axshully, i'm reading a fantubulous book by Kimberly Springer about the rise and fall of black feminist movements, Living for the Revolution: 1968 - 1980. In it, she is exploring this very identity politics -- how it formed part of the very internal struggles that erupted *within* black feminist organizations themselves when they debated who would be allowed to join (did they have to agree that they were of African descent? Would they allow Puerto Rican women who were asking to be included? Were they, in this case The Combahee Collective's most powerful voice Barbara Smith, actually excluding questions of elitism within the collective when they ignored class and other issues? Were they aligning with third world people? Should they call themselves feminist and risk alienating lots of women who couldn't identify with that silly white women's movement -- for that was the dominant view at the time, peddled in Ebony and Jet and peddled a great deal by black nationalist men. Some of the stuff is stomach turning -- what these men said -- but the book is also eye opening for the way black women were under constant pressure not to become feminists because they were seen as traitors to the civil rights struggle, called a lot of names by black nationalist men, a trope often picked up by socialist and radical socialist feminist white women themselves who, in a meeting at Sandy Creek to discuss feminist and black women voiced the view that the worst women were black women who embraced feminism -- because they'd abandoned their role in black liberationist struggles.
Which was something I'd read about. What I hadn't read about was the notion that the antiwar movement was seen as a white issue and any black person who got involved took a lot of shit for it -- before the issue got take up later. Barbara Smith writes about being in a tough spot at the University of Pittsburgh in 1968 when she got nothing but heat from students and college profs alike for being part of the antiwar movement as a black woman.
Anyway, all of these groups in the book - and she focuses explicitly on what she calls militant black feminists b/c she's interested in black socialist feminist history -- emerged, only to quickly find that they faced their own issues that would make collective identify formation difficult. Reading it, it makes you realize that *all* politicized groups are involved in collective identity formation -- in so far as one *becomes* an activist engaged in struggle.
Identity Politics? It was the label women, people of color (e.g., the Combahee Collective) applied to their politics in 1976. Was it a bad thing? For Springer, no. It didn't divide the movement, it was part of the process of defining what it was. Did it lead to their demise? Not according to Springer. More often, it was just plain ol' burn out and the conservative backlash.
So, I really have no idea what anyone means here by identity politics, but if it means attentiveness to the notion that, when one tries to say "we're all human" or "we're all women" or "we're all working class" "or we're all in this together", it can't hurt to ask, "Who is this we you're talking about?"
Thing is, so far, in this book, the groups that attended most to diverse issues -- rather than thinking they had to focus on a handful -- were the ones that lasted the longest and had the most impact. But i'm not done yet. I just made two posts on the first chapter and author at the blog. http://blog.pulpculture.org
At 09:29 AM 6/16/2007, you wrote:
>Doug Henwood wrote:
> >
> > On Jun 16, 2007, at 2:19 AM, Joseph Catron wrote:
> >
> > > identity politics war far superior, for their purposes, to class
> > > struggle.
> >
> > Damn, I thought this opposition of "class vs. identity" had gone the
> > way of the dodo, or at least the 90s.
>
>Indeed. "Identity politics" was a passing fad of the '80s, marking the
>end (for the time being) of the struggle politics of the 1955-75. Rights
>for gays is NOT identity politics. Anti-lynching is NOT identity
>politics. The Black Liberation Movement, the Women's Liberation
>Movement, the Gay Liberation Movement, and so forth had nothing whatever
>to do with identity politics. It is a stupid phrase and should be
>forgotten. All of these movements were forms of class struggle, of the
>working-class movement. Opposition to any of these movements is
>scabbing.
>
>Carrol
>
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