>Doug Henwood wrote:
> >
> > On Jan 6, 2008, at 6:06 PM, Joanna wrote:
> >
> >
> > I still don't get what you mean by "identity politics." Organized
> > feminism had a lot to do with the improvement of women's economic
> > status (and, as Jane Mansbridge argues, informal relations of daily
>
>Yeah. That's o.k. I guess.
>
>As I experienced it at the time what is now called identity politics
>began to develop _before_ the phrase was coined & theorized. (I forget
>the theorizations now but they exist.) The basis was quite simple. With
>the defeat of ERA, with the crushing (externally & internally) of the
>Panthers, with ebbing of the war, with the Slump of 1974-5, the movement
>was in full retreat. (Like Thurber's dueller we didn't know it for a
>while.) So what had been activist groups with a sense of being _part of_
>a much larger movement*, gradually turned into what should probably be
>called self-help groups or discussion groups, etc. Then someone named
>it, Identity Politics. Some of us went through the motions of opposing
>it, but we had no real alternative to offer. The New Communist Movement
>was melting away even before it had achieved its maximum grown.
>
>CISPES was not "Identity Politics," and we worked like hell -- but we no
>longer felt that we were part of anything larger. Neither could local
>NAACPs or radical caucuses in unions etc.
>
>In short, we were in Retreat, because the Neoliberal assault overwhelmed
>us. It was a fairly honorable retreat on the whole.
>
>Carrol
There was a very influential feminist organization, third world feminists, who had a widely disseminated magaizine called 'Triple Jeopardy' -- this was based on the notion that they were most oppressed by their class, race, and gender and specifically in terms of colonial rule. The emphasis was on who suffered the most.
Identity politics stems from that line of thinking, which dominated leftist thought at the time.
The word circulated among black women and was taken up and made very famous by The Combahee River Collective in Boston. That's where it started, where it was theorized _from_ political practice. The arguments they made, that there was a group of people who knew the truth of history were taken directly from people who believed either that US blacks were the center of any coming revolution or that Third World Peopls were the center of any revolution.
And this was upheld very strongly by those white leftist groups who insisted that they align themselves with the Black Power movement. If you want, I'll get out Kimberley Springer's book which details the conversation held throughout the late 60s and 70s.
The argument was that the white working class could not be organized, was not revolutionary enough because they were too well off at the center of colonialist rule. The only "true" revolutionary consciousness would be found among people of color -- in the US or in Third World countries.
But this didn't sit to well with black women who found themselves subjected to white women's and men's racism in leftist groups. (Cf Angela Davis) on one side and Black Power Movement (and their white male supporters') sexism on the other side.
The identity politics movement was born of that claim: that we could find a class consciousness, a specifically racialized one, as the group most oppressed by capitalism.
The group that stepped forward to embrace the name proudly was The Combahee River Collective who argued that, because they were the most oppressed in US society, suffering multiple oppressions of being black, women, lesbians and, as a consequence, this subject position provided them the consciousness to "at any moment" (their words "make a revolutionary leap."
They were the revolutionary consciousness of any movement, they argued, and people better start paying attention.
According to Kimberly Springer, The Combahee Collective dominated the left political scene in Boston, deciding who was among the chosen groups to have an approved politics. As a consequence, they influenced who got to speak at protests, which struggles were important, and so forth.
Of course, on a couple of months after they issues this statement, there were discussing issues of class and education. They realized pretty quickly that it didn't stop with black lesbian consciousness but that, as black lesbians, they might exert, today, what we call privilege in terms of class and education and thus silence the voices and experience of people from backgrouns not like their's.
And I think, if you bother to read any of their work, such as _Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology_, you will find that they articulate far better than you are capable of your own ideas about the centrality of race to left movements.
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)