3 June 2020
Identity politics is advocacy by those with a particular racial, sexual, or cultural identity for policies that benefit that particular group, as opposed to the populace at large. The term arose in the 1960s and 70s among minorities in the United States, particular among black political activists, who advocated for an end to discriminatory policies and for policies that promoted equality. But identity politics is not, by definition, limited to minorities. The dominant racial or cultural group in any given polity can also be an identity, and policies and institutions that discriminate against other groups or maintain conditions of inequality are also a form of identity politics.
The earliest use of the phrase identity politics that I have found is in the Atlanta Daily World of 16 July 1970 in an article about the politics of the Alabama governor George Wallace and how he weaponized black identity politics to give coherence and motivation to his racist supporters who were engaged in white identity politics:
Shrewdly, Mr. Wallace made capital of what could be called identity politics in which the “strange bedfellows,” the “black bloc vote” and those “big city newspapers” were made villains and targets. Such hate symbolism found easy believers among the gullible, the bigoted, the unthinking, and the odd bloc.
The Atlanta Daily World is a newspaper serving the black community of Georgia. The “what could be called” makes it clear that the term, if it were already in circulation in the black community, wasn’t instantly familiar to many of the paper’s readers.
In 1973, sociologist and political activist Todd Gitlin used identity politics to retroactively describe the radical political movements of the late 1960s, in particular the group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). He viewed identity politics negatively, believing that its, perhaps inevitable, growth stifled any hope of a truly revolutionary movement taking shape. The quotation here is long, but I believe the length is necessary to understand the context in which Gitlin uses the term:
In the absence of radical movement elsewhere in the society, [the radical student movement] could even claim that it was the embryo of revolutionary agency itself (“we are the people”)—a movement for itself. In other moments (community and factory organizing), it tried to repudiate its social reality by claiming to be the instrument, or the vanguard, or the catalyst, of social forces that really were oppressed (the poor, blacks, industrial workers, the Third World) and capable of taking power—a movement for others. Throughout the sixties the movement oscillated between these poles, searching more for identity than for strategy.
Unable to carry the burden of historical novelty, sects within SDS (Progressive Labor, Weatherman, Revolutionary Youth Movement) took on pseudo-identities as self-appointed vanguards and fifth columns of other forces. Thus they could hold onto their elitist belief in their right to rule, while claiming to have entered the revolutionary lists in the name of their chosen constituencies. They split and devoured SDS so easily because they capitalized on a widespread self-doubt: with a rush they occupied a vacuum of identity and strategy, virtually without opposition. Identity politics swallowed itself. The alternative, a conscious, programmatic radicalism, has not yet formed.
Many credit the Combahee River Collective, a black, feminist movement of the 1970s, with coining the term identity politics. While they did not, as we have seen from the earlier uses, invent the term, they did embrace it. Unlike Gitlin, they did not view an overarching revolutionary movement as a good thing for them. From their perspective, no movement led by men was ever going to truly advocate for equality for black women, and it would be up to themselves to fight for it. From the collective’s 1977 statement:
This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.
Since the early 1970s, the term has been used both positively and negatively.
Sources:
The Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement” (1977). In Zillah R. Eisenstein. Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979, 365. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Gitlin, Todd. “The Future of an Effusion: How Young Activists Will Get to 1984.” In 1984 Revisited. Robert Paul Wolff, ed. New York: Knopf, 1973, 27. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, s.v. identity, n.
“A Spokesman for Racism.” Atlanta Daily World. 16 July 1970, 6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.