The great issue of how the social sciences have distorted our view of groups of people first occurred to me immediately after the 2016 election when people were grasping the surveys of outfits like Pew to try to figure out who they should assign blame (or, I'd imagine on the other side, "credit") for the catastrophe of the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. That the real group that deserved the blame for putting yet another loser of a presidential election in the office, "The Founding Fathers" was pushed aside for blaming everything from "evangelicals" to "White Women" to whoever the person citing the statistics wanted to blame. As if any of those categories as even reported by Pew et al were uniform in voting for Trump. Even by Pew's own figures there were significant percentages, a fifth, a quarter, and even up to figures nearing 50% of the blamed groups, WHO VOTED FOR HILLARY CLINTON. But the habits of sociological thinking which we were all educated into and taught to practice made those significant minorities of those identity groups disappear into insignificance. That is something I've railed against since the first times I commented online.
I don't know if it was because my parents, especially my mother, had such an overriding sense of fairness and honesty so as to discourage us from thinking of individuals in a stereotypical manner or what but I never figured that that kind of thing was any different from saying "Women" or "Black People" or "whatever other you want to insert" as if that meant anything except that you were a bigot.
But not all groups are like that. There are groups of very strong ideological identity that you might be able to make such conclusions about under drastic circumstances, the Republican Party as it became in the wake of Nixon and as that fascistic depravity accelerated to Trump means that anyone who chooses to join or remain as a Republican, today, is safely considered to share in that ever more overtly anti-democratic ideological program. I'm struck at that distinction that Susanna Heschel made between someone who joined the Nazi Party in 1930, as the central leadership of that party were hiding their intentions and in 1937 when they were well into boldly asserting their intentions. I don't think the basic intentions of the Republican Party, since the time of the strategy of attracting racists and "evangelicals" to win elections became obvious were as covert over a longer period. People who, presented with the fact of a Trump, the predictable outcome of such a program, in short hand Nixon's "Southern strategy"* express their horror are disingenuous. Every Republican President since Nixon and even going back to Barry Goldwater ran on the identity politics that no one calls "identity politics" White supremacy. George H. W. Bush who is the object of artificial veneration this week, was one of the most vicious practitioners of such racist politics. To some extent even the "nice" Republicans certainly intended to benefit from that strategy of racism. When Barney Frank, during the myriad of Republican congressional hearings brought under Newt Gingrich's speakers-ship ask Jim Leach of Iowa "What's a nice guy like you doing in a party like this," the answer was obviously, he's being a Republican under the leadership of of Newt Gingrich.
The only good Republicans in the United States are so uninformed that they are deludedly living in a past that hasn't existed since Eisenhower's administration more than sixty years ago.
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Since I was accused, last night, of practicing "identity politics," I was reminded that I had meant to address this segment of the CBC Sunday Edition show, a short essay by Frances Lee a student about discovering the problems of and limits of such "identity politics".
One night, my partner and I were on the couch. We were looking at data about the overrepresentation of East Asian students at top universities. At my school earlier that day, I had been told that as a person of Chinese descent, I couldn't be part of my campus organization for underrepresented students of colour.
My partner, who is white, leaned over to me and joked: "I guess you're not oppressed anymore."
I panicked.
After years of being in social justice community, I had fully embraced my identity as a person of colour. I had grown attached to the special underdog comfort it provided me, especially when I found myself in a roomful of progressive white people.
And then it hit me — I don't know how to be anymore, without this identity.
As an activist, I've fought for justice and equality for myself and my communities. And that has required me to constantly talk about being oppressed, even at times when I feel powerful.
Well, to some extent I think her problem is that she's young and young people tend to throw themselves into such identities, especially out of a felt need of belonging to something. Also out of a clear desire to NOT be part of the oppressive machine, which is laudable, especially when consistent. Though I think she's definitely on the cusp of pulling out of what can turn into a trap, though I hope she doesn't give up. What this needs is more discernment, not abandonment. Wisdom in such things might come with more experience of the world (or it might not come). I think she is on the road to that because right after that passage, Lee cites this paper by Eve Tuck about the seductive dangers of giving yourself too much to that kind of thinking:
In this open letter, Eve Tuck calls on communities, researchers, and educators to reconsider the long-term impact of “damage-centered” research—research that intends to document peoples’ pain and brokenness to hold those in power accountable for their oppression. This kind of research operates with a flawed theory of change: it is often used to leverage reparations or resources for marginalized communities yet simultaneously reinforces and reinscribes a one-dimensional notion of these people as depleted, ruined, and hopeless. Tuck urges communities to institute a moratorium on damagecentered research to reformulate the ways research is framed and conducted and to reimagine how findings might be used by, for, and with communities.
I am certainly not going to miss the opportunity to point to this as a smoking gun in my indictment of the place that sociology and sociological methods ("research") have played in giving people who should know better the excuse to present stereotypes - as are constructed through sociological methods - as real things and an acceptable, even required way to talk about and think about diverse groups of people, classifying them as either sheep or goats (to use a Biblical metaphor). You should be very careful because that thinking, even with the methods and imprimatur as being "science", because it's not that different from the very thing that is used to oppress us. There is, in the end, even for members of "identity groups" the very real fact that the denial of individuality, of us NOT being like other members of that group is a form of oppression. Especially when it's called "science" which we are all trained to consider as meaning it is of enhanced reliability, not merely a different form and framing of low-status, bigoted stereotyping as folklore.
The difficulty with "identity politics" is that the crux of the problem that necessitates such politics IS THAT WE ARE CONFRONTED BY THE IDENTITY POLITICS AS PRACTICED BY THOSE WHO ARE PRIVILEGED AND POWERFUL ENOUGH TO EFFECTIVELY OPPRESS US AND MISREPRESENT US IN MASS MEDIA. Such "identity politics" as done by what was one universally taken as and considered as and became accustomed to considering themselves the default form of humanity, straight, white, males of whatever ethnic group(s) had the status as being the elite in their location, are never called "identity politics" in my experience, but that's what it is. It was when people classified as in those groups for discrimination and oppression used that to point out the injustice done to them BY PEOPLE IN GROUPS ABOVE THEM in power and status and wealth, that people started whining about "identity politics".
Maybe the solution is to distinguish between them as the identity politics of the privileged and the identity politics of those disadvantaged by that privilege. You can do that because the first one is going to ensure the existence of the second kind which is a response to it.
If you want a model, one of the clearest ones is the racist opposition to affirmative action in University admissions. First, the clearest and longest standing form of what is, in fact, affirmative action, the legacy admission of the generally richer, generally white, often male offspring of earlier generations of graduates is generally considered unfair to mention in that argument. Second, the largest and most benefited group to benefit from official affirmative action, White Women, is never talked of as actual beneficiaries of that law, even in those schools where they now predominate in admissions. Third, it is only members of those groups who are not the beneficiaries of the privilege granted to those of white or light skin color who are beneficiaries of affirmative action that those already privileged by it or by previous forms of it (never called that) find a rich racist to fund a court challenge.
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By chance, this morning I read in a news shorts column in the National Catholic Reporter, it said in regard to Pope Francis'* recent spot of hot water:
I am sure the extremists in the gay rights choir will be calling for Pope Francis' head after he told an interviewer that a gay priest who was not celibate should leave the priesthood rather than lead a double life. But does anyone think leading a double life is a thing to prefer? That said, if I could whisper something into the pope's ear, it would be this aphorism from Leon Wieseltier, from his magnificent essay "Against Identity": "I hear it said of somebody that he is leading a double life. I think to myself: Just two?"
I am indebted to Michael Sean Winters for the link to Wieseltier's piece "Against Identity" from 1994, I have read it through, quickly once today - I think I may have read it around the time it was first published. It is full of ideas that need to be addressed and I'm sure this is going to turn into a multi-part post, I'm just not certain about how I'm going to handle it. Wieseltier does confirm my recent suspicion that a lot of the bad habits surrounding this do come from sociological methods.
"I seize the word identity," wrote Robert Penn Warren in 1965, "It is a key word. You hear it over and over again." A few years earlier there appeared a book that portrayed the United States as The Identity Society. Identity, according to Erik Erikson, writing in the 1950s, is "vague," "ambiguous," "unfathomable," "colloquial," "naive," "all-pervasive." Identity was certainly one of the most repercussive contributions of the social sciences to American culture. But what was it? For many intellectuals in post-war America, identity was what alienation was not. For Erikson, it was a slogan for the end of childhood, for the crucible of adolescence, for the success of socialization. Identity smelled like teen spirit. (The crucible of adolescence: that is an example of Eriksonian sentimentality.) Finally Erikson's influence on the American obsession with identity was less a theory than a mood. He made identity into a romance.
I don't think, especially given the unreliability of the results and the inevitable misreporting of them even on those rare occasions that the researchers present their results in honestly modest terms that it's helpful. I am less impressed with sociology than, perhaps, Robert Penn Warren was, though I think his identification of identity as a central issue in American life reaches the glaringly obvious. It's embedded in the United States Constitution, against which so many "identity groups" have had to struggle.
I do have to wonder at Wieseltier, a straight white male of Jewish identity, a product of elite private schools, at a time when there was a virtual 100% affirmative action program for white males in most if not all of those he attended was in effect, someone who would later be revealed to have a history of sexual harassment (which he admitted), working in a milieu in which his ethnicity would certainly not make him a target of oppression (The New Republic of the Marty Perez era), writing that article on that topic. I certainly think the racism and other freely expressed bigotries freely expressed in that magazine he wrote it for is relevant to that consideration.
One thing is certain, from the fact that this article is twenty-four years old and that it cites much older authors talking about the issue that the current attempt to make "identity politics" a recent innovation of Women, Black, Latino, Asian, LGBTQ, etc. people to whine about their victimization is a lie. It's the whining, typically by the same people who mounted and benefited from the "Southern Strategy" to attack people struggling for their rights as members of minority groups and as individuals.
The issue for those of us in such "identity groups" is not to be so stupid as to reject allies among even straight-white-men and to not allow the stereotypical images of us deprive us of the ultimate goal, of being able to be ourselves in full equality.
* I wish Pope Francis would stop giving interviews, it's about the only time he gets himself in trouble as journalists and those who read them can't deal with the level of nuance Pope Francis obviously thinks in. They don't seem to understand that he still is the Pope of the Roman Catholic church and is not a politician. I do wonder what his conception of "gay culture" is because there's lots that gets called that which I've got a problem with.
Note: This is a preliminary article on this topic, it's kind of all over the place but I'm sure other posts will come dealing with it in smaller doses.
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