The students in my seminar on “American Culture Since 1970” are wonderfully diverse in terms of students’ ethnicities, nationalities, backgrounds, interests, and even majors – UT Dallas consistently ranks among the most diverse research universities in the nation (at least per U.S. News and World Report) – and they have bravely plunged with me into texts that could make for challenging and awkward class discussion, but that we all seem to be handling with dignity and aplomb. Last week we were discussing, among other texts, Susan Lydon’s “The Politics of Orgasm,” from Sisterhood Is Powerful. If you think that’s an easy thing to nonchalantly do – or even to chalantly do – in a class full of women and men ,who are roughly half your age or younger, without a hint of awkwardness, well, you try it.
One key thing to do is to address the potential awkwardness at the start of the discussion. (Still, at one point, I just had to tell them “GTS” – “Google that shit.”) Even more crucial is to remind everyone of the distance between the text we are looking at together and our own selves and lives – the distance in time, the distance in historical circumstances, the distance in cultural mores. In all my teaching, whatever the text or the subject or the time period being discussed, I continually remind my students (and myself), “This isn’t ‘us’ we’re talking about today; this is ‘those people back then.’ We need to understand what they thought was important and why, whether we think the same way now or not.”
Harriet Tubman, 1860s-1870s. Courtesy of Library of Congress.
Often, though, the text we are talking about contains language or ideas or conflicts that resonate loudly with our current moment, like the sympathetic vibration of harp strings octaves apart. That resonance is no mere accident — the past ever flows into the present. Our raft is spinning in the river, and we look now back, now forward, in the swirling currents which carry some things toward us and perhaps beyond us that we thought we had left behind.
A few weeks ago, we discussed the Combahee River Collective Statement as a pivotal document reflecting the rise of radical feminisms – emphasis on the plural – and charting a possible course for those movements. As diverse as my class is, this text written by radical Black queer feminists may have seemed to them at first glance to be speaking entirely from and for and to a distant time.
But then, of course, we come to the phrase “identity politics.” In the discussion – which was very good – none of the students brought up the term. Why? Because it is so familiar to them – not the meaning the phrase had in this text, but the sound of the words. “Identity politics” has become a slang term, a catch-all for cultural critics (and internet trolls), left, center, and right, who believe that a consideration of the positionality of participants and stakeholders in our public debates imperils “the revolution,” or “liberal democracy,” or “the Western tradition,” respectively. It’s a term tossed about in Twitter flame wars and Disqus comment threads with imprecision and derision.
So it’s worth thinking about what the women who introduced this term into our lexicon in 1977 meant by it, and what they hoped to accomplish through it.
Here is the context of the term as it appears in the Combahee statement:
We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.
This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.
The first part of this passage should seem unobjectionable to anyone who has read Federalist No. 10. (No, I am not suggesting that the Combahee statement is anything other than a radical Marxist revolutionary document calling for an end to capitalism, racism and the patriarchy. Just making a rhetorical point for those who imagine that a self-identified “interest group” becoming active in politics is somehow a Dire Development.) The Combahee Statement is the declaration of people who recognize that they have a common interest, yet their interest is explicitly not “adverse to the rights of other citizens.” They are not seeking elevation above others, priority above others within the body politic, and they are not seeking to remain in a position of subservience. “To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.”
Yet these women know how revolutionary it would be for Black queer women to be able to walk through the world with the same freedom, the same fearlessness, the same peace and safety, the same respect and regard, as anybody else. For in the history of radical Liberationism and rights Liberalism alike, they can see that every other group’s concerns and causes have been championed before their own. And so “identity politics” means first of all that they will be their own champions.
But that’s not all it means. And, crucially, it does not mean that social transformation for the better will come about as everyone becomes the champion of his or her own particular personal needs and concerns. In fact, that’s the road to stasis, as Federalist No. 10 makes clear. And yes, this means that the “champions of the Enlightenment” who rail against “identity politics” are, in fact, engaging in the kind of identity politics they decry, defending their own interests against what they perceive as the hostile interests of these radical Black queer women and all those who have found motivation in their call for the radical reconstruction of the social order.
But the kind of identity politics engaged in by the Steven Pinkers, the Jordan Petersons, the Dinesh D’Souzas, the Richard Spencers of the world – oh, they are Legion, and, save for the different market niches to which each of these sad standard-bearers directs his appeal, they are pretty much interchangeable – is not the identity politics of the Combahee River Collective.
These women clearly spelled out their position and their intention:
The psychological toll of being a Black woman and the difficulties this presents in reaching political consciousness and doing political work can never be underestimated. There is a very low value placed upon Black women’s psyches in this society, which is both racist and sexist. As an early group member once said, “We are all damaged people merely by virtue of being Black women.” We are dispossessed psychologically and on every other level, and yet we feel the necessity to struggle to change the condition of all Black women. In “A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood,” Michele Wallace arrives at this conclusion:
“We exist as women who are Black who are feminists, each stranded for the moment, working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle—because, being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world.”
Wallace is pessimistic but realistic in her assessment of Black feminists’ position, particularly in her allusion to the nearly classic isolation most of us face. We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.
These radical Black queer feminist women envisioned something far more radical than Steven Pinker or Richard Spencer could ever imagine. It’s there in that last line: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free.” The complete liberation of Black queer feminist women from all oppressions, all injurious practices directed at them as members of the least empowered, least regarded, least important, last considered “interest group” in the body politic would necessarily involve setting everyone free from sexism, from toxic gender norms, from economic exploitation, from racism that drives a dividing wedge between people who might make common cause to make our lives and the lives of our children peaceful and bountiful.
In a very real sense, “identity politics” was not a call for each “unmeltable ethnic” or interest group to foreground the interests of race, class, and gender in the abstract. Identity politics as it was birthed by the Combahee River Collective was a call for everyone to put the well-being of Black queer feminist women first. If we do something to make the lives of Black queer feminist women better, the Collective was saying, we will make the lives of everyone who is currently in a more powerful position in the social order better along the way, until we are all “levelly human.”
As I said – as they said — that’s revolutionary. These women identified as socialists and called for a class revolution that would require a revolution in gender relations and race relations.
But as all my regular readers know, and as my students discover — some to their great relief, others to their great disappointment — I’m not much of a revolutionary. I’m not a radical. I’m not a Leftist. I am a bourgeois centrist Liberal. I believe in liberal democracy, voting, property rights, self-ownership, contracts, individualism, an educated electorate – all those quaint and stodgy ideas. I believe in reform, not revolution – I want to see justice roll down but I don’t want to see anyone’s blood flowing in the streets.
And, God bless them, revolutionary as they were, the women of the Combahee River Collective didn’t want to see that either:
In the practice of our politics we do not believe that the end always justifies the means. Many reactionary and destructive acts have been done in the name of achieving “correct” political goals. As feminists we do not want to mess over people in the name of politics. We believe in collective process and a nonhierarchical distribution of power within our own group and in our vision of a revolutionary society.
The Combahee River Collective could imagine what so many of us still cannot: a radically democratic social order. For this country to even begin to live up to the words that Thomas Jefferson himself could not hope to fulfill – all are equal, all have the right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness – would be a revolution indeed.
I realize that this reading thoroughly de-radicalizes what is most radical in the Combahee Statement. I do not mean to say that my cautious liberal democratic vision of meliorism carries anything like the power or the prophetic urgency of their profoundly revolutionary intervention.
But I do mean to say this: identity politics as they envisioned it can be the path to profound and salutary social transformation if we recognize that making the world better in practical ways for Black women would necessarily mean making it better for the rest of us as well.
“How would this policy affect the lives of Black women who do not have a male partner?” That’s a question that the Combahee Statement can prompt us to ask, even as it asks us – with far more grace than the rotten history and current cruelty of our society could ever hope to receive – to choose the policies that make those lives better, to choose the policies that demonstrate that Black women’s lives matter. For, given the history we have inherited, when Black lives truly matter, in our living as in our laws, then everyone’s will.
20 Thoughts on this Post
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My only quibble here is describing their imagined polis as “radically democratic” when it’s arguably the antithesis of majoritarianism. Maybe this is basically a semantic problem – as Marc Bloch said “To the great despair of historians, men fail to change their vocabulary every time they change their customs. ” — distinguishing between democracy as a procedural politics and “democracy” as a system in which rights inhere in persons rather than in society.
L.D.,
This post, istm, makes v. good points, but I do think it’s rather unfair to Steven Pinker to mention him in the same breath — even for these specific purposes — with D’Souza and Spencer. D’Souza is a right-wing extremist and Spencer is a white nationalist and, last I checked, a neo-Nazi. Pinker is not either; from what I can tell, he’s pretty close to the centrist liberal you identify yourself as being. Liberals of course disagree among themselves, and you and Pinker may and evidently do strenuously disagree about various matters, at least about ‘identity politics’ at any rate, but I don’t think he belongs in the same company as D’Souza and Spencer. (As for Jordan Peterson, I don’t really know enough about him to place him in this context.)
p.s. Whether Pinker’s time is best spent writing books for a wide audience (and no doubt profiting handsomely) as opposed to doing more scholarly research in his field (for all I know, he does both, though it seems unlikely since there are only 24 hrs in a day) is a question I’ll leave aside here. Also will leave aside whether Pinker’s general perspective on the world is correct or not.
I confess that I hadn’t used the Combahee Statement in my survey courses. But I will if/when I get in that kind of classroom again. Question: Do we know, for sure, that the term “identity politics” originated in this statement? I ask because often the origins of terms like this are so very murky. – TL
Side point: How were you able to write a post on this topic without tossing in something about Mark Lilla? 😉
Thanks all for the comments.
Jonathan, I meant the terms “radically democratic” to pull against each other, so I meant it in both senses that you point to, but mostly the second one — radically egalitarian and intentionally diffusive in distributing responsibility and power for making collective decisions for the good of all. However, I also had in mind (or at heart) the idea James Kloppenberg explored in Toward Democracy, where “democracy” depends on a charitable audition of alternate or even opposed views, choosing the way of deliberation until some agreement can be worked out over the alternative of anathemas and violent imposition of one group’s will upon another. So, “democratic” in the ethical sense that posits “democracy” as dependent on something like Christian charity (which is what JK does in his book), though then the problem becomes, is Democracy possible in a post-Christian world? But that’s another blog post.
Louis, I listed those men on a continuum — a “continuum of respectability,” I suppose, from least objectionable to most deplorable. But they are all currently in the news (or at least in that portion of the news that flows across my algorithm-warped feeds) for challenging “identity politics” as somehow a corrupting influence on the body politic, and as something to which they themselves (with the possible exception of Richard Spencer) are immune.
I think the impulse to say that it’s not fair to lump Pinker in with Spencer because Pinker’s not a crass white supremacist is understandable. Pinker thinks he’s defending the Enlightenment by excluding a consideration of the perspective of the knower in considering that which is presumed to be known — his own perspective, of course, being the neutral baseline for all knowledge. He is deciding what counts as “identity politics” and what counts as just “politics” (his views), what counts as “situated epistemology” and what counts as just “epistemology” (his views), with his own understanding serving as the guideline. He’s also a bit of a biological determinist (maybe more than a bit), which puts him in the unenviable position of having something else in common with Richard Spencer. The two are presumably not interchangeable on many points, but the number of straight white men who confidently combat identity politics from or for a “purely objective” point of view is in fact legion. And to be honest, Pinker gives off a real Charles Murray vibe. I am not into that dude.
Tim, I can’t seem to locate my copy of How We Get Free right now, but IIRC Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor credits the Collective with either coining the term or first putting into print circulation.
I didn’t mention Mark Lilla because I didn’t know that I should. As far as I know, I have never read a thing he’s written. Have I missed something?
The Lilla aside was sort of a joke. But here’s what I was referring to: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html. …And then he turned it into a book: https://www.amazon.com/Once-Future-Liberal-Identity-Politics/dp/0062697439.
Ah. Thank you. I missed both of these events in contemporary American intellectual discourse. Does Lilla advance any arguments that have not already been made at some point in the past 25 years? I’m serious — I am having difficulty imagining a novel argument against identity politics from a liberal position.
And this is pertinent and problematic to my own current writing project. As my editor occasionally reminds me, I am writing from a liberal, not a Left, standpoint vis a vis the canon wars / culture wars. And that is true. So how is my argument going to turn out any differently than Mark Lille’s? I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that yet, but I know that it will be different, because I ain’t him or anything like him, liberalism aside. That’s less identity politics than it is Pragmatism. I have a view from somewhere. I just hope I can make it interesting and useful enough to merit the cost of printing and binding.
Do you recall Lila coming up at the “summit” we arranged in Grand Rapids. It was David Sehat who sincerely challenged me about black wonen’s political theory, my focus having been on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s notion of “all bound up together.” Sehat drew upon Lila to suggest that Harper et al. were at odds with a broad styled liberal democratic vision. My reading of her was not so different from your reading of Combahee. Identity in these examples is a starting place, an entry point, and even a measure of a vision for humanity, not for any identity group.
Martha, I am afraid I was not present for that first fruitful gathering of what would become the S-USIH. But it’s so heartening to know that you were there — you were here — from the beginning.
Yes, I see the call to identity politics as expressed in Combahee not as a call to division, but a call to solidarity and community with “the least of these,” until no one is in a position of being made “less than.” People who read this call to identity politics as a call to everyone to “retreat” to their own identity group positionality and thus “divide” or “dilute” or “dissolve” the underlying unifying commitment to liberal democratic citizenship are misreading it, and really missing its radicalism.
These Black women were not encouraging everyone to fight for their own causes, advance their own interests, pit their group against other groups. They dared to ask everyone to use the status of Black queer women as a marker for the political work that needed to be done to transform the social order until Black queer women, who were at the very bottom of the social order, enjoyed equal status in every respect with everyone else.
That was not “privileging” Black women’s needs over everyone else’s, but recognizing that anything that oppressed Black women was also oppressing everyone “above” them. Thus, to focus political activity on addressing the needs of Black women would make sure that no one in society was left out or left behind. That is a vision of humanity, yes, of the beloved community. I think the misread of “identity politics” as a more general phenomenon or term is a way of diluting the radicalism of that original call.
Still, I am not sure I would have recognized this as a fundamentally democratic call had I not read James Kloppenberg on democracy. To hear the Combahee exhortation not as an implicit attack on other identities but as a call to uplift all people requires humility and charity, the Christian virtues that, Kloppenberg argued, shaped the emergence of democratic thought in a war-torn world of sectarianism and violence. The vision of the Combahee collective melds “do unto others” with “as ye have done for the least of these, so ye have done for me.”
LD – While you’re clearly more engaged in today’s polemics around identity politics than with putting it into historical context, it’s still difficult to let pass the rather easy dismissal of the idea that there were important, widely perceived differences between interest politics and identity politics. Much of what made the latter so contentious, so threatening to many, is traceable to these tensions.
Lilla is a useful reference in these discussions not because he is particularly original, but because he is a particularly clear exponent of a certain sort of aggrieved point of view. Sam Moyn filleted him here: http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/samuel-moyn-mark-lilla-and-crisis-liberalism
There’s a lot of truth to this, LD, but I note a couple points of your reasoning that I think are questionable: your use of determinism and how ideas evolve.
1) Determinism – doesn’t saying that progress for black women necesssrily entails progress for everyone sort of fall into a determinist trap? I would certainly hope that’s the case, and I think it probably would shake out that way, but what are your grounds for saying it must necessarily be so? It seems there are plenty of historical examples where attempts to elevate a group have simply pulled down other groups.
2) Evolution – Also I’m curious about your aside about Jordan Peterson et al in the middle of the post. You begin by stating that 1970s identity politics are foreign to us, but then claim that Peterson et al are wrong to criticize identity politics today, but you support this claim by using the definition of identity politics from back then. Isn’t it possible that the nature of identity politics has changed in that time, so that what they are criticizing is not what is in the Combahee statement but instead ideas and practices found in recent years?
Daniel, I didn’t mention “progress” anywhere in the piece, and I’m a middling liberal. The Combahee Collective, unapologetically Leftist and unapologetically radical, certainly wasn’t looking for “progress.” Their argument was for liberation, specifically a liberation aimed at freeing and elevating those on the very bottom of the social order. To do that would necessarily entail demolishing the social order. Progress is an awful mild word for such a bottom to top transformation.
Pinker, D’Souza, et al slap the label “identity politics” on things that have very little to do with how the Combahee Collective used the term or how other people who are not of the same political persuasions as Pinker, D’Souza, et al use the term today. It is a shibboleth, a term tossed around to create tribalism by decrying tribalism. Some identity.
L.D., the word “progress” is used by any number of groups seeking change ranging from mild reform to democratic socialism to liberation. It is a very broadly used word, and by taking me to task for my word choice, you seem to be evading the substance of the question, which was about determinism.
Regarding the “identity politics” label, I think you’ve reiterated my point for me. They are indeed not using the label in the same way that Combahee did, but I’m asking why you think that one is used correctly (Combahee) and the other is used incorrectly, and why you would hold writers today to the definition of a word as it was used by this group forty years ago.
Our personal political beliefs should be irrelevant to this conversation, but if you need to know I am also a middling liberal. I’m not trying to pick a political fight with you, I’m trying to explore what I think are flaws in your reasoning. I hope you’ll answer my questions more directly in the spirit of debate.
Daniel, here’s what you wrote: “Determinism – doesn’t saying that progress for black women necesssrily entails progress for everyone sort of fall into a determinist trap?”
Maybe, maybe not — but since I didn’t argue that, and I didn’t say that the Combahee collective argued that, I really don’t see the point of the question. Are you thinking of somebody else’s argument and lumping it in with mine? I’m not responsible for other people’s arguments. Take it up with them.
Also, this post is focused on the origin of the term “identity politics” and how it was used by those who introduced it to the lexicon, and what meaning that use of the term might offer for those who encounter it today. The fact that pundits today take the term, utterly emptied of reference to some actual political stance that anybody held then or holds now, and throw it around as a shibboleth to frighten people is worth noting (and I did note it), but not really worth engaging in any significant way in this post focused squarely on what the Combahee women meant and what they did, and what meaning their statement can have for a boring old liberal like myself. If that has gored someone’s ox, then maybe the dumb thing should have gotten out of the way.
L.D., the exact quote from you is thus: “But I do mean to say this: identity politics as they envisioned it can be the path to profound and salutary social transformation if we recognize that making the world better in practical ways for Black women would necessarily mean making it better for the rest of us as well.”
The word “necessarily” is your own, as is the claim that what is good for black women is good for everyone, and it certainly looks like you are making a deterministic statement. I was interested in discussing the extent to which progress (or liberation, to use your preferred term, although progress seems to be a better fit for “making the world better in practical ways”) can actually yield uneven or negative results for others. I asked this because I am currently teaching about communism and radical socialism in my AP Euro class, and I think that one of the tragedies of these movements is how their advocates, even with the best of intentions and a belief in progressive determinism, ended up making the world worse for everyone. I was interested in discussing this with you.
So the discussion I was trying to have with you was about tragic imagination and how reform/revolutionary efforts can go awry. I have no idea why you have reacted with such hostility to such basic questioning, or why you aren’t willing to take responsibility for your own words in your blog post, or apparently don’t even remember them. At this point I don’t expect a genuine response from you, but I am disappointed that we couldn’t have a civil conversation on this topic.
This conversation has been perfectly civil, but not that interesting from where I sit, because until this comment you haven’t bothered to engage with anything that I actually wrote. And even here, while you’re quoting some words, I think you’re really misunderstanding them.
Let me try, once again, to make the misreading plain: “progress,” either as a specific term or as a governing idea, means something like “improvement over time.” I am not arguing that prioritizing the lives of Black queer women in some tangible way right now would *eventually* make things better for other groups. I am arguing that prioritizing the lives of Black queer women would *immediately* make everyone’s lives better, right now, because society is not a zero sum game nor is it some closed system where the “elevation” of some requires the “degradation” or “repression” of others — that would be deterministic.
I am a Pragmatist, and I believe in experimenting. Let’s try something we have never once tried as a country or a culture: let’s put the needs of Black queer women first and see what happens. I mean, this has to be one of the least controversial ideas I’ve ever asserted at this blog. I can’t imagine why anyone would find it objectionable. Can you?
And of course you’re more than welcome to read my concluding question above as rhetorical — and even read as a legit question, it may not merit a response. It seems unlikely that we are going to converge on some point of agreement in the comments here, though that would be fine either way. It’s just a comment thread, and it’s just a blog post. There will be others!
Hesitant to put my two cents in here, partly because it’s been a while since I read the original post.
But I wouldn’t call the statement that “making the world better in practical ways for Black women would necessarily mean making it better for the rest of us as well” a deterministic statement. I just don’t think the adjective “deterministic” is especially apt here. I’m making more a linguistic point than a substantive one, but the word “deterministic” carries resonances and overtones for me that I don’t find in that statement. Now someone could, I suppose, try to construct an argument that making the world better for black queer women would not necessarily make the world better for everyone, but I don’t think the person trying to make that argument would be esp. well served by arguing that the statement is deterministic. (For one thing, the statement could easily be read as probabilistic, where the word “necessary” is being used in a slightly loose, but entirely permissible I think, way to mean something like “very likely.”)
And I also don’t think if I were teaching European history that I would tell my students that “radical socialists” went awry because of their “determinism”, but that opens up an unrelated set of issues, and I guess one nice thing about being a teacher is that, within very wide limits, one can, and should be allowed to, say pretty much whatever one wants when it comes to matters of interpretation at any rate.
I think that’s fair. I interpreted LD’s use of the word “necessarily” as equivalent to “certainly”. It’s not at all certain that anything will lead to a particular outcome, and there’s plenty of cases when well-intentioned major change had contrary effects. If something is necessarily or certainly going to happen, then it would seem the outcome is determined, hence my use of the word “deterministic”. I’m aware of the materialist Marxist undertones (I’ve been teaching about Marx lately and it was on my mind), so I’m open to another word with the same meaning if you’ve got one.