"She's embarassed by it all now and looks back at her
self of a few years ago with a bit of disdain. I tell her to be at ease. Achieving escape velocity from racism comes in stages. For her, the first was turning traditional tropes on their head: black became all good and white mostly bad. The next stage was tossing that silliness aside to discover and accept complexity."
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Identity politics is a dead-end. In addition, it's interesting to note that identity isn't actually given by the group you're born into -- as a worker, woman, homosexual, lesbian, african-american, etc. -- it's given by the group you identify with. The repug secret of success is that it invites people to identify with "tough, strong, successful" people; the demo secret of failure is that it asks people to identify with "losers," and, by adopting identity politics, it fragments whatever base of support it has left.
All forms of identification are a form of mental lazyness, but the way most of us are raised and brought to unconsciousness, they appear to be a way of becoming someone important--either through identifying with the strong or the weak. It would be interesting to discover how to organize politically without this identification game. Bringing back notions like "civil rights" would be good; introducing the idea of a shared/common patrimony would help too.
Joanna