....And I'm not saying I'm any smarter than anyone else. The biggest mistakes I have made in my personal life stemmed from the assumption that someone who was oppressed would naturally understand the injustice of oppression and fight oppression wherever it existed.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
Hannah Arendt has some very interesting observations about the project of building politics on oppressed identities in an essay called "On Humanity in Dark Times." (Thanks to Chuck G for the book.) I'm not sure if a few fragments can convey the whole, but I'll try:
First she speaks of the shared humanity of oppressed people: the kind of humanity that manifests itself "when the times become so extremely dark for certain groups of people that it is no longer up to them, their insight or choice, to withdraw from the world. Humanity in the form of fraternity invariably appears historically among persecuted peoples and enslaved groups....This kind of humanity is the great privilege of pariah peoples; it is the advantage that the pariahs of this world always and in all circumstances can have over others. The privilege is dearly bought; it is often accompanied by so radical a loss of the world, so fearful an atrophy of all the organs with which we respond to it...that in extreme cases, in which pariahdom has persisted for centuries, we can speak of real worldlessness. And worldlessness, alas, is always a form of barbarism."
Note her argument that the "humanity" (identity) of the oppressed is the result of a loss of the world, literally of the loss of options that non-pariahs enjoy in the world. She goes on:
"In this as it were organically evolved humanity, it is as if under the pressure of persecution, the persecuted have moved so closely together that the interspace which we have called world (and which of course existed between them before the persecution, keeping them at a distance from one anther) has simply disappeared. This produces a warmth of human relationships which may strike those who have had some experience with such groups as almost a physical phenomenon. Of course I do not mean to imply that this warmth ...is not a great thing. In its full development it can breed a kindliness and sheer goodness of which human beings are otherwise scarcely capable. Frequently it is also the source of a vitality, a joy in the simple fact of being alive, rather suggesting that life comes fully into its own only among those who are, in worldly terms, the insulted and injured. But in saying this we must not forget that the charm and intensity of the atmosphere that develops is also due to the fact that the pariahs of this world enjoy the great privilege of being unburdened by care for the world."
Do we all remember the degree to which identity politics was so deeply attractive to the non-pariahs? Attractive precisely because of the warmth of enforced community and because of the denial of responsibility. Identity politics did not simply draw the oppressed to a familiar corner; it also drew the privileged (or their children) hankering for the brotherly warmth that could not be found in the circles of privilege. And there was something else, something pretty sinister as I remember: it was the expectation that finding the correct oppressed minority, you had also found the group that was historically destined to do your bleeding for you. Under the overt compassion there was covert cruelty.
As for basing political action on compassion for the oppressed, Arendt notes...
"Modern times and antiquity agree on one point: both regard compassion as something totally natural, as inescapable to man as, say, fear. It is therefore all the more striking that antiquity took a position wholly at odds with the great esteem for compassion of modern times. Because they so clearly recognized the affective nature of compassion, which can overcome us like fear without our being able to fend it off, the ancients regarded the most compassionate person as no more entitled to be called the best than the most fearful. Both emotions, because they are purely passive, make action impossible. This is the reason Aristotle treated compassion and fear together....In judging these affects we can scarcely help raising the question of selflessness, or rather the question of openness to others, which in fact is the precondition for "humanity" in every sense of that word. It seems evident that sharing joy is absolutely superior in this respect to sharing suffering. Gladness, not sadness, is talkative, and truly human dialogue differs from mere talk or even discussion in that it is entirely permeated by pleasure in the other person and what he says. It is tuned to the key of gladness, we might say. What stands in the way of this gladness is envy, which in the sphere of humanity is the worst vice; but the antithesis to compassion is not envy but cruelty, which is an affect no less than compassion, for it is a perversion, a feeling of pleasure where pain would naturally be felt. The decisive factor is that pleasure and pain, like everything instinctual, tend to muteness, and while they may well produce sound, they do not produce speech and certainly no dialogue.
All this is only another way of saying that the humanitarianism of brotherhood scarcely befits those who do not belong among the insulted and the injured and can share it only through their compassion. The warmth of pariah peoples cannot rightfully extend to those whose different position in the world imposes on them a responsibility for the world and does not allow them to share the cheerful unconcern of the pariah. But it is true that in "dark times" the warmth which is the pariahs' substitute for light exerts a great fascination upon all those who are so ashamed of the world as it is that they would like to take refuge in invisibility. And in invisibility, in that obscurity in which a man who is himself hidden need no longer see the visible world either, only the warmth and fraternity of closely packed human beings can compensate for the weird irreality that human relationships assume wherever they develop in absolute worldlessness and irreality it is easy to conclude that the element common to all men is not world, but "human nature" of such and such a type. What the type is depends on the interpreter; it scarcely matters whether reason, as a property of all men, is emphasized, or a feeling common to all, such as the capacity for compassion. The rationalism and sentimentalism of the eighteenth century are only two aspects of the same thing; both could lead equally to that enthusiastic excess in which individuals feel ties of brotherhood to all men. In any case this rationality and sentimentality were only psychological substitutes, localized in the realm of invisibility, for the loss of the common, visible world.
Now this "human nature" and the feelings of fraternity that accompany it manifest themselves only in darkness, and hence cannot be identified in the world. What is more, in conditions of visibility they dissolve into nothingness like phantoms. The humanity of the insulted and injured has never yet survived the hour of liberation by so much as a minute. This does not mean that it is insignificant, for in fact it makes insult and injury endurable; but it does mean that in political terms it is absolutely irrelevant." ------------------------- -------------------------- In short....to look at the identities manufactured by class society makes sense to me. To understand how sexual-, racial-, gender-based identities are manufactured and used to keep us worldless, wordless, separate, helpless, crippled, blind this makes sense to me. To ground political action on these "identities" makes no sense whatsoever.
--The Black Panthers were destroyed and no accounting has yet had to be made for the terrorist acts that were involved.
--The demands made by feminists were met to the extent that they dovetailed with the plummeting standard of living and the system's need for two-worker families. Women as women have no greater rights today than they did forty years ago: there is no free medical care for them or their kids, and they can be mothers only on either side of their 8-hour day. There is no paid maternal leave, no living wage, no free daycare, and few decent schools.
-- One third of black males are routinely cycled through the nation's jails and, once through, have little or no chance to get decent employment.
-- The disabled are slowly being pushed back into the ditch. Chuck can speak more to this; he's seen it all.
-- Probably the most successful identity movement has been that for gay rights -- it has also been the most apolitical.
Joanna