“Mistaken Identity – Race and Class
in the Age of Trump,” by Asad Haider, 2018
At this
point in history, the ideological battle between the actual left and liberalism
is over various forms of ‘identity’ politics.
This book is both a philosophical and historical blast against what
identity politics has become. Essentially
it is now a tool of a wing of the capitalists, represented by the Democratic
Party, to hide class and economics as issues.
It is how modern neo-liberalism appears, in both right and left forms.
Haider,
being Arab, selects the issue of ‘race’ as his fulcrum, though he also
discusses gender issues, mostly with the help of Judith Butler, an alt-feminist. He starts by looking at the Combahee River Collective (CRC), which
was a 1974-1980 black, lesbian, feminist and socialist organization that
maintained issues of class, color, gender and sexual orientation were in a
historical matrix, combined. He identifies
them as the first to use ‘identity politics’ and ‘intersectionality’ as phrases. This was in the service of the CRC’s
anti-capitalist work – something that has been white-washed. They believed that only getting rid of capital
would ensure a path to equality.
Haider
maintains that what liberal and middle-class elements did with these ideas was
to individualize them, isolate each ‘identity,’ create a victimhood narrative
and hierarchy, and finally divorce them from economic and class issues. “Class” is almost never taken seriously by
identity radicals, as you might note. The resultant “safe spaces, ‘micro-aggressions,’
'trigger warnings," overwhelming white guilt and the policing of language instead turn the color or gender issue into
an apolitical and individualist dead-end. Politically, electing a darker-skinned person or a
woman or a gay person became the end game.
This has created modern versions of black nationalism, middle-class gay/lesbianism
and bourgeois feminism. It is a form of liberal totalitarianism mirroring conservative totalitarianism.
Haider
attempts to resurrect the real history of black radicalism, when ‘reactionary
black nationalism’ (or ‘cultural nationalism’) was defeated in the 1960s and
1970s by dark-skinned left-wingers like CLR James, the Black
Panthers, Malcolm X, Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Marxist organizations like
the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Certainly MLK’s evolution also pointed away
from black nationalism, which was embodied at the time on the right by Ron
Karenga’s “US”
organization and the Nation of Islam. (US eventually gave birth to Kwanzaa.) Haider quotes Marxists like Noel Ignatiev,
who looked at ‘white skin privilege’ in the 1960s and saw that it was actually materially detrimental to white workers. As Haider puts it, “The fight against white
supremacy is central to the class struggle” because of this. This counters a main tenant of identity
‘radicals.’
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| Black Socialists Today |
Haider also
looks at the reactionary white guilt politics of the Weathermen regarding identity, this back in the 1960s. The
Weathermen wrote off the working class as a whole. Taking an international tack on various ethnic
and national ‘diasporas,’ Haider covers the progressive English politics of
Stuart Hall and those of French philosopher Alain Badiou. Badiou notes that military ‘humanitarian
interventions’ are actually based on twisted Enlightenment ‘rights’ arguments
and victim narratives. Haider locates the beginning of 'race' laws in the U.S. after the 1676 Bacon's Rebellion, which united indentured servants, workers and small farmers of all skin tones against the government and planter class. "Race" is how the lower classes are divided against themselves.
Haider
points out that some branches of Black
Lives Matter are dominated by black cultural nationalists or elite liberals
of color who celebrate small business, anti-union organizations like "Teach for America" and even charter schools. He rebuts Frank Wilderson’s ‘Afro-pessimism,’
which alleges that an unending ‘antiblackness’ is the real problem worldwide.
In the process he quotes historian Barbara Fields to refute Wilderson: “…as though the chief business of slavery was
the production of white supremacy, rather than the production of cotton, sugar,
rice and tobacco.” In effect, the
disappearing of economics. Abracadabra!
Haider uses
his personal experience at a 2014 strike against higher tuition and privatization
at UC Santa Cruz to illustrate how black nationalist separatism split a large
coalition of many nationalities fighting against the tuition hike and helped
the administration. Economic issues
became ‘white’ issues! His experience
led him to this conclusion: “This
experience showed me that identity politics is … an integral part of the
dominant ideology; it makes opposition impossible.”
Haider
admits into evidence the struggle against the police murder of Freddie Gray in Baltimore in 2015, when a mayor
and police chief of color mobilized against an uprising by the African-American
population. Obama’s presidency is Exhibit
A that merely having an elite, mixed ethnicity person in the Presidency did not
change the essential situation of the darker population. Just on the issue of police violence and
militarization, it was still happening under this ‘black’ President and his dark-skinned
Attorney General and Homeland Security chief.
Identity radicals find themselves supporting ‘black,’ gay, Latino or women
police and even certain police murders of 'white' people – evidently unaware of the role of the police in this society.
As anyone
who takes a second to think about it, the issue of class cuts into every single
identity, bar none. Humans live
their lives in a ‘matrix’ of identities, not just one, but our material and institutional roles are
the most decisive. Philosophically, the
dialectical answer to the white, nationalist and Christian identity politics of the Republican
Party, the Right or the fascists is not exclusive identity politics. It is to defend oppressed 'identities,' yet make demands that can cut the Right from any working-class voting base – transitional and anti-capitalist class
demands. In other words, a winning strategy.
Other
reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left: “Detroit,”
“A Threat of the First Magnitude,” “Go Set a Watchman,” “Struggle &
Progress,” “Annihilation of Caste,” “Souls of Black Folk,” “Are White People
White?” “Black Radical,” “Things of Dry Hours,” “Revolution in the Air”
“Malcolm X,” “The Dutchman,” “Red Hook Summer,” or words like ‘racism’ and ‘Panthers.”
May Day
carries writings by the Combahee River Collective, along with many other books
on how to actually fight racism. Here is a link to a new organization, Black Socialists of America - BSA.
https://blacksocialists.us/about
https://blacksocialists.us/about
And I
bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog
May 3, 2019
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