Only those who belong to a given identity are said to be able to understand certain oppressions. This implies not only that those who do not belong to the identity cannot understand that oppression, but that all those who belong to said identity will have an automatic knowledge of it: no white person can ever truly understand racism, just as every person of color will naturally understand racism simply by virtue of having darker skin. It is then further assumed that this experiential knowledge will necessarily lead to the right political stances against those oppressions.One of the fundamental problems of contemporary identity politics is therefore reductionism. As the very term suggests, for partisans of identity politics, one’s politics are a direct reflection of one’s identity. One’s gender, race, or sexual orientation, the assumption goes, will lead automatically to certain political stances. Because you are a white woman, you will naturally vote for Hillary Clinton. Because you are black in a fundamentally racist society, then you must automatically have anti-racist politics. If you belong to any marginalized group, you must endorse identity politics. In this way, identity politics has come to erase the contingent mediations between identity and politics.
Salar Mohandesi, Identity Crisis (via freuds-cokedealer)
“One of the most alarming of these limits [to unity] was guilt. Suddenly recognizing the profound depths of others’ oppression, as well as socialism’s historical limitations in struggling to overcome such oppressions, some radicals, especially white radicals like the Weathermen, succumbed to a politics of guilt. Feeling personally responsible for racism at home, or for the U.S. government’s mass murder of Vietnamese abroad, they effectively reduced activism to self-flagellation, politics to moralism. Ironically, although they intended to draw attention to marginalized struggles, when white radicals foregrounded their acts of public expiation, they recentered the story on themselves.”
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