Content area
Full Text
"identity politics" has been under attack since the concept was first named in the Combahee River Collective Statement in 1977. Today, it is under attack from all sides. On the right, Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and others target Black identity politics, while simultaneously enacting a white supremacist politics. Shortly after defending the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Bannon reportedly said, "the longer [the Democrats] talk about identity politics, I got 'em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats" (Kuttner 2017). In the center, Mark Lilla (2017) scathingly attacks Black and trans* identity politics, arguing that they undermine solidarity and cohesion around universal liberal principles among Democrats and caused the 2016 election of Trump. "Identity politics," Lilla writes, "is largely expressive, not persuasive. Which is why it never wins elections—but can lose them" (2016). On the left, thinkers from Slavoj Žižek (2021) to Adolph Reed (2001) challenge the focus on racial identity, arguing that it often obfuscates deeper issues of class. Even within critical race theory, there are attacks on identity politics. Kendall Thomas, one of the founders of critical race theory, argues that today "the task of critical race theory is to develop a theory of racial power without resort to, that is not dependent upon, and that is not the same as a theory of racial identity" (2022). And none of this is new. Since at least the 1990s, many critical thinkers on the left have tried to imagine a political reality "after identity" (Danielsen and Engle 1995).
Despite all that, the United States recently witnessed the largest political protests in its history, organized around Black identity: the George Floyd protests and the movement for Black lives brought out up to 26 million people, remarkably, during a time of heightened concern about public gatherings following the first deadly wave of COVID-19. In reaction to those nationwide, and even global, protests, the country erupted in raging controversy over the teaching of critical race theory in our public school systems—a contestation that reflects, as Jamelle Bouie writes in the New York Times, "an admission, however tacit, that something has changed,...