Editor’s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore’s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG.
It’s funny how things you once reject as really not that worthwhile later come to seem worthwhile, either in a way that they come to seem integral or not. Pickles might be an example. So might identity politics.
What is identity politics? It may be called the exercise of a form of a political life that raises a particular constitutive aspect of one’s personal identity above the others. One might be a black man, or a white woman, or a white man of a certain age, to take just three examples pertinent this year.
As philosopher Stanley Fish wrote in the New York Times early this year, “you’re practicing identity politics when you vote for or against someone because of his or her skin color, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or any other marker that leads you to say yes or no independently of a candidate’s ideas or policies.” We’re perfectly willing to accept this as a working definition.
It might seem shocking to think that a person could endorse such a method of choosing political leadership; it would appear to encourage bigotry, constant repression of the downtrodden, and the inattention to the individual. It raises fundamental questions about the individual and the identity thereof, like “what comprises me?” and “Am I inherently political because of my station in life?”
In an egalitarian society, one would have to say that life’s station should have no effect in determining the level of political engagement required of an individual. We must remember, however, that we do not live in a perfectly egalitarian society devoid of class, race, gender, and other distinctions, and thankfully at that. The diversity of station is one aspect of American life that cannot be ignored; and although certain extremes exist that breed injustice, like the inequality in quality education between minority and white communities, it must be said that the stations that our lot has bestowed upon us manifest themselves in and drastically shape our ideas, actions, and our identity.
Indeed, all of the groups of which we are members in some way constitute us, so long as we subscribe to a position, contrary to Marx, to only belong to clubs that will have us as members. But it’s the “in some way” that really matters here, because there should be no single element of one’s identity that matters quite so much. There’s a book by philosopher Charles Taylor entitled Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, and the mere title offers a better notion of how we might properly orient ourselves towards the world than many treatises.
We are individuals, and each of us is a single individual, not a multiplicity. There may be different aspects of a person in the form of those things we call personas (facets), those refractions of the whole that we present to different groups which we encounter, this is quite all right so long as they remain refractions of the self we wish to construct rather than masks we wear to keep things simpler and make our way.
The modern world is a difficult one, even purely on the basis of it being so much vaster than that our ancestors lived, often never leaving the particular world constructed by their tribes and their towns. To make our way in a rich, complex, and meaningful way and not get lost requires a sense of who one is. This entails one’s race, to be sure, and also one’s gender, sexual orientation, age, state of health, and those other surface qualities that so clearly are attainable to others.
Also, however, are our national allegiances, family histories, chosen or forced professions, ideological commitments, the choices that we make in our daily lives – they help to determine our selves, and some are affect by the content of our selves. They represent facets of – not completely disjointed personas – of a singular self.
It is difficult, to be sure, to construct and understand our identity; indeed it may seem that much of human life is devoted to precisely this endeavor. And certainly some facets of the self matter more than others. That I am a coffee drinker, while making some differences in my construction of myself, is not nearly as important as the fact that I am a Christian, which may or may not be more or less important than my status as an American.
These are facets, but with varying significance, though none comprise the totality of my being. To be sure, they will at times conflict, and should in some strange turn of events coffee-drinking be prohibited by my being a good American (as it would be if our enemies were the only source of coffee), then I am faced with making a decision, based upon the satisfaction of the strongest, most important, or most numerous facets of my self.
And so it is with politics. Decisions are to be made on the basis of an individual in conflict; where a bundled identity prescribes certain courses of action as being preferable to others. It also must be said that particular characteristics of an individual (race, gender, orientation, etc.) seem to be no more an important aspect of the self than the ideas and principles that one holds to be the guiding light of life, contrary to the dichotomy espoused by Fish. Certainly there is some substantive difference between ideas and tangible characteristics of an individual; but neither is any less a constitutive part of that individual, regardless whether they can be seen or felt or merely communicated.
Therefore, it seems that identity politics requires a new paradigm, one in which no one aspect of the self rules tyrannically over the others. Decisions should be made as the best personal decisions possible, taking into account the conflicts of the identity’s construction, and confronting the contradiction by weighing that which matters more to us in moral sense.
It’s not quite a way of ordering a society, and our account of it is pretty brief, but it ought to orient us towards one; a society that would allow for and encourage the construction of such rich conceptions of identity, based on the overlapping facets formed by our actions, ideas, and memberships would be one that took seriously each of us as human beings but also saw the value and the meaning of the commitments that we hold to things greater than ourselves. It would make those things we do less akin to choices and more akin to callings.
And so, when you cast your vote, whether you’ve done so already or not – construe it not as the sort of commitment that determines your worth as a person or the overall validity of the views that you hold, but rather as one commitment among many. It matters, but it’s far from all that matters. The political may be personal, but not all that is personal is political. This seems as good a time as any to recall that.
