Penny Wong, a first-generation Malaysian-Chinese Migrant, the first butch lesbian in the Australian Parliament, paid $160 an hour, opposed marriage equality for half of her career.
My cousin, a first-generation Vietnamese Immigrant, the first butch lesbian I knew, paid $25 an hour, needs to find a wife or will face deportation.
One is supposed to speak for the other, and to the mainstream, they are categorised under the same niche… yet their lives couldn’t be more different.
In this article, I will discuss Identity Politics, its radical origin, and how it was taken away from us.
Identity Politics: designed to be an entry point.
To discuss Identity Politics, we must first acknowledge that the framework is a compelling, charismatic, and observable way of teaching people that social inequality exists. Furthermore, we must understand that when identity politics was being cooked up, it wasn’t just “some liberal bullshit.”
For this reason, in this section, we will talk about the MOTHERS of Identity Politics: The Combahee River Collective (CRC).
The CRC was a Black feminist lesbian socialist organisation in Boston (1974 – 1980). In one of their retreats, the collective wrote one of their biggest hits (my literal favourite text) titled ‘The Combahee River Collective Statement’ (1977). The statement is not hard to find, and I promise, unless you are the most annoying theory bro who has formed your personality around being extremely anti-identity politics, you will find that the statement is just bars, after bars, after bars.
“We realise that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us”
“This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. 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.”
They are arguing for simple yet very revolutionary concepts: specific knowledge about oppressions can be formed through being in different marginalised positions. The people who face certain oppression are more interested in resolving it because it is their own.
Their explanations face criticism, most of which often hyper-focuses on the idea that the CRC was arguing for gatekeeping social movements. However, I believe that this argument is shallow and is a mischaracterisation of what CRC’s version of identity politics is meant to be. If you just take a second to scroll down a couple paragraphs, you will realise that the political argument that the CRC puts forward is actually one that is against separatism.
“Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand…We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism.”
(As I said, bars after bar after bars)
The MOTHERS of identity politics argued that the theory itself was supposed to be material and coalitional…
it was meant to be learning about yourselves then expanding further to others
…and it was.
Political fronts popped up everywhere! The strategy is mobilising people through community networks, organising on everyday issues that they experience, then campaigning on broader uniting issues.
One example is Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners! In 1984, an alliance of lesbians and gay men supported the British National Union of Mineworkers during the year-long strike of 1984–1985.
But now, when people complain about identity politics, the idea has been completely removed from its roots.
Identity Politics Will Now Backfire at You Like a Fucking Bitch
“I, a sex worker on a student VISA, Subclass 500, sucking men’s dicks to pay off my rent, am asking you, a white man, employed at a union job, if you hear the most fucking vile, disgusting, racist, anti-sex work, misogynistic bullshit from another migrant sex worker, would you stand up tell them that they are wrong?”
And he responded: “Well…It’s hard because I don’t want to speak over marginalised communities” after sitting through a forum on anti-racism and sex workers’ rights.
Unfortunately, all good things must be co-opted, carved out, and sucked up by the ruling class. Since the late 1970s to now, our lives have been co-opted, our work has been co-opted, and most horribly, our organising has been co-opted.
Elites of marginalised communities are co-opted. One notable example of this is Rupaul; the ‘queen of drag,’ transformed from working in the club, identifying as a sex worker who needed to make a living, to now, being The Queen of Fracking.
This co-opting can also be said about our movment’s language. In a rally against domestic violence earlier this year hosted by [redacted], one of the speakers grabbed the mic and discussed the necessity of calling the police on your family members while quoting revolutionary, anti-carceral, abolitionist feminist, top 10 most wanted by the FBI, Angela Davis.
Unfortunately, this is also true for Identity Politics. What was supposed to be coalitional has now turned and become an organiser’s worst fear: Deference and Separatism.
Deference: when a person in a position of power defers the responsibility of making social change to someone else. It is omitting responsibilities.
Separatism, on the other hand, is the advocacy for separations of movement not for the sake of strategy but for controlled cohesion. It is preferring the elite of a movement like Penny Wong (gay genocidal Minister for Foreign Affairs) over solidarity (straight working class Arab refugees).
Both of these tendencies set our movements back and highlight words that were never written in the formation of Identity Politics. It believes that the struggles we all face are separate, which means the way that we relate to each other is by pity rather than as equals.
Setting Ourselves Free
We must put an end to deference and separatism, and we can not do so by over-corrections and condescension. A real response is one that starts with a desire for transformation and organising on the principles of solidarity.
We start with what it is that we want to structurally change about the world and go from there.
Identity Politics will tell you that your struggles are unique and that you should start off by understanding its source but then expand further.
Separatism and deference convince you that these struggles are unique to just you, and that no one will ever understand; that we are the beholder of knowledge, and no one shall speak before you.
Solidarity says that the liberation of yourself is the liberation of all; the liberation of others is your liberation.
We are stuck in the room of separatism and it is up to us to break down the walls and build a new one.
