Freddie de Boer on the subject:
I mean, ask yourself: who is more likely to call for the elevation of identity politics above all other kinds of political engagement, liberals or socialists? Liberals. Who has thrown their shoulder behind the gay rights movement with all of their fervor but demonstrated nothing resembling a similar commitment to economic justice? Liberals. Who’s more likely to accept the empty symbolic politics of the Obama administration, rather than calling for deeper change and a real alternative to American plutocracy? Liberals. Who identifies people as being “the right kind” through the kind of limp social signalling expressed through buzzwords, rather than based on deeper concerns about the fundamental social order? Liberals. Salon gives readers a never-ending parade of complaints about who used the wrong word when; Jacobin questions the basic power structures that make the oppression those words signal possible. The Nation wants people to say nice things about women and people of color; In These Times wants to reorganize our economic order so that it doesn’t matter if white men say nice things about women and people of color. I suspect Goldberg knows that.
I have lots of radical queer friends, socialists and anarchists, who are totally contemptuous of the kind of politics involved in #CancelColbert or the recent Mozilla CEO freakout. They are far more likely to complain about Brendan Eich’s salary and power than they are to complain about his boneheaded views on gay marriage. Nor are they likely to think that enshrining the ability of gay people to engage in bourgeois marriage contracts represents some sort of ultimate victory, in a world where stultifying social and economic norms are otherwise untouched. . . .
I am not, and have never been, an “it’s not about race” lefty. It’s most certainly about race, and sex. What I am is a lefty who thinks that the only way for permanent racial justice and equality between sexes and genders to be achieved is for people of color and women to have the economic and political strength necessary to secure their own best interests. . . .
Karen Lewis of the Chicago Teacher Union, an organization filled with women of color fighting daily for economic justice through street level activism and labor organizing, has less than 3,000 Twitter followers. Suey Park has almost 23,000. Yet Lewis does more for women of color in a day than Park has done in her whole life. If attention is the coin of the realm in a world of hashtag politics, then something is clearly wrong here.
Karen Lewis v. Rahm Emmanuel is like Katniss Everdeen v. President Snow. Identity politics is an entertainment for the good citizens of the Capitol. It is faux outrage as all emotion is faux emotion in the Capitol.
Stupid analogy? I don't think I'm nailing it, but it points to something and I'm trying to put my finger on it. In part it's about the level on which we should focus our struggle against injustice. But more than that it's about how identity poltics is ultimately a symptom of profound alienation, a dehumanized and dehumanizing alienation that is so well depicted as normative in the Hunger Games films. Identity politics is like wanting to be with the cool kids in middle school. Its outrages have more in common with the attitude of mean girls making fun of the girl who is wearing the dorky dress than it does with an attitude that wants to get to fundamental roots of what ails us. It's a symptom of the disease, not a path to its cure.
And yet my outrage about the fatuity of identity politics is about as impotent as the outrage felt by those I'm outraged by. So I just want to name it and move on. To do otherwise is to stay stuck in this loop that renders us impotent. How to break out of it--not just individually--lots of individuals are not caught in this loop--but how to do it collectively?