On the Uses and Abuses of Identity Politics
Chronicle of Higher Ed | Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow
An interview with Georgetown University philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on the academy, the elite, and identity politics. Táíwò recently published Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else). The book builds on an essay he wrote for The Philosopher and related piece in Boston Review.
The two begin by discussing Táíwò’s position on identity politics, that “Amplifying certain voices on the basis of group membership…could serve as a merely cosmetic change, leaving structural problems unaddressed.”
Táíwò begins by distinguishing identity politics from deference politics.
“I’m in favor of identity politics,” he says. “I think identity politics is great. Who you are, where you stand in society, affects what you know, it affects what you want, it affects what you can do…{But] how should we take them into account? That’s the question that deference politics answers, and in my view it’s not a good answer. It says, well, you should figure out which people are marginalized or, perhaps, which people are more marginalized than you are, and you should defer to their judgment.”
“So…deference politics is often only aesthetic, if the thing that you’re doing is really just coming to an independent political judgment and then slapping someone else’s face or identity on it. But I also think it’s unfair. While we should reject and be suspicious of ways of thinking through political questions that ignore marginalized perspectives, we should also be suspicious of approaches that tokenize marginalized perspectives.”
Related to tokenism, he nods to Kant—”We should value the other people we’re organizing with as ends and not just as means… Other people aren’t just tools for us to use to reach our political goals, right?” he asks. “If we’re doing this because we care about justice…then it actually doesn’t make sense for us to treat people as tools. So I think the constructive view has to itself be a way of looking at the world that has a deep moral core, and not just this Machiavellian realism.”
As for the elites, he explains, “I meet so many people in the nonprofit sector who are tying themselves up in knots about whether they’re feeding into the white-savior complex — while they’re doing work on famine relief or something…It’s not that we shouldn’t have questions about those things. But how have we gotten to a point where we valorize making people more fixated on those questions than on the actual consequences of the things that they’re doing? That’s my bugbear.”