Identity politics have become a convenient scapegoat for the deepening political divisions in the United States. Though evidence for the claim is thin, detractors blame Hillary Clinton’s presidential loss on her choice to provide a platform for discussions of identity and inequality during her campaign.

In the months leading up to 8 November 2016, Clinton differentiated herself from her opponent by becoming the candidate who cared about America’s underserved groups: women, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, black and Latino voters, and the many people whose identities span multiple categories. Her supporters rallied behind the Big Tent slogan: “Love Trumps Hate.”

But on election day, it did not.

In an interview with 60 Minutes last fall, Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist for the White House and chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, warned, “The longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em.”

A skittish left might view Bannon’s words as an imminent threat. But identity politics are not to be feared. Their effectiveness as a progressive political strategy, however, is undermined by their misuse.

When a group of black feminists called the Combahee River Collective coined the phrase “identity politics” in 1977, they imagined that the “seemingly personal experiences of individual Black women’s lives” would provide the foundation for a politics that is “actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression”. Their ideology began with self, but it was not self-obsessed. Ultimately, they knew their work would benefit everyone.

When identities can be invoked to assert an unquestionable authority, marginalized people can get by making dubious or false claims

Since then, identity politics have veered away from Combahee’s foundational ideals. We should return to them, not to appease the right wing but to reaffirm the importance of a progressivism that touts liberty and justice for all.

Identity politics become flimsy when they devolve into shallow back-and-forths that conflate lived experience with sound political analysis. A worldview that moves us closer to equality doesn’t stem from living in a certain kind of body. It emerges from pursuing a certain kind of politics.

When identities can be invoked to assert an unquestionable authority, marginalized people can get by making dubious or completely false claims because of their “lived experience”.

As secretary of housing and urban development, Ben Carson, has endorsed delays of anti-discrimination regulation in housing and called poverty “a state of mind”. Carson, himself, grew up impoverished in Detroit. He documented his journey to becoming a renowned neurosurgeon in a widely read autobiography, Gifted Hands.

Because of his personal story, Carson is held up, by himself and his supporters, as a testament to the supreme importance of hard work. But the belief that grit is the key to escaping poverty is contradicted by decades of social science research. Poverty persists because of a crumbling social safety net not a culture of dependency.

Carson’s anecdotes are compelling, in part, because our lives do matter. Marginalized people gain a unique insight into systemic inequality because we face it every day. For too long those stories have been doubted or dismissed by claims that only an “objective” or “dispassionate” viewpoint can be trusted.

But lived experience is one form of knowledge that should be considered alongside others, and stories are most useful when assessed within a broader context of structural inequity.

The Combahee River Collective argued that one’s political consciousness colors how one will interpret life events; thus, similar experiences can lead similarly situated people to draw divergent conclusions.



For example, every black American who grew up like Carson and went on to be successful will not share his views. In fact, based on the racial makeup of the Republican party, most do not. So sweeping generalizations about the lives of oppressed people that are backed up only by stories of individuals should always be interrogated because so many of those conclusions collapse when examined more closely.

A misuse of identity is not just a conservative problem. In the #MeToo era, women are empowered to call on their experiences with bias and sexual assault and create change within industries that facilitate abuse. But those traumas are not a pass for women to avoid difficult questions about the substance of their activism.

Rose McGowan emerged as a sexual assault activist but has been taken to task for comments about trans women. Photograph: Paul Sancya/AP

Actor Rose McGowan emerged as a sexual assault activist in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal that upended Hollywood’s silence on the mistreatment of actresses. When a trans woman confronted McGowan about her past transphobic comments at a book event, she responded angrily. On Twitter she charged that the audience and her staff failed to protect her during the exchange, and she refused to apologize for the statements. Instead, the actor-turned-author cancelled the rest of the book tour.

Though McGowan’s identities as a woman and a victim of sexual assault are central to her activism, using them to shut down criticism is unproductive for the movement she advocates. Trans women are also victims of discrimination in employment, housing and healthcare, and an inclusive feminism must invest itself in recognizing all who are vulnerable. These sorts of oversights are easily correctable if acknowledged, but treating identities as credentials discourages critical self-reflection.

Thoughtful conversations and meaningful activism require a measure of openness that the current paradigms for identity politics don’t always allow. We have to make sure that our exchanges do not reproduce oppressive power dynamics, but every challenge is not oppressive.

An identity politics that is not principally concerned with dismantling all forms of inequality quickly devolves into a never-ending game of oneupmanship where self-satisfaction is all that’s won.

For marginalized people, our power comes from seeing identity as a starting point, not the end.