Rights of Man in England. Later that year, our Bill of Rights was ratified. The next year, Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the founding feminist philosophers, wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Starting in the 1600s, humanism (another Enlightenment idea) led to criticism of slavery for violating natural rights. In 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention passed a resolution to secure for women their “sacred right to the elective franchise.”
During the Civil War, ex-slaves fought alongside Whites to procure for Blacks the most basic human right—freedom. In 1920, the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote. In 1944, Franklin Roosevelt proposed his Second Bill of [economic] Rights.
Between 1955 and 1965, Blacks and Whites worked together to pass the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960 and 1964—followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. More recently, gays and lesbians have gained many new rights.
From Rights to Privileges
The new identity politics rejects nearly four centuries of equal-rights identity politics. The start of this rejection was the “White privilege” idea of Noel Ignatin, a Marxist-Leninist White guy who sold the idea to the New Left in about 1969. As he put it, “We intend to keep bashing dead White males, live ones, and females too, until the social construct known as ‘the White race’ is destroyed.”
The White privilege idea works like this. If Blacks but not Whites are subject to arbitrary arrest by police, the equal-rights approach would demand equal rights for Blacks—no arbitrary arrests. But the White-privilege approach tries to make Whites feel guilty for not being arbitrarily arrested. But then what? Should the “guilty” Whites demand to be arbitrarily arrested?
Or what if only Whites have the privilege of eating in a certain restaurant. Should we take away that guilty privilege so no one can eat there, or should we give Blacks equal rights? For a few decades, this bizarre approach of taking away “privileges” that should be rights remained on the fringes. But now the White-privilege approach is back in force as part of the new identity politics.
The Birth of ‘Identity Politics’
The founding document of what we now call “identity politics” is the Combahee River Collective Statement, written in April 1977. It declared: “This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics.”
The Combahee River Collective was a Black feminist lesbian collective, many of whom were college-educated writers. One member, Chirlane Irene McCray (no longer a lesbian), is now the wife of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. The Collective’s statement provided a groundbreaking description of various sources of oppression: Whites, men, heterosexuals and capitalism.
They explained their strategy: “We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.” That “somebody else” was aimed first at White women, then Black men, and a little at straight Black women.
This foreshadows the fragmenting nature of the new identity politics. Identities were already being defined by “intersectionality.” Once all the identity groups that you belong to have been listed, that combination is your intersectional identity.
Three years later, the Combahee River Collective disintegrated. Seemingly, it died of exclusivity. But this was only the beginning.
Courage versus Outrage
These first two currents, intersectional identity politics and anti-White-privilege politics, soon merged with the new Critical Race Theory that was an offshoot of postmodern politics, which has its roots in European neo-Marxism. By the mid-1970s, postmodernism was taking over the humanities and social sciences in American universities. This combination was incredibly powerful and produced the identity politics we see today.
The next chapter compares the courage of the old civil rights movement to the victim mentality of the new identity politics. Then I explore different strains of identity politics and finally drill down to find its roots.
As it turns out, the new identity politics is now at the heart of the culture war, which powers Trump’s base. And it may be providing more motivation for Trump’s get-out-the-vote efforts than even the fear of socialism.
Ripped Apart
