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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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If you want to understand Identity Politics, then it is best to go to the source of Black feminist group named The Combahee River Collective and how they defined it in their 1977 manifesto

This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves.

This is the true birthplace of the concept of intersectionality, The Combahee River Collective was a group of black women many of them were lesbians. They connected their identity to oppression, and posited that until the least privileged are free (black, queer women), nobody is free. Of course the identity politics in this sense is abhorrent as it automatically assigns value judgement to immutable characteristics such as sex, race etc. The way to get around this is to introduce systemic thinking. You are a man and even if you do not directly and consciously engage in oppression, you nevertheless have access to male privilege and you implicitly and unwittingly perpetuate the system of power - The Patriarchy (or White Supremacy or Capitalism etc.) - that oppresses people. You will never be able to tap into the lived experience of oppressed people, you will always lack this way of knowing, but you can be an ally and center these marginalized identities whenever possible. To center here it means literally, they imagine identities being on the margin of the circle while privileged people are in the center. Marginalized people have better view of the situation having the outside view, you have to shrink the circle and introduce margins into the conversation. You will see these concept in DEI training explaining it all to you. As Di Angelo says:

This work [anti-racism in this case] requires courage and commitment to a lifelong process.

It is lifelong work until patriarchy/capitalism/white supremacy/whatever is dismantled completely. But before then you have to give power to the marginalized so that the society can reorient itself in right direction under their expert guidance to dismantle oppression. Once that goal is achieved, the marginalized will abolish themselves as they will no longer need the power and we all end up in utopia.

That is the one minute summary of generalized dialectical conspiracy theory, their weltanschaung and ideas behind that worldview. It really is quite simple if you look at it. For sure at least in the way to identify who is the victim and who is to blame for everything as with many other conspiracy theories. Similarly to those there is also a huge rabbit hole to lose yourself for a lifetime, but the general gist stays the same despite complicated sounding jargon and the rest of it.