Friday, May 3, 2019

Identify This!

“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.’

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

And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog
May 3, 2019

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