Identity politics has become an increasingly hot button topic for people to write about. Opinions run the gamut, from contempt to passionate, with myself on the passionate end of this spectrum. We should be having more conversations about identity politics, ones that push beyond the very simplified version applied in white activist spaces. This simple version has the essence of ticking off symptoms boxes without any follow up about the illness. The illness of course is white supremacy.
White people use our marginalized identities like queerness, poverty, disability and so forth to deflect from examining our whiteness. Being white is an identity, politically created and inherently anti-black and anti-indigenous. The current common discussion of identities among white folks (ignoring the derisive and condescending ones) are how these identities can be tallied and subtracted from ones responsibility to deconstruct ones whiteness.
This is often a misconception of lateral oppression. Lateral oppression does indeed exist and marginalized identities do work together. They do not, however work as get-out-of-whiteness free cards. As white people, any lateral oppression we experience never take precedence over whiteness. For example a cis heterosexual white man had more privilege than I, a trans queer white person. Both of our privileges are rooted in how freely we can operate in white supremacy. Whiteness sets the standards of privilege because it supersedes the rest of our identities.
It's troubling to me that white, self-proclaimed activists and allies use any personal marginalization as leverage, in many ways. One of the most insidious is throwing out identities as buffers. These buffers can be used to ignore people of color and their critiques. It also is a pick and choose version of identity politics, one that allows us to arrange groupings of oppression that can be manipulated to insert our voices. It also intentionally obscures any relevant privileges as they aren't accounted for in these Oppression Olympic debates.
This is absolutely an issue we need to address in all white spaces but especially activist spaces. Too many times have white people preyed in these supposed safe spaces because we in whole haven't moved past identity politics 101. What I mean is we often allow white peoples marginalized identities to become the entire vetting process. We latch onto these identities and use them to avoid our responsibility to unpack our intersecting privileges. Using these markers, we can gain social capital, which is then weaponized.
Waiting for the ‘right’ person to defend you from a callout and tagging friends of color to do emotional labor on your behalf are two of the most common I've witnessed. It's not at all surprising people of color are cautious around us. We on average, refuse to address the core issue of white supremacy and dismantling it. Largely because it would mean weaponizing our privilege, and we wave our other identities as reasons we would become threatened or endangered. Considering this is the omnipresent reality for everyone else, it highlights our insulation from the realities we contribute and benefit from.
