What’s good, Medium? “Identity politics” edition
Thanksgiving eve eve 2016
Yesterday Bernie Sanders published his new vision for the Democratic Party on Medium:
Yes, we need more candidates of diversity, but we also need candidates — no matter what race or gender — to be fighters for the working class and stand up to the corporate powers who have so much power over our economic lives. We need all of our candidates to have the courage to stand up to the Koch Brothers, Wall Street, drug companies, insurance companies, oil companies, and fight for working families — not just the top one percent.
Folks were feeling some type of way about Sanders’ points about “identity politics.”
Here’s what folks had to say on Medium:
Did you ever watch that episode of Saved by the Bell where the boys act like jerks and they stage the “What I Should Have Said Theater” to get out of trouble with the girls? (I can’t find it on You Tube but trust me, it’s a classic.)
Jamie Nesbitt Golden lays out what that might look like for Sanders:
Welcome to this edition of “What I Should’ve Said” Theater. I’m your host, Jamie Nesbitt Golden. Tonight, we’ll take a shot at revising Bernie Sanders’s troubling remarks during his speech at Berklee College Sunday evening in hopes of helping him fix his shit. Let’s begin.
“Let me respond to the question in a way you may not be happy with.
It goes without saying that as we fight to end all forms of discrimination, as we fight to bring more women into the political process, Latinos, African-Americans, Native Americans — all that is enormously important, and count me in as somebody who wants to see that happen.
Marcus H. Johnson says we should stop calling it “identity politics” at all and call it what it is: civil rights.
Let’s be completely honest here: asking marginalized people to renounce their identity, or to make it secondary or tertiary to “class interests,” is white supremacy. White supremacy tells us that only the interests of white people are legitimate, and politics should be about maintaining structures that keep white people and their interests at the top. Asking marginalized people to be subservient and docile, especially in the face of a planned assault on their rights, is white supremacy. Telling marginalized people that it doesn’t matter if they get representatives who look like them (as long as they follow the class doctrine) is white supremacy.
Mala Kumar points out that identity politics are actually a good way of addressing economic equality:
The most common argument against identity politics I hear from the right is that they are “divisive” and “exclusionary.” Divisive to whom? To white people, mostly. Until this point, the left has not done a great job of articulating the majority of any population doesn’t need to be specifically addressed like the minority. For decades, if not centuries, minority needs barely made it to mainstream politics or media. Solutions were built for the majority and minorities were left to figure out how to make it work in their own lives. Arguably for the first time in American history, the needs of people outside the majority are featured. But in that amazing phenomenon, much of the majority felt like they were left out. Seeing that the new right is the alt-right is white supremacy, I’m going to take a wild stab and say it’s thus up to the left to figure out how to properly message “majority inclusion”. Again, I argue the solution is not to drop identity politics, no matter how tempting.
