I just finished reading Brian Botman’s Wespeak, “A Note to
Straight White Guys,” and want to say that I am glad that the Left has finally
found its own Bill O’Reilly. I hope you don’t mind, Brian, if I disobey your
order to “Shut the Fuck Up” and respond to your broad indictment. I don’t know
if your quotes are specific or hypothetical, but I agree with your dismay at the
notion of the straight white male being an oppressed group in America (i.e.,
Charlton Heston comparing gun-owners to Jews in Nazi Germany and saying that
white male heterosexuals are becoming the most oppressed group).
However, all your profanity, simplifications, and demands
for your opponents to “shut up” do not make you right, nor do they give you a
monopoly on leftist politics. Your reduction of the argument “against” identity
politics to the desire to perpetuate hierarchical roles while still “play[ing]
lefty” is a cursory condemnation that refuses to address the actual issue. I
put “against” in quotation marks because positions in this debate are more
nuanced than Botman’s condescending quip would imply; many who Botman would
probably deem as being enemies of identity politics are not actually against
those political movements for recognition.
The American Left is clearly fractured and part of that is
due to the battling of supposedly oppositionist movements vying for recognition
yet existing together in a tenuous coalition that has all but ruled out
pragmatism as a strategy. The multiculturalist movement is not misguided in its
goals and there is the need for marginalized groups to assert themselves through
the deconstruction of a patriarchal hierarchy, but these movements cannot
maintain their narrow focuses at the expense of the unity achieved through class
struggle. The politics of group identities are being emphasized above and are
overshadowing economic distribution. Cultural politics have become the
dominating discourse and have shown that identity politics can be devastatingly
limiting. Botman wants those with different opinions to “shut up,” but that
only leaves the abstract language of ethnic and sexual particularism, of
parochial philosophizing that the vast majority of people will relegate only to
high-minded academia. For local issues on a campus like Wesleyan, concentrating
on politics of recognition in order to secure rights for individuals within a
group identity is essential. However, by inextricably linking the Left to
identity politics we are losing the transcendent power of economic
redistribution, losing the masses that have moved farther and farther right
because the banner of class struggle has been lost amidst the gripes of every
group clamoring for attention. Radical humanism can coexist with racial,
gender, and sexual politics as long as class is treated as an overarching
identity and source of struggle.
Identity politics at their worst are politics of emotion;
politics aimed at expression and catharsis with no pragmatic steps to gain the
rights that are allegedly being denied. The “common man” in America is now
firmly in the camp of the Right because of the distraction of micropolitics.
These struggles for identity have consumed campus politics and have polarized
the left because of their abandonment of labor issues and populist mobilizing.
Granted, the universality of economic struggle and the goals associated with it
are antithetical to a society in which marginalized groups are not represented
and subject to normative majoritarian values. It is necessary, then, to put
identity politics in perspective and reconcile them with reaching out to a
populist base (which, of course, includes individuals from every minority group
demanding recognition) that is universally oppressed by economic injustice and
inequality. Botman’s Wespeak does nothing to help this cause. His immature,
profanity-laden diatribe is cute, but only furthers the idea that identity
politics, if not rethought and recreated, are a dead-end.