Identity Politics Quotes

“People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of 'race' or 'gender' alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my 'race,' unless I was permitted to put 'human.' The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put 'white,' which is not even a color let alone a 'race,' and I sternly declined to put 'Caucasian,' which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you 'black.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“You and I are the remains of an unfulfilled legacy, heirs to a kingdom of stolen identities and ragged confusion.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin

“Identity politics replaced structural political analysis, and meant that people could claim identities that were seen to arrive from the heavens rather than from the power structures of sex, race and class.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism

“We must not be anything other than what we are.”
― Maaza Mengiste, Beneath the Lion's Gaze

“People even said I was a racist because I shot black bank robbers at the beginning of Dirty Harry. So, first I’m labeled right-wing. Then I’m a racist. Now it’s macho or male chauvinism. It’s a whole number nowadays to make people feel guilty on different levels. It doesn’t bother me because I know where the fuck I am on the planet and I don’t give a shit.”
― Clint Eastwood, Clint Eastwood: Interviews

“...we have to be aware of the power and importance of organizing not just around identity, but the materiality of daily life, which still, in many respects, is racialized for people of color. You build from that, but you have a grander social vision that transcends it and recognizes the strengths and limitations that are drawn from the particularity of identity.”
― Manning Marable

“An important ethical function of identity politics, in this context, is to highlight that obstacles to the self-development of individuals, and to the formation and exercise of their agency, emerge in complex cultural and psychic forms, as well as through more familiar kinds of socio-economic inequality.”
― Michael Kenny, The Politics of Identity: Liberal Political Theory and the Dilemmas of Difference

“this is the conversation I’ve been having since the 2016 election ended and liberals and progressives have been scrambling to figure out what went wrong. What was missing from the left’s message that left so many people unenthusiastic about supporting a Democratic candidate, especially against Donald Trump? So far, a large group of people (mostly white men paid to pontificate on politics and current events) seem to have landed on this: we, the broad and varied group of Democrats, Socialists, and Independents known as ‘the left,’ focused on ‘identity politics’ too much. We focused on the needs of black people, trans people, women, Latinx people. All this specialized focus divided people and left out working-class white men. That is the argument, anyways.”
― Ijeoma Oluo

“The assumption that being gay or black necessarily harms the self-worth of all who fit this category has a patronizing dimension, because it neglects consideration of the agency that persons exercise in respect of imposed identity.”
― Michael Kenny, The Politics of Identity: Liberal Political Theory and the Dilemmas of Difference

“In modern societies, some members of ethnic minority groups do not want to feel compelled to heed the voices of their communities when participating as citizens.”
― Michael Kenny, The Politics of Identity: Liberal Political Theory and the Dilemmas of Difference

“The prevailing vision of history, as an egalitarian pageant of equally valid, self-authenticating "perspectives" on the past representing the "voices" of particular groups, is dangerous to society at large. It reserves a special place for everyone, which is exciting news for political extremists, con-artists, and megalomaniacs eager to register their self-interested propaganda as legitimate contributions to a "broader perspective" of history.”
― Timothy H. Ives, Stones of Contention

“His first plan of attack was to plant the words in as many areas of his homeland as possible.
He planted them day and night, and cultivated them.
He watched them grow, until eventually, great forests of words had risen throughout Germany.... it was a nation of farmed thoughts.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Identity politics not only contract the multiple components of our identities to one: they essentialize that component over which we have the least control.”
― Susan Neiman, Left Is Not Woke

“The fear of course is that in denying or refusing complicity in the marginalization of 'black' writers, I ended up on the very distant and very 'other' side of a line that is imaginary at best. I didn't write as an act of testimony or social indignation (though all writing in some way is just that) and I did not write out of a so-called family tradition of oral storytelling. I never tried to set anybody free, never tried to paint the next real and true picture of the life of my people, never had any people whose picture I knew well enough to paint. Perhaps if I had written in the time immediately following Reconstruction, I would have written to elevate the station of my fellow oppressed.
But the irony was beautiful. I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression. So, I would not be economically oppressed because of writing a book that fell in line with the very books I deemed racist. And I would have to wear the mask of the person I was expected to be.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“He leaned forward, his voice softening. “I get that representation, identity, and history are important, but when you hold on too tightly to something, any fault becomes a fault line, the very thing the world will use to bring you down.” He paused, his gaze shifting between Regina and me. “Whatever happens in this archaeological battle of sexes, the fact remains that the world is unfair, and I give you my word that history, whatever it may be, won’t stop me from being your ally and trying to fix, not the past we can’t control, but the present.”
― Amalia Rose, Decoded

“Nobody is entitled to a history that makes them feel good about themselves or the groups to which they belong.”
― Timothy H. Ives, Stones of Contention

“I fear that when enough people rally to the identitarian visions of their choice, and when enough of the remaining population becomes too afraid to engage them with honesty and reason, the democracy that maintains a space for both will collapse.”
― Timothy H. Ives, Stones of Contention

“...but I'm also talking about the colonizing of truth, the redesigning of the fabric of reality. I am talking about the imposition of a way of classifying, measuring, and quantifying the world, including everything from time, to temperature, to distance, to weight. All of these things became calculated and bounded by frameworks that were not only European but often peculiarly English ways of understanding reality. Today's activism responds to the world on these terms, operating on terrain already mapped out by white supremacy, Eurocentric logic, and colonialism. This would be less worrying if it was clearly identified, would not pose so grave a danger if there was awareness that the terms of engagement operate within a framework that we need to dissolve. However, that acknowledgement appears to be entirely absent, and we congratulate ourselves on 'speaking truth to power' (often, depressingly, via what we know call 'platform capitalism').”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition

“But we must realize that even this tendency to restrict the exploitation of class privileges is a fairly common ingredient of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is not simply amoral. It is the morality of the closed society—of the group, or of the tribe; it is not individual selfishness, but it is collective selfishness.”
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato

“Nineteenth-century nationalism established what we might call the modern ground-rule for having an identity. You have the strongest identity when you aren't aware you 'have' it; you just are it. That is, you are most yourself when you are least aware of it”
― Richard Sennett, The Foreigner: Two Essays on Exile

“At bottom, identity politics rests on problematic ideas of political authenticity and representation. These derive from the faulty premise that membership in a group gives access to shared perspective and an intuitive understanding of the group's collective interests. This leads to two related beliefs that are wrong-headed and politically counterproductive: that only a group member can know or articulate the interests of the group, and that any group member can do so automatically by virtue of his or her identity.

Clarence Thomas should have been evidence enough to invalidate the premise linking group membership and perspective. Embarrassingly, people like Maya Angelou and Catherine MacKinnon initially cut Thomas slack based on the silly belief that because he's black and once was poor, putting him on the supreme court would turn out OK.

The simplistic belief that any credible member of a group can automatically represent that group's interest feeds a tendency to reduce political objectives to a plea for group representation on decision-making bodies or in other councils of power. That's the Clinton trick: to accept pleas for group representation or "access" while repudiating demands for an issue-based program. The dominant elites can happily satisfy such pleas; token egalitarianism is no threat at all.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., Class Notes: Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene

“Race and religion have been deliberately conflated. All the intolerant have to do is say that it’s racist, or politically incorrect, or antisemitic, to challenge them, and the cowed liberals immediately all fall into line like the craven little poodles they are. The one thing the fascists can bank on is that if they play the race card, or any other minority card, they gain instant and total immunity. All the useful idiots of liberalism will rally around them and support them. But all intelligent Westerners should see through the scam. Islam is not, and never will be, a race. It has nothing to do with race. It’s a totalitarian system trying to take over the world, and everyone has the right and indeed duty to oppose it.”
― Jim Lee, In (Unlikely) Praise of Donald Trump: Embracing America’s Shadow

“I recognized that the racialized liberalism in which I was educated--where we strive for a bigger part of some mythological pie that our fractured identities are in competition for--leaves us without a language with which to talk about inequality. It leaves black and white in perpetual opposition, a state that feeds the plantation mentality.”
― Tessa McWatt, Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging

“Because nationalism is simply another form of identity politics, it perpetuates the cycle of political warfare between nationalist majorities and identity group minorities, each side approaching politics as nothing more than an extended exercise in special pleading, trying to seize state power and milk it for perks for their tribe until the next election, driven by the inexorable logic that if they do not, the other side will.”
― Paul D. Miller, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism

“[The right-wing populist] narrative centres around division: dividing the world into the virtuous and non-virtuous. Convincing an electoral majority that they are among the virtuous, and that the non-virtuous - that is, free trade, China, migrants and refugees, and those who would impose meaningful action on climate change - need to be dealt with via tough policies. This right-wing populism turbocharges identity and grievance politics and weaponises it through the amplifying support of both social media and elements of the traditional mainstream media. (p.20-21)”
― Chris Bowen, On Charlatans

“The unique epistemic role of the university in our culture was to set up conditions where students could learn how to bring arguments and evidence to a question, and to teach them not to project convictions derived from tribal loyalties onto the evaluation of evidence on testable questions. The rise of identity politics should have been recognized by university faculties as a threat to their ability to teach decoupled argumentation and evidence evaluation. As a monistic ideology (Tetlock 1986), where all values come from a single perspective, identity politics entangles many testable propositions with identity-based convictions. It fosters myside bias by reversing Kahan’s (2016) prescription—by transforming positions on policy-relevant facts into badges of group-based convictions. One of the most depressing social trends of the last few decades has been universities becoming proponents of identity politics—a doctrine that attacks the heart of their intellectual mission.”
― Keith E. Stanovich, The Bias That Divides Us: The Science and Politics of Myside Thinking

“The appeal to identity is capitalism’s secret sauce.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“[M]any DEI initiatives, as they function currently, neither serve those they are supposedly intended for, nor do they make any meaningful changes in the structure of the society at large. Instead, the way I see many DEI initiatives working in this country…is by maintaining the status quo in several ways: first, most diverse people I see in different places are tokens and are only allowed any form of power or contributions upon the condition of proving that they are not there to rock the boat or be a threat to the upper powers, who are usually selected privileged whites. Second, there are deliberate and malicious efforts to tokenize diverse people who are not only incompetent, but also complicit to almost make it look like that truly qualified diverse people don’t exist (far from true), as well as to give the majority of white people the impression that they are losing their jobs and privileges to people who are not even qualified or deserving, hence creating further bitterness and divide in the society. In sum, the way the DEI initiatives work is neither benefiting the truly qualified and competent diverse people who could change the structure and the system, nor are they helping white people truly see the value of different perspectives and different ways of thinking, sensing, and doing that enrich this world.

[From “The Trump Age: Critical Questions” published on CounterPunch on June 23, 2023]”
― Louis Yako

“In today's world, we find ourselves surrounded by an abundance of identities that we can choose and embody. The world we live in allows individuals to explore and express their unique perspectives, experiences, and social affiliations. But back in the 1980s and 1990s of Somerset and the South West it was a stark contrast. Society seemed more homogeneous, with limited recognition and exploration of diverse identities. We’d been boxed in and characterised by a more constrained and traditional understanding of identity. Societal norms largely dictated what was considered acceptable, and there was often little room for deviation from these norms.”
― Pete Trainor, Electrasy: Calling All The Dreamers