Mistaken Identity

Mass Movements and Racial Ideology

Asad Haider

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781786637376
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786637390
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Whether class or race is the more important factor in modern politics is a question right at the heart of recent history's most contentious debates. Among groups who should readily find common ground, there is little agreement. To escape this deadlock, Asad Haider turns to the rich legacies of the black freedom struggle. Drawing on the words and deeds of black revolutionary theorists, he argues that identity politics is not synonymous with anti-racism, but instead amounts to the neutralization of its movements. It marks a retreat from the crucial passage of identity to solidarity, and from individual recognition to the collective struggle against an oppressive social structure. Weaving together autobiographical reflection, historical analysis, theoretical exegesis, and protest reportage, Mistaken Identity is a passionate call for a new practice of politics beyond colorblind chauvinism and "the ideology of race."

1

Identity Politics

In 1977, the term identity politics in its contemporary form was introduced into political discourse by the Combahee River Collective (CRC), a group of black lesbian militants that had formed in Boston three years earlier. In their influential collective text “A Black Feminist Statement,” founding members Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier argued that the project of revolutionary socialism had been undermined by racism and sexism in the movement. They wrote:

We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and antiracist revolution will guarantee our liberation.

The statement brilliantly demonstrated that “the major systems of oppression are interlocking” and proclaimed the necessity of articulating “the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers.”¹ Black women, whose specific social position had been neglected by both the black liberation movement and the women’s liberation movement, could challenge this kind of empty class reductionism simply by asserting their own autonomous politics. As a way of conceptualizing this important aspect of their political practice, the CRC presented the hypothesis that the most radical politics emerged from placing their own experience at the center of their analysis and rooting their politics in their own particular identities:

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.²

Now this did not mean, for the CRC, that politics should be reduced to the specific identities of the individuals engaged in it. As Barbara Smith has recently reflected:

What we were saying is that we have a right as people who are not just female, who are not solely Black, who are not just lesbians, who are not just working class, or workers—that we are people who embody all of these identities, and we have a right to build and define political theory and practice based upon that reality … That’s what we meant by identity politics. We didn’t mean that if you’re not the same as us, you’re nothing. We were not saying that we didn’t care about anybody who wasn’t exactly like us.³

Indeed, the CRC demonstrated this perspective in its actual political practice. Demita Frazier recalls the emphasis the organization placed on coalitions:

I never believed that Combahee, or other Black feminist groups I have participated in, should focus only on issues of concern for us as Black women, or that, as lesbian/bisexual women, we should only focus on lesbian issues. It’s really important to note that Combahee was instrumental in founding a local battered women’s shelter. We worked in coalition with community activists, women and men, lesbians and straight folks. We were very active in the reproductive rights movement, even though, at the time, most of us were lesbians. We found ourselves involved in coalition with the labor movement because we believed in the importance of supporting other groups even if the individuals in that group weren’t all feminist. We understood that coalition building was crucial to our own survival.⁴

For the CRC, feminist political practice meant, for example, walking picket lines during strikes in the building trades during the 1970s. But the history that followed seemed to turn the whole thing upside down. As Salar Mohandesi writes, “What began as a promise to push beyond some of socialism’s limitations to build a richer, more diverse and inclusive socialist politics” ended up “exploited by those with politics diametrically opposed to those of the CRC.”⁵ The most recent and most striking example was the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, which adopted the language of “intersectionality” and “privilege” and used identity politics to combat the emergence of a left-wing challenge in the Democratic Party surrounding Bernie Sanders. Sanders’s supporters were condemned as “Bernie Bros,” despite his widespread support among women; they were accused of neglecting the concerns of black people, despite the devastating effect for many black Americans of the Democratic mainstream’s commitment to neoliberal policies. As Michelle Alexander wrote in the Nation, the legacy of the Clinton family was a Democratic capitulation “to the right-wing backlash against the civil-rights movement” and “Ronald Reagan’s agenda on race, crime, welfare, and taxes.” The new brand of Clinton liberalism ended up “ultimately doing more harm to black communities than Reagan ever did.”⁶

The communications director of Clinton’s campaign, Jennifer Palmieri, said during an MSNBC interview about the anti-Trump protests following the inauguration, “You are wrong to look at these crowds and think that means everyone wants fifteen dollars an hour. Don’t assume that the answer to big crowds is moving policy to the left … It’s all about identity on our side now.”

To be fair, Palmieri is not solely to blame for this error in judgment. In fact, she was really just expressing a classical and inescapable tenet of liberalism. Judith Butler has explained that “identities are formed within contemporary political arrangements in relation to certain requirements of the liberal state.” In liberal political discourse, power relations are equated with the law, but as Michel Foucault demonstrated, they are actually produced and exercised in a range of social practices: the division of labor in the factory, the spatial organization of the classroom, and, of course, the disciplinary procedures of the prison. In these institutions, collectivities of people are separated into individuals who are subordinated to a dominating power. But this “individualization” also constitutes them as political subjects—the basic political unit of liberalism, after all, is the individual. Within this framework, Butler argues, “the assertion of rights and claims to entitlement can only be made on the basis of a singular and injured identity.”⁷

The word subject, Butler points out, has a peculiar double meaning: it means having agency, being able to exert power, but also being subordinated, under the control of an external power. The liberal form of politics is one in which we become subjects who participate in politics through our subjection to power. So Butler suggests that “what we call identity politics is produced by a state which can only allocate recognition and rights to subjects totalized by the particularity that constitutes their plaintiff status.” If we can claim to be somehow injured on the basis of our identity, as though presenting a grievance in a court of law, we can demand recognition from the state on that basis—and since identities are the condition of liberal politics, they become more and more totalizing and reductive. Our political agency through identity is exactly what locks us into the state, what ensures our continued subjection. The pressing task, then, as Butler puts it, is to come up with ways of “refusing the type of individuality correlated with the disciplinary apparatus of the modern state.”⁸

But we can’t possibly achieve this if we take these forms of individuality for granted—if we accept them as the starting point of our analysis and our politics. Clearly “identity” is a real phenomenon: it corresponds to the way the state parcels us out into individuals, and the way we form our selfhood in response to a wide range of social relations. But it is nevertheless an abstraction, one that doesn’t tell us about the specific social relations that have constituted it. A materialist mode of investigation has to go from the abstract to the concrete—it has to bring this abstraction back to earth by moving through all the historical specificities and material relations that have put it in our heads.

In order to do that, we have to reject “identity” as a foundation for thinking about identity politics. For this reason, I don’t accept the Holy Trinity of “race, gender, and class” as identity categories. This idea of the Holy Spirit of Identity, which takes three consubstantial divine forms, has no place in materialist analysis. Race, gender, and class name entirely different social relations, and they themselves are abstractions that have to be explained in terms of specific material histories.

For precisely that reason, this book is entirely focused on race. That is partly because my own personal experience has forced me to think of race beyond the easy theological abstraction of identity. But it is also because the hypotheses presented here are based on research into the history of race, racism, and antiracist movements. Of course, studying any concrete history necessarily requires us to deal with all the relations constitutive of it, and thus we will encounter the effects of gender relations and movements against gender-related oppression. But I make no claim to offer a comprehensive analysis of gender as such; to do so would require a distinct course of research, and to simply treat gender as a subsidiary question to race would be entirely unacceptable. There is already much work along these lines to consider. Butler’s Gender Trouble is itself one of the most prescient and profound critiques of identity politics as it exists within the specific discourse of feminist theory. In Butler’s own words, her critique “brings into question the foundationalist frame in which feminism as an identity politics has been articulated. The internal paradox of this foundationalism is that it presumes, fixes, and constrains the very ‘subjects’ that it hopes to represent and liberate.”⁹ But here I focus on race, and I will be primarily concerned with the history of black movements, not only because I believe these movements have fundamentally shaped the political parameters of our current historical moment, but because the figures to whom these movements gave rise are at the apex of thinking on the concept of race. There is also the matter of my personal contact with black revolutionary theory, which first exposed me to Malcolm X and Huey Newton’s critiques of the precursors of identity politics. Following their practice, I define identity politics as the neutralization of movements against racial oppression. It is the ideology that emerged to appropriate this emancipatory legacy in service of the advancement of political and economic elites. In order to theorize and criticize it, it is necessary to apply the framework of the black revolutionary struggle, including the Combahee River Collective itself. These movements should not be considered deviations from a universal, but rather the basis for unsettling the category of identity and criticizing the contemporary forms of identity politics—a phenomenon whose specific historical form the black revolutionary struggle could not have predicted or anticipated, but whose precursors it identified and opposed.

Malcolm’s analysis was cut short in 1965 when he was assassinated by the cultural nationalists of the Nation of Islam, with whom he had broken after connecting with revolutionary anticolonial movements in Africa and Asia, which he constantly invoked in his speeches. He had deepened his structural analysis of white supremacy and the economic system on which it rested. As Ferruccio Gambino has demonstrated, this is not surprising when we look at Malcolm’s life as a laborer—as a Pullman porter and a final assembler at the Ford Wayne Assembly Plant, where he encountered the tension between the workers’ antagonism toward the employer and the restraint imposed by the union bureaucracies.¹⁰ “It’s impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism,” Malcolm said in a 1964 discussion. “You can’t have capitalism without racism. And if you find one and you happen to get that person into conversation and they have a philosophy that makes you sure they don’t have this racism in their outlook, usually they’re socialists or their political philosophy is socialism.”¹¹

The Black Panther Party followed through on Malcolm’s growing practice of revolutionary solidarity and his critique of the Nation of Islam’s cultural nationalism, which they called “pork-chop nationalism.” The pork-chop nationalists, Huey Newton argued in a 1968 interview, were “concerned with returning to the old African culture and thereby regaining their identity and freedom,” but ultimately erased the political and economic contradictions within the black community. The inevitable result of pork-chop nationalism was a figure like “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who used racial and cultural identity as the ideological support for his brutally repressive and corrupt dictatorship of Haiti. Newton argued that it was necessary to draw a “line of demarcation” between this kind of nationalism and the kind that the Panthers espoused:

There are two kinds of nationalism, revolutionary nationalism and reactionary nationalism. Revolutionary nationalism is first dependent upon a people’s revolution with the end goal being the people in power. Therefore to be a revolutionary nationalist you would by necessity have to be a socialist. If you are a reactionary nationalist you are not a socialist and your end goal is the oppression of the people.¹²

Another leader of the Black Panther Party, Kathleen Cleaver, has reflected on how the revolutionary nationalism of the Panthers led them to understand the revolutionary struggle as a specifically cross-racial one:

In a world of racist polarization, we sought solidarity … We organized the Rainbow Coalition, pulled together our allies, including not only the Puerto Rican Young Lords, the youth gang called Black P. Stone Rangers, the Chicano Brown Berets, and the Asian I Wor Kuen (Red Guards), but also the predominantly white Peace and Freedom Party and the Appalachian Young Patriots Party. We posed not only a theoretical but a practical challenge to the way our world was organized. And we were men and women working together.¹³

That’s an obvious conclusion when you understand socialism the way Huey Newton did: as “the people in power.” It can’t be reduced to the redistribution of wealth or the defense of the welfare state—socialism is defined in terms of the political power of the people as such. So not only is socialism an indispensable component of the black struggle against white supremacy, the anticapitalist struggle has to incorporate the struggle for black self-determination. Any doubt about this, Newton pointed out, could be dispelled by studying American history and seeing that the two structures were inextricably linked:

The Black Panther Party is a revolutionary nationalist group and we see a major contradiction between capitalism in this country and our interests. We realize that this country became very rich upon slavery and that slavery is capitalism in the extreme. We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.¹⁴

This was not, however, a new insight of the Black Panthers. While I was growing up, the civil rights movement had been rendered palatable for mainstream audiences, and I had sought out the more militant-seeming legacy of Black Power. But thanks to the work of scholars and activists who have practiced fidelity to the revolutionary content of the civil rights movement, it is becoming evident that recognition for an injured identity cannot possibly describe this movement’s scope and aspirations. Nikhil Pal Singh writes in his important book Black Is a Country that the reigning narrative of the civil rights movement “fails to recognize the historical depth and heterogeneity of black struggles against racism, narrowing the political scope of black agency and reinforcing a formal, legalistic view of black equality.”¹⁵

As the historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall elaborates in her analysis of the “long civil rights movement,” Martin Luther King Jr. has been rendered an empty symbol, “frozen in 1963.” Through selective quotation, Hall observes, the uplifting rhetoric of his speeches has been stripped of its content: his oppos...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface to the 2022 Edition
• Introduction
• 1. Identity Politics
• 2. Contradictions Among the People
• 3. Racial Ideology
• 4. Passing
• 5. Law and Order
• 6. Universality
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index