Identity politics did not play much of a role in any of those. Identity politics did play a role in making sexual harrassment and rape actionable offenses, which probably had a salutary effect on working conditions.
Comparing changing conditions for women with those of blacks in the last
forty years makes it pretty clear that identity politics played a much
smaller role than did changing economic conditions. Otherwise I can't
come up with any explanation for why racism continues more or less
unabated, with the state now taking over the lynching function. Perhaps
life in prison is progress over being strung up in a tree; otherwise,
I'd argue that state lynching is a very clever way to get the taxpayer
to support racism and state terror, while at the same time
congratulating ourselves for having gone beyond the Jim Crow south.
> While we're
> certainly not post-race or post-gender or any of those other fanciful
> features of ObamaWorld, levels of awareness now aren't as low. As Kim
> Moody said years ago, after all those "identity" struggles, we now
> have the capacity to do class right.
In theory, I guess.
> But we sure didn't when we
> thought of the "working class" as something unitary.
I don't know. Certainly the socialists/communists could have done better
about how they treated women and what sort of priorities they considered
important...But even in the pre-identity days, they did significantly
better than anyone else. In fact, one might argue that they took the
first step.
Joanna