THE ELITE CAPTURE OF IDENTITY POLITICS
We last discussed the formation of identity politics as intended by the Combahee River Collective in their 1977 statement.
That original meaning of identity politics as a means of solidarity and to address the demands of Black lesbian feminist socialists has since been neutralized and co-opted—elite captured—for various non-liberatory purposes, even to uphold the very systems of capitalism and imperialism that the Collective was fighting against.
What has happened?
In short, it's the detachment of revolutionary politics away from identity.
The Collective's statement specifically expressed “the need to do political work and to move beyond consciousness-raising and serving exclusively as an emotional support group.”
Adrienne Rich, poet and feminist, observed that:
“The project of changing structures of inequality would be carried on from a self-conscious and analytic knowledge of one’s own location… This self-consciousness was a necessary step toward the self-definition of African American women against both white and male self-universalizing, but it was not an end in itself.”
In 1984, the Collective's co-founder Barbara Smith warned of the limitation of identity politics when used without a revolutionary political goal in Between A Rock and a Hard Place in the essay collection Yours In Struggle: “The concept of identity politics has been extremely useful in the development of Third World feminism.
It has undoubtedly been most clarifying and catalytic when individuals do in fact have a combination of non-mainstream identities as a result of their race, class, ethnicity, sex, and sexuality; when these identities make them direct targets of oppression; and when they use their experiences of oppression as a spur for activist political work.”
While recognizing the significance of identity politics to Third World feminism, Barbara nevertheless pointed out that:
“Identity politics has been much less effective when primary emphasis has been placed upon exploring and celebrating a suppressed identity within a women’s movement context, rather than upon developing practical political solutions for confronting oppression in the society itself.”
In 2021, she was more explicit, lamenting in a discussion that, “They’ve taken the identity, but they have left the politics on the floor.”
Examples of the elite capture of identity politics
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò explores this phenomenon in Elite Capture, referencing the works of Edward Franklin Frazier' Black Bourgeoisie and Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks on the subject of the Black middle class in the U.S. and Africa, and how they have subverted anti-imperialist struggle. Táíwò argues that the members of the Black upper class work to advance the subgroup interests without regard for the welfare of the larger group.
Similarly, queer politics has been captured away from the more radical elements and events, such as the 1969 Stonewall riots, toward assimilationist goals and rights-based legislation.
The protest movements and orgs such as the Gay Liberation Front in the 1950s and 60s were closely tied to other social movements, and imagined gay liberation through social revolution.
Sociology professor Colin P. Ashley remarked in 2015: “Forgotten are the Marxist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-imperial underpinnings of many facets of the LGBTQ movement and the riots, rebellions, and insurrections of decades past,” and that efforts toward “acceptability” counteract the potential for solidarity.
In 2002, Adrienne Rich noted the consequences of the failure to properly understand identity politics for white women in Essential Essays:
“Had such a reading of ‘identity politics’ been responsively taken up by a critical mass of white women, it might have led us to see—and act on —the racialization of our lives, how our experiences of color and class were shaped by capitalist patriarchy’s variant and contradictory uses for different female identities.
As the 1980s wore on… an often stifling self-reference and narrow group chauvinism developed. Meanwhile, capitalism lost no time in rearranging itself around this phenomenon called ‘feminism,’ bringing some women closer to centers of power while extruding most others at an accelerating rate. A narrow identity politics could easily be displayed on a buffet table of lifestyles by the caterers of personal solutions.”
Táíwò notes that this can happen with any group of any identity:
“In the absence of checks or constraints, the subgroup of people with power over and access to the resources used to create political realities—in other words, the elites—will capture the group’s values.
The interests of the group get whittled down to what they have in common with those at the top, at best. At worst, elites fight for their own narrow interests using the banner of group solidarity.” (p. 32)
Táíwò identifies two trends in the elite capture of identity politics in recent years:
The tactic of performing symbolic identity politics to pacify protestors without enacting material reforms, such as when the mayor of Washington, DC, had “Black Lives Matter'' painted on streets near the White House, atop which protestors continued to be brutalized.
The efforts to rebrand (not replace) existing institutions, also using elements of identity politics, such as the “Humans of CIA” recruitment videos reaching out to multiple identity groups, including Black women and queer and Indigenous people.
How does this happen, and what can we do about it? We’ll look at this in the next posts on deference and constructive politics.