The Origins of Identity Politics

Donald trump and his cronies have ignited the most massive and broad-based resistance and democracy movement in my lifetime, maybe in American history. What’s the place of identity politics (for want of a better catch phrase) in that resistance movement? What are its strengths and limitations? I’ll let others discuss its downsides. I want to make a case for identity politics as a positive and healing force and as a creator of new visions of what democracy could look like. To do it, I’ll contrast it with earlier political thinking.The Federal programs after World War II exemplify the older way of thinking about identity; they greatly expanded the middle class and rolled back many racial barriers but had their limitations. As that war ended, with some 11 million vets returning, corporate leaders and the Roosevelt administration feared a resurgence of pre-war radicalism should the veterans return without any programs for reintegration into civil society. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill, was the Roosevelt Administration’s answer to this problem. It provided housing, jobs and the education. Its successful execution radically changed the class and racial structure of America—in a good but limited way.Thanks to the GI bill the U.S. became a middle-class society in terms of education, home-owning and income for the first time in its history. The Veteran’s Administration offered G.I.s home mortgages without down payments, preferential hiring, and free college education including living expenses. These programs stimulated a huge growth in colleges and community colleges, created a mass home owning middle-class, and produced a generation of workers educated to take on the new jobs of America’s booming postwar economy. Non-veterans also benefitted from low-interest mortgages, and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) underwrote suburbanization and massive homebuilding by merchant builders. As Roosevelt said, “a rising tide lifts all boats”—but not all were lifted.The race story is where things become ugly. Rather than ending racism and segregation against African Americans, post-war policies, established institutional practices kept it at the heart of American life. Although benefits were officially open to all veterans, African Americans were denied access to most of them. The US Employment Service, responsible for finding good jobs for vets and giving them preferential hiring, was openly discriminatory and restricted Black GIs to menial jobs. Black colleges were soon filled with African American GIs, but they were still denied entry to most white colleges. Most damaging, they faced racial covenants as homebuyers—a policy advocated and enforced by the FHA. The new suburbs that the FHA played a key role in creating almost completely excluded African Americans, and the FHA or the VA would not lend to Black GIs or underwrite mortgages in the areas where African Americans were allowed to live. To add insult to injury, African American and racially diverse neighborhoods were routinely redlined.Before the war, Jews (and other Southern and Eastern European immigrants) faced many of the same restrictions as African Americans. Before World War II, antisemitism was widespread and institutionalized. Like African Americans, Jews were officially classified as not white and treated accordingly both institutionally and interpersonally. White colleges had quotas on Jews.The implementation of the GI Bill changed that radically. Rather than “lifting all boats,” it merely shifted the boundaries of whiteness. Jews could now get mortgages for the new houses being built. They (and other Euro-descended GIs) received the same preferential hiring for a wide range of good jobs and professions as other whites—and colleges ended their widespread practice of rigid quotas on Jews so that they could now take advantage of opportunities in America’s expanding economy.In short, free college, good jobs and low interest home mortgages went a long way toward transforming Jews, and other Euro-descended groups, from a working-class and poor population into middle-class Americans by ending institutionalized discrimination against them and providing the wherewithal for a middle-class life. The institutionalized practices of excluding African Americans from these benefits helped keep the economic base of a racist and segregationist system firmly in place. In public culture, Jews became the measure of America’s openness, perhaps from guilt at wartime Jewish exclusion (think of the St. Louis ocean liner filled with Jewish refugees turned away from US ports). Jewish humor entered the mainstream through the new medium of television as Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Sid Ceasar, Groucho Marx all hosted major shows.There’s a cautionary message in this tale. Post-war ideology and institutionalized practices also threw women out of good wartime jobs and ended support for a nascent, free early childcare and education program. These well-meaning programs were a set of top down creations designed by a relatively small circle comprised of mainly white male politicians and corporate leaders, and executed by local officials and civil service employees with much the same race, class, and gender profile. They were all limited by their own political beliefs. One of the more salient limitations was that the ruling Democratic party had a powerful, solidly segregationist Southern wing and had no intention of bucking it. Those who sought to disconfirm those beliefs, most notably a nascent and growing African American civil rights movement were excluded from the process of shaping policy. More than that, there was no mass activism on the part of Progressive and Left white groups that was equivalent to the movement growing in the African American community.The result was that a set of post-war GI programs helped whiten Jews and people of European descent, and by excluding African Americans, kept segregation and racism solidly in place. It just shifted the boundaries of white privilege—and the focus on jobs for returning GIs excluded many service women, and many women civilian war workers lost their jobs and their child care.So in the current resistance what’s to keep us from building new institutions that perpetuate the same kinds of structural discrimination? The most obvious answer is that we have real grassroots movements, that are generating new social agendas from below. But there was a lot of movement activism during World War II.I believe that identity politics is what has made today’s social movements different from those of the mid-20th century. Today we think about social issues in a way that assumes plural identity perspectives and plural issue priorities are legitimate. I think we take this set of insights for granted, but it really marks a step forward in political thought from the progressive vocabulary of the post-World War II era.After World War II, a strong African American civil rights movement fought segregation (including in the armed forces) and institutionalized discrimination. There was some white organizational support, but there was no political language for seeing how struggles of African Americans are intertwined with their own. The GI Bill and associated programs left in place underlying race-based structures that could harm many of its then-white beneficiaries in the long run. They saw it as making America middle class. But a class lens obscures what a race lens illuminates: that only whites can be middle class—even if who is white changes with the times and who is in power. We just saw that in Charlottesville Virginia as the white supremacists chanted “Us not Jews.” The assembled fascists focused their hatred on African Americans, but they also hated Jews. They remind us that racism can threaten even those who are currently racially privileged.In the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement gave birth to a radical shift in political thinking on the Left. As late as the 60s, many on the Left believed that the working class, regardless of their race, gender, sexuality, or anything else shared a set of fundamental interests which could only be won by toppling capitalism. These interests were placed at the center of agendas.Civil Rights and Black Power movements challenged this prevailing leftist thinking that only a movement based on working class needs could liberate everyone. Their new thinking argued that economic or class-based issues were no more fundamental than anti-racist demands, suggesting that the whole notion of a “fundamental” demand was a way of legitimizing some issues while downplaying others. That was the first conceptual step.The next step taken in the mid 1960s was the birth of many identity movements, most notably African American, Chican@, American Indian, Asian American, feminist, and LGBT movements. As they became prominent, so too did wider recognition that each made different important contributions to what constituted social justice. The late 1980s and ‘90s saw the rise of issue-based and hybrid identity-issue based movements; for example environmentalists were thinking about natural ecosystems and environmental justice groups were thinking about how environmental issues impacted specific populations. The impact of identity and issue-based organizations broadened popular thinking about what a democratic movement needed to deal with. They also displaced the socialist, communist, and progressive political parties that had been so important in earlier movements’ thinking about what social transformation would look like.The third step began in the 1970s as Black and Latina feminists and lesbian feminists took the lead in developing a more sophisticated way of conceptualizing identities. It rests on the recognition that every individual is a complex mix of socially-ascribed identities. For most of us, some of our identities give us social privileges and others give us second-class citizenship—woman and white; Black and straight, etc. It’s called “intersectionality,” a way of thinking from the complexity and contradictory nature of individual and group identities. No identity (including class) really has a single essence. By complicating our identities, this perspective can help us get beyond fights over whose identity is more important to understanding how all our lives are interdependent.Equally important, intersectional ways of thinking developed within a social movement landscape made up of many issue and identity-generated organizations. These organizations and conceptual tools help work to prevent the mistakes of the GI Bill. A modern day GI Bill would likely be subject to intense opposition from the Black Lives Matter Movement. These more developed ways of thinking have come to serve our current progressive political lingua franca. Thus by the early 21st century, progressives had developed a very inclusive social agenda, a landscape of many organizations, nationally networked around both identity and issue interests, and a sense that all were of pretty much equal importance and inextricably tied together.Today’s left is also relatively democratic in its ideological and organizational praxis. It is made up of lots of independent, not very hierarchical organizations, voluntarily networked together. Wherever their members’ primary race, class or gender identities may lie, they also connect with other organizations that represent issues and identities they also share. For example, much of the power in today’s environmental movement is a result of a merger of the environmental justice movement and longstanding preservationists. The former, developed by African American and Latin@ activists brought awareness of the dangers of industrial and urban pollution; the latter developed by preserving wild and beautiful places. In Los Angeles, a powerful coalition of both types of organization has brought major improvements to the nation’s second largest Port.Resistance to Trump has given a great leap forward to this kind of political thinking. The Women’s March brought out more than women, and created space for more identities and interests. The Sierra Club supports Black Lives Matter. Los Angeles’ Gay Pride celebration organizers turned it into an all-Resistance march. The list goes on.Our current progressive landscape is a strong and flexible network of identity and issue-based organizations. It is a significant addition to representative democracy, but also a departure from it. Separately and together these groups enhance public awareness of the ways in which our world is unequal. They make visible and challenge the “natural social order” on so many fronts.I think identity politics have helped us take a giant step forward for what democracy might look like. It demands conversation across boundaries, finding commonalities and wrestling with conflicts from positions of equality. It spreads power more evenly and relies on negotiation and consensus.Could something like this work as government? I don’t know, but I’d sure like to see us try. In the meantime, we should all learn and gain the needed skills by participating in this kind of Movement.