On your recommendation -- and on the basis of what i'd read about it when it came out -- I picked this up yesterday and just finished it. It's a quick read. I think he's mistaken about what some people mean when they take about identity politics from a leftist perspective. He kept using the term leftist -- for he's largely speaking to them. They are his audience. But I am not sure who he identifies as leftists. For me, leftists are people on this list -- people who see inequality has something to be eliminated and that the source of inequality is capitalism.
But I'm not so sure that's who Michaels is ultimately talking to. The people he has in his target aren't leftists. They typically shy away from any talk of capitalism. Most of them have no idea how capitalism works, why it drives inequality, etc. For most of them, I suspect they have no fundamental problem with inequality in so far as, while they don't like it, they can't imagine a world without it. And, on some level, think it's as inevitable as the weather. They're democrats. They're liberals. They're progressives. They call themselves leftists, because the right has been calling everyone to their left the left -- even if that includes Lieberman. So, with the constantly calling them leftists, they think they are so. But they only are so in contrast to a democratic party that has shifted way to the right.
So, Michaels arguments seem misplaced because the people he seems to want to shame into caring about inequality don't and won't and never have anyway. To illustrate whay I mean -- and why the claim that ID politics somehow came "after" something "before" which was supposedly more radical is wrongheaded because it was going on *at the same time*, here's what I wrote after reading a few chapters of Kimberly Springer's _Living for the Revolution_. My point is, from my reading of several accounts of the era, the most common rhetorical insult to another member of a group committed to socialist principles was to hurl the insult "middle class" or bourgeois and claim it as a kind of cultural oppression. "Oh, how bourgeois, to wear fashionable clothes."
Didn't LNP3.exe have a fascinating account of the reason why he wore certain kinds of slacks -- because otherwise he'd be considered too bourgeois?
NO TIME TO SHIT by Quare Dewd at June 16th, 2007
I was going to entitle the post 'Living for the Revolution' because, 3/4 of the way through the book, on p 120, I came across the line that Springer eventually used for the title. It's in the chapter on forging "Black Feminist Identities" where Springer talks about the various approaches each black feminist organization took and the struggles it faced in terms of identity politics *within* their movement. She takes the view that movements are process of politicized identity formation and, thus, cannot be based simply on a given identity such that, simply because one is a black woman, a politics flows directly from that identity.
Anyway, the title is from the words from a discussion of the focus on consciousness raising taken up in groups like the BWLC (SNCC's Black Women's Liberation Committee) In particular, one of the first issues they discussed was black women and beauty standards. While they dealt with the way that black women were compared to the norm of white women's as the standard of beauty, it was also the 70s. That wasn't the only thing that was on the horizon. At that time, Black Is Beautiful was in. But that meant yet another standard of black women's beauty that women in the BLWC felt subjected to.
They also focused on abortion in consciousness raising groups which was a particularly thorny issues. OT1H, the procedure was illegal in all but a few places, so that made it difficult. It was considered a black women's issue the struggle for abortion because, as Margaret Sloan and Frances Beal contended, black and Puerto Rican woman suffered the highest incidence of death from illegal abortions in places like NYC. OTOH, they were also subjected to the concerns of Black Nationalist who declared that birth control and abortion were part of a genocidal plot planned by white supremacists. Caught in the crossfire, thinking about women's death from illegal abortions and about the outrage of black nationalist men who reject black feminists for supporting women's rights to abortion, Beal asked,
"What about living for the revolution, not just being prepared to die for the revolution?"
So, why the current title? Because I got carried away reading, I moved on to a discussion of class disputes within the organization. The NBFO, National Black Feminist Organization, was accused of being nothing but a NOW for black women. That is, it was seen as a middle class organization with little interest in the struggles of working and poor black women. This was't true, according to Springer, but it was a frequent charge that women at NBFO often tired of.
In an interview with 'The Lesbian Tide,' Margaret Sloan explained that a lot of the criticisms was born of a gender bias and, for some, a purposefully divisive tactic:
<quote> I don't respond to the accusation that the Women's Movement is white and middle-class anymore than I respond to the accusation that is non-existence, that our [civil rights] movement is Black middle class. Nobody criticized Dr. King for having a PhD or Stokely for going to Howard University or Fred Hampton for coming from a suburb. People are able to get excited about the fact that these Black men were able to get up and out of their oppressive situations and bring about a movement
In any movement, it's always the overeducated that get it together anyway. People who are so oppressed rock bottom don't even have time to shit . It's so important for Black women to survive that we can't afford the luxury of saying, "Well, you oppress me because your father is a minister of the chairman of the IT&T." We can't get involved in that .. not saying that we shouldn't have sound arguments about class. But when feminists do that, here we are women who claim not to be male-identified but when we go into a class thing what we do is judge her by the man she's attached to, because most women who do come from a privileged class got it from the dude they sleep with, the man that kept them, the father that had them. It's never because of the money. Very few women in this country really have power and money." </quote>
I think Sloan has at least one interesting point: how frequently, at the time, people were hurling "middle class" as a way to undermine each others' struggles and organizations. It didn't happen in black male movements though I do think that there was something that happened in white new left movements that is akin to it: a concern that they were too bourgeois to be of use in analysis or action.
At any rate, the rest of it, I remain ambivalent and will go back to finishing the book so I can see what Springer does in this section.
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)