The term ​“iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics,” like a teth­er ball, is get­ting smacked around by play­ers on all sides. Although the term has shift­ing con­no­ta­tions, it gen­er­al­ly refers to a height­ened focus on the polit­i­cal inter­ests of mar­gin­al­ized groups like women, racial minori­ties and LGBT folks.

No question, we need to build a broad, inclusive movement of people opposed to the manifold threats Trump poses.

Bernie Sanders smacked it from the left dur­ing a con­tro­ver­sial post-elec­tion speech in Boston, when he said in response to a Latina’s ques­tion, ​“One of the strug­gles that you’re going to be see­ing in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty is whether we go beyond iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics.” New York Times colum­nist David Brooks joined the Wash­ing­ton Post’s George Will in slam­ming it from the right. These mar­quee post-mortems see iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics as the Democ­rats’ cur­rent bête noire. Some even blame it for Hillary Clinton’s loss, in line with a pop­u­lar nar­ra­tive that ​“polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness” is a major irri­tant to the white work­ing class.

Many on the Left crit­i­cize Clin­ton for down­play­ing eco­nom­ics in favor of anti-racism and anti-sex­ism. They believe she saw a road to pow­er through a new Amer­i­can major­i­ty of Blacks, Lati­nos, women, youth and labor, and tried to appeal to dif­fer­ent seg­ments through tar­get­ed mar­ket­ing rather than an over­ar­ch­ing theme of sys­temic change — which could have brought in the white work­ing class. Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois pro­fes­sor and social­ist Wal­ter Benn Michaels has been urg­ing a shift in focus from iden­ti­ty to inequal­i­ty for more than a decade. He told the Chica­go Read­er in a post-elec­tion inter­view, ​“In the cur­rent prac­ti­cal moment, half the peo­ple the [Clin­ton cam­paign] accused of being racist are peo­ple who should be vot­ing for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party.”

Oth­er crit­ics see such argu­ments as part of a back­lash. ​“When the alt-left says ​‘iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics,’ what they actu­al­ly mean is civ­il rights,” writes blog­ger Mar­cus H. John­son on Alter­Net. ​“They want mar­gin­al­ized groups to stop fight­ing for civ­il rights because that would upset poor white peo­ple who might oth­er­wise vote Democratic.”

For many Black activists, it’s absurd to ques­tion the pri­ma­cy of race in Amer­i­ca. Africans were abduct­ed and enslaved; the strug­gle to address that mon­u­men­tal injus­tice has pro­pelled Black activism ever since.

Despite that clear ori­gin, a debate about the func­tion of iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics is also tak­ing place with­in the Black Left, although the term is shad­ed with a dif­fer­ent nuance. The pri­ma­ry argu­ment is that skin col­or is used by venal politi­cians as a kind of Tro­jan Horse to attract African-Amer­i­can sup­port for poli­cies inim­i­cal to their interests.

Much of this dis­cus­sion was prompt­ed by the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry. Sanders’ focus on eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty rather than anti-racism failed to attract sig­nif­i­cant Black sup­port — always best mobi­lized by direct racial appeals. Clin­ton owes her pop­u­lar­i­ty in the Black com­mu­ni­ty in large part to her husband’s cul­tur­al ges­tures and her expres­sions of con­cern for issues impor­tant to African Americans.

In Black Agen­da Report, an online jour­nal noto­ri­ous­ly hos­tile to this type of iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics, Solomon Comis­siong argues, ​“Far too many black folks will vote for their worst ene­my, if he or she looks like them. That’s why iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics, which mas­quer­ades as a black pow­er strat­e­gy, winds up dis­em­pow­er­ing African Amer­i­cans every election.”

These are impor­tant issues to pon­der as the Black com­mu­ni­ty attempts to come to grips with the loom­ing Trump admin­is­tra­tion. No ques­tion, we need to build a broad, inclu­sive move­ment of peo­ple opposed to the man­i­fold threats Trump pos­es. Move­ments have thrived best in Amer­i­can his­to­ry when they’ve been cou­pled with the strug­gle for racial equi­ty — from the abo­li­tion­ist move­ment of ante­bel­lum Amer­i­ca, to the pop­ulist move­ment of the 1890s, to the coun­ter­cul­ture move­ment of the 1960s-70s. Racial jus­tice move­ments have ener­gized the lib­er­a­tion strug­gles of oth­er groups oppressed by white suprema­cist cap­i­tal­ism — includ­ing white work­ers. This is like­ly because inter­ra­cial uni­ty sub­verts the divide-and-con­quer tac­tics deployed to stunt pro­gres­sive challenges.

One major threat to this uni­ty is the iden­ti­tar­i­an core of Don­ald Trump’s sup­port base. The pres­i­dent-elect rep­re­sents a return to ​“white­ness” for some. This explains his appeal to the white nation­al­ists of the ​“alt-right,” who bemoan the lack of white racial esteem. This nation’s slav­ery-taint­ed his­to­ry presents us with an asym­met­ri­cal real­i­ty: All iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics are not the same.