Transcript: Plebity panel on identity politics

A conversation between myself, Amna Khalid and Jeff Snyder

This week Lean Out is back from our annual summer hiatus, and I am recharged and ready to get back to tackling the big issues of the day. One of the things that I did while I was away was attend Plebity’s inaugural virtual conference, Free Speech and the Left, a timely and important gathering that brought together many prominent writers and thinkers on the left. I was honoured to moderate a panel for that conference — which I enjoyed so much that I’m bringing it to you this week in podcast form, featuring two former Lean Out guests.

Amna Khalid and Jeff Snyder are history professors at Carleton College. The title of our recent Plebity panel discussion is “Personal Experiences and Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture and Free Speech.” You can find the entire conference archived online at plebity.org.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.

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TH: Amna and Jeff, it's great to be with you both again. We've had some really fruitful conversations in the past. I'm pleased that we get to talk through the big issues of our day again. I’m just delighted to take part in this conference, which is really an important conversation about free speech on the Left. Welcome to you both.

AK: Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

JS: Yes, thank you.

TH: The topic of the panel today is “Personal Experiences and Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture and Free Speech.” That's a big umbrella for us to start with. Let's start by setting terms. What do we mean when we say we're talking about identity politics?

JS: Well, I think this is important to clarify, because I think there are various meanings of identity politics. There's an identity politics that has been central to the long Civil Rights movement in the United States, where African Americans have constructed and advanced an idea of being a community, of being a people who share certain interests, who share certain features of oppression. So, identity politics in the interests of solidarity and organizing power. In some ways, the classic Civil Rights movement of the 1960s — although it was expansive and involved in interracial coalition — at its heart, it was very grounded in identity politics. That is, it came out of the Black experience. Or Black experiences, plural.

One can also say that identity politics has been foundational to all of U.S. history, in terms of taking the broad view and thinking about the role that whiteness, white people, have played in advancing racially-coded ideas about citizenship. For those people who think that identity politics is only for people of colour, I would strongly reject that notion. You've seen very strong and powerful coalitions of white people across history who have organized to defend their interests, whether that's property rights or voting rights.

In terms of how it's understood today, the way that I would think about it, in the context of a conversation about academic freedom, free speech, and cancel culture, is that identity politics of this vein has been narrowed to a very fine point. I would say that today's identity politics, to my mind, in certain areas, is about a kind of standpoint epistemology. The idea is that you can only speak according to the community that you are a part of. Or the communities that you are a part of. That constructs a very narrow idea of identity. That's the “Asian people shouldn't write about the Black experience because they haven't had that direct lived experience.” Of course, lived experience is essential for understanding the world, but if lived experience becomes a way of erecting boundaries, a way of telling other people, “You can't speak for me, and in addition to that, you can't even understand me because you haven't lived in my shoes…” I'll let Amna add in here.

AK: Yes, just to clarify a couple of things. The first thing I'd say is: I, of course, agree with things that Jeff has laid out. But I think identity politics has deep connections with feminism, and with the idea that your identity is critical to how you are in the world and how you present in the world. I want to recognize that.

I think what we are seeing today is a very different kind of identity politics. I would call it the bureaucratization of identity politics, where it's turned into a box-checking exercise, and where it's very much about your monolithic identity as a community member. And then you were seen as representing that community. Which is why the identity politics of today is coming into conflict with freedom of ideas, because there is no room for you to espouse ideas that might go against what your community is supposedly espousing. If you are a dissenter within the community, then somehow your voice counts for less. And that's getting in the way of your individual expression.

The point that Jeff made about standpoint epistemology, again, by way of clarification, standpoint epistemology when it originated actually had a lot to contribute to the ways in which we think about knowledge production. I think those are valuable contributions. That your lived experience and your particular position in the world informs your worldview. That needs to be taken into consideration. You have to remember that this was coming at a time when the idea was that there's objective knowledge, that somehow everything can be objective. It was questioning that idea, so it allowed a lot of minorities, in many interesting ways, to bring their experiences to bear upon knowledge construction. And I think that is vital. Reducing it to purely lived experience is how we are experiencing it today. For instance, in my classrooms, I'll ask a question and about why are Indians X, Y, and Z. Then some white student will reluctantly raise their hand and say, "Well, I don't know. I'm not an Indian. As a white person, I can't really know their experience." I'm like, “Well, this isn't about experience. This is really just trying to understand behavior or a social strategy” — whatever we're discussing. I think there are ways in which both identity politics and standpoint epistemology have been reduced to things that they weren't initially intended to be.

JS: Let's throw in some additional jargon here. Related to all of this is the idea of intersectionality. As a social scientist, who straddles also the humanities, and historian, also in the field of ed studies — intersectionality, the idea that each of us are individuals made up of multiple overlapping intersecting identities, that's an empirically accurate way of describing the world. You literally can't argue with it from a historical or sociological perspective. There's something brilliant about that insight — that the experience of a Black woman would be fundamentally different from the experience of a Black man, when you take into account gender and not just the racial background.

Again, as Amna said, the problem is when intersectionality isn't one of many lenses that we bring to address and think through social problems, but when it's the only lens. One additional addendum to that would be the fact that intersectionality privileges certain kinds of identities and ignores others. Intersectionality today is very inattentive, in general, to class. Almost wholly indifferent to religion. There are many people in the United States who, if you ask them who they are, their very first statement would be something like, "I'm a Christian," no matter their ethno-racial background. Again, a lot of these ideas are very powerful, but they've been narrowed down, distorted, reduced.

AK: Clearly with the two of us, Tara, you're going to have to fight to get a word in.

TH: [Laughs] This is great, we're starting with a really high degree of nuance, which I think is part of the solution to the polarization that is inherent to the issues that we're discussing today. I'm really happy that we're starting off from a place of complicating the narrative, and trying to get more nuance into the conversation. You mentioned class. I think that's a really good piece to bring in early as well. The traditional Left was about class and about material conditions. Recently, I interviewed Adolph Reed, and he said that what we're seeing, at the heart of these issues, is a competition between two different ideals of social justice: the racial democracy ideal and the social democracy ideal. This is a model, I believe, from Preston Smith. One of them looks at structures in society and says, “Okay, we have this percentage of this identity. We need to have that percentage represented up and down the hierarchy.” The other perspective looks at the hierarchy and says, “How do we narrow the inequalities between all the groups?” I would definitely fall on the second. But I do think it's a useful way of describing what we're seeing right now. What do you think?

AK: I would agree. The cultural turn made a lot of contributions to understanding how inequality works through culture and reproduces itself. That was an incredibly valuable contribution, again, at that time to see the mechanisms of power and to look at how symbols and language and cultural norms begin to reproduce inequalities. The problem is, I feel like right now, we're in a moment where that conversation has become completely divorced from the material conditions. It's almost as if contesting symbols in itself becomes the end-all and be-all of social justice.

JS: Here's a concrete example of that. Several years ago, in the Trump era when there were all of the migrant children who had been detained at the Mexico-US border, often in really gruesome and grim conditions, one could see in the popular press a debate about how to refer to these particular children. There were some people who insisted that they had to be referred to as Latinx migrants, that that somehow was really important in terms of centering their experiences and their identity. If you step back from that and think about that battle over terminology and vocabulary, I mean, forgive me, I will try and put myself into the shoes of an 11-year-old coming from Guatemala. I don't think that it's going to matter to that 11-year-old what they're called, the term that they're used. What they want is relief from the acute suffering that they experienced. They want people to pay attention to them. Yes, it is about the material conditions, and whether you refer to them as Latinx migrants, it doesn't matter if we're not doing anything to actually alleviate their conditions and remove them from the horrible circumstances that they were enmeshed in.

TH: I think there's also the issue of impracticality, in terms of what's being proposed on the Left. There's this idea that we can have this coalition of identity groups, which in some cases have competing interests. The classic example we're seeing play out of that right now is radical feminists and trans women. These are tricky issues. They're going to require a lot of compromise, they're going to require a lot of care and a lot of negotiation, but the idea that this is a natural coalition is, in some cases, impractical.

AK: Well, yes. To me, I would even become more basic about it. I resent the term BIPOC, for instance. There is a way in which that terminology itself assumes a shared experience. [But] the only shared experience is that BIPOC people are not white, and that doesn't say much. There are also deep assumptions about how whiteness is operating in different contexts, and how the politics of colour, whatever that is, is also playing out. To my mind, again, it's this binary approach, and it is flattening differences and assuming that you are a natural ally if you are non-white. To me that actually reeks of racist underpinnings.

JS: As a historian, this is deeply frustrating because the anti-racist dogma that BIPOC people are going to share natural affinities and have a kind of political sensibility and solidarity — it absolutely disintegrates when you look at U.S. history. You don't even need to look abroad, but just within the broader domain of people who are now coded as white. The animosity between Irish immigrants and Protestants, between people from Poland and Western Europe. These have been dramatic and sometimes violent conflicts between these groups that are all now seen as white.

Anybody who goes to an urban area in the United States today, if you've got your eyes open, you will notice that there are visible tensions among different "BIPOC" communities. For example, in Washington, DC, where I lived for seven years in a predominantly Black neighbourhood — I mean, this hearkens back to Spike Lee's 1989 film, Do the Right Thing, where you could see a real, palpable tension between the local Black community and more recent immigrants, specifically from South Korea, who had the corner grocery store. It was palpable when you walked into the grocery store that there was a sense of tension. There was no natural affinity between these two groups. And why would there be? They don't share a history, a language, except for those who are born in the United States. I think from a historical perspective, you almost have to teach students to unlearn [some ideas]. The default is not solidarity. The default is friction, if you live in a pluralistic, multicultural democracy. I think that's a really important point, especially for those students who want to become activists. If you imagine that all BIPOC people are going to sign onto your petition straight away because of what they look like, you're in for some tough lessons in the real rigour of organizing.

AK: In the 20th century, we spent so much time debunking the idea of race as biological. That these are social categories — and recognizing that. Yes, of course, racism exists, no one's denying that, but race in itself, there's nothing essential about it. Now, I find that we're in a moment where we've kind of come to that, but at the same time, we want to hang on to this idea that there's something inherently, biologically different about being from a different race. When you start thinking about it in those terms, it leads to very simplistic notions of “BIPOC people must be trusted whenever they say something.” Well, why? Why would you not think that we are equally as complex, which means also being mean, horrible, disingenuous. That's part of the complexity of being human too. We're not all golden all the time, and the “we” in itself is a problem. It leads to very simplistic thinking and assumptions being made, which are really just anti-intellectual. There's no other way to put it.

TH: Yes, absolutely. I saw this in the newsroom when we started tracking guests by race. The idea was that we would increase the diversity of viewpoint on air by increasing the racial diversity. That's a laudable goal. That is not how it worked out. Because if you're looking strictly through the prism of race, you can have an outcome, which I saw many times, where you still have the vast majority of your guest base economically privileged, living in urban areas, credentialed and subscribing to this "woke" ideology. Whereas huge parts of the population have different religious views, different educational backgrounds, rural experience. There's many facets — this shouldn't require stressing but it does — many facets of being a human being.

AK: Indeed.

JS: I think there's an element of vanity and narcissism. Especially on the part of white liberals, but on the part of a lot of liberal folks. In that they want their environment, whether that's a corporate office in Silicon Valley, whether that's a college campus, whether that's a nonprofit organization — they want their small professional context to reflect the ethno-racial diversity of the United States. This is Obama's cabinet. Their ancestors came from every single part of the world, but all of them went to Princeton, Harvard, Yale, or Stanford. There's this idea that we can achieve what I would call cosmetic diversity in this very narrow professional context, and we can pat ourselves on the back for being so enlightened. And look at how diverse the faculty is, or look at how diverse the people who work at this particular NGO are. When you zoom out — and this gets back to the race versus class distinction — when you zoom out, you're missing out on not just a large segment, but the overwhelming majority of people in the United States who do not work or reside in these contexts.

The equity that you're striving for — it’s a laudable goal, and of course we should go for it — but we shouldn't convince ourselves or imagine that diversifying a college campus, no matter how pressing and how serious I take that, is somehow moving the needle on social justice more broadly. Whether that's the 18,000 people who live in Northfield and have no connection to Carleton College, whether that's all the millions of people in the United States who don't have college degrees, the working class, the poor, these people often aren't incorporated into these discussions except in the most perfunctory and …

AK: Patronizing way.

JS: Patronizing, sloganeering way.

TH: And sometimes are treated with active hostility, as well.

JS: Yes. To my mind, if I think about various earlier iterations of the Left, is all about creating solidarities across lines of difference. I think we've lost that skill and we've lost that interest. Not everybody. Of course, there are fantastic activists and thinkers who are super attuned to this. But generally, the state of the Left, I don't think is — it's struggling to build coalitions and that comes back to the identity politics splintering of the Left into these various identity-based factions.

TH: Absolutely. And one thing I worry about is feeding the beast of racialized thinking. I think a lot about Eli Steele, who made this wonderful movie called How Jack Became Black, about his multiracial son and having to choose a box for what. Eli is a descendant of slaves and a descendant of Holocaust survivors. He spends the film meditating on: “We've tried this before in his history, this has not worked out well for us as humanity.” I see some of the solutions that are now being tried out, things like affinity groups, which is racial segregation, leading us down a very dangerous path.