Why liberals should value ‘identity politics’

Interviewed on the fortieth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, civil-rights activist Eleanor Holmes Norton was asked why the only woman to take the podium on the day of the protest was Mahalia Jackson, who sang “The Star Spangled Banner.” Not a single woman, among the many people who spoke that day, was solicited to address the audience of protestors who had come to Washington to demand voting rights for African Americans. From the vantage point of 2003, the interviewer was curious how the organizers of a civil-rights march could have overlooked such obvious sexism in the midst of their fight against racism. Norton replied, “Well, shame on us! This was before the women’s rights movement, and we didn’t even realize, we did not even recognize, this injustice that was being done. We did not even think about it at that time, although as soon as three years later we were certainly aware of that type of thing.”1

As Norton’s remark reveals, a political identity does not arise spontaneously. Instead, by using categories of race, gender, and class to define an unequal distribution of rights and privileges, liberal democratic societies compel some of their members to identify with others of a similar ethnic, sexual, or economic character. In general, only those group definitions that have been used to restrict access to power will become self-conscious and gain salience, in the act of contesting–or protecting–the exclusions that constitute them.

Thus, movements form around issues of gender, race, or class, not because people feel a need to express a primary commitment to such shared identities, but rather because these categories have regulated the distribution of the goods of a liberal society. The emergence of new political identities therefore signals some shortcoming of the democratic system. We should think of such mobilizations, as Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres suggest, as a miner’s canary, warning us of the poisonous gases of entrenched power threatening the health of our democracy.2

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Endnotes

• 1Eleanor Holmes Norton, interviewed by Tavis Smiley, The Tavis Smiley Show, National Public Radio, August 25, 2003.
• 2Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Not all politically salient identities are emancipatory, progressive, or sympathetic to democrats. Not all people are seeking simply inclusion for a group that has been marginalized. Many Afrikaners in South Africa, for example, have a highly developed Afrikaner political identity that was organized, in the apartheid era, around maintaining privilege and the boundaries of existing exclusions. This example corroborates the underlying premise, however, that it is political contestation over exclusions and inclusions that produce political identities. Democracy implies that Afrikaners have as much right to try to maintain their privilege as others have to contest it. Critical liberalism insists on providing the grounds that will enable the others to contest it.