How Identity Politics Turns the Oppressed Into Oppressors

Consequences of the sexual revolution and the deconstruction doctrine promoted by the postmodernist philosophers of the Frankfurt School and French theory, the primal attachments such as family, religion, and patriotism, have weakened and fractured throughout the Western world.

The emptiness left by the disappearance of stable communities born from those primal attachments was increasingly filled with collective identities formed around characteristics such as race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Identities constructed in opposition of the group perceived as the oppressor (white Christian heterosexual men) are therefore recognized as oppressed.

Those purported oppressed groups have organized themselves into active political factions. They have given birth to identity politics, the social or political activities wherein agendas based upon those particular characteristics – race, gender, sexual orientation, or other identifying factors – rather than social status are promoted.

As well as answering the need for community in an atomized West, identity politics aims to rectify perceived injustices inflicted by the dominant/oppressor group to the supposed oppressed faction due to their differences and their particular identity. The social and political activities undertaken aim to eliminate the stereotypes allegedly employed to justify an exclusion; achieve a sort of cosmic justice based on presumed past discriminations. They promote the idea that cultural minorities deserve acknowledgment of their distinctive beliefs, values, and lifestyles.

Identity politics arose in reaction to the perceived failures of the civil rights movement of the ’60s. However, instead of attempting to remove the political impact of identity (Martin Luther King, in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech envisioned a world where his children would no longer be “judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character"), identity politics reclaims identity as a characterization for groups or individuals on the political discourse.

Identity politics, under the guise of achieving greater social equity through the assistance of perceived historically oppressed and discriminated groups, develop politics based on the distinction of individuals in regard to those identities. It is the tribalisation of politics and advocates for unabashed separatism: political meetings forbidden to white people or dedicated spaces for people of color. 

Consequently, identity politics is the negation of individualities. It considers that rather than being an individual, we are all essentially a member of a group based on those oppressors or oppressed characteristics. Identity politics evaluates individuals according to their birth rather than their achievement.

Correspondingly, identity politics is the negation of association on values, it boils down the political perspective to an identity. As such, identity politics marks the end of the political debate. It hinders rational conversation.

Indeed, on one hand, minorities need to conform to a particular orthodoxy.  They are a homogenous group that votes, thinks, and talks alike. Dissident opinions would be chastised such as the American rapper Kanye West was for his support for Donald Trump.

On the other hand, the political arguments of the so-called oppressor groups against identity politics are received as a personal attack toward oppressed communities. Those oppressor groups are accused of erasing the identity of individuals from minority groups (“unperson”), and as they have reportedly never experienced oppression or discrimination, their views are deemed to be invalid in the political debate.

And so, in essence, identity politics is the distribution of individuals into groups conforming to those recognized oppressed characteristics. It defines humans and the social and societal struggles according to those groups' context. With identity politics, history is reduced to the power maneuvers between such groups. It has turned society into a battleground between atomized factions of different influences. Instead of individual guilt or innocence, identity politics has promoted collective responsibility or virtue.

As such, identity politics is not a politic based on a common goal, for the society as a whole, to unite all, but the weaponization of identities, the ambition for minorities to impose their will and political agendas on the rest of the population without concern for the interest of society. It is a common enemy politic, a system in which a particular group identified as oppressed can wield power against those recognized as oppressors. 

The resentment of the minority groups fuelled by identity politics leads to the legitimation of the (violent) actions against the designated oppressors. It implied that people from minority communities are virtuous while calling for the complete annihilation of the individuals perceived as oppressors, the complete annihilation of their children, their grandchildren, etc. 

For that reason, identity politics is something only marginalized groups can adopt. The silent majority, the faction identified as oppressors, is bared to assert any form of singularity by fear of being accused of racism, white supremacy, sexism, homophobia, etc.  They can endure public humiliation or physical retaliation. The policy applied to one group (considered oppressed) is positive but the same applied to another (regarded as oppressors) is negative.

In summary, identity politics ultimately achieved the realization of the dictatorship of minorities.

Conclusively, identity politics fragment and disunify the working class. It is a negation of the imperative of production. Besides, theorizing a political strategy based on identity often played into the hands of neoliberal capitalism.

Feminism, for instance, had held legitimate claims for freedom. However, the economic emancipation from the oppressive male figure (father or husband) has actually compelled thousands of women to leave the household, understood as the place of their alienation, to join the labor market. It has led to the transformation of the housewife (an individual without direct purchasing power) into a wage worker and consumer at the service of the neoliberal capitalist system: Homo Consumericus Libertarian.

If millions of women emancipated themselves from their husbands’ sphere of influence, they eventually ended up in their bosses’ sphere of influence. Worst, their traditional role in the household never dwindled, so they ultimately suffered from double alienation: their status as housewives and their status as salaried employees. 

Factually, the feminist emancipation through work, i.e. wage labor (housework is unsalaried work), benefited women only from the upper classes – bourgeois’ wives or daughters.  Who thanks to their social status and cultural capital acceded to desirable positions in the labor market: lawyer, professor, journalist, politician, etc while women from the working class join their male counterparts on the assembly line in factories.

Furthermore, the emancipation of the women from the bourgeoisie from the constraint of the household was typically at the detriment of women from the working class.  Employed to handle their housework (housekeeper, cleaner, baby-sitter, etc.). Those proletarian women, lacking the financial means to delegate their household chores, won’t be able to afford the same luxury. And so, they would need to attend their own domestic duties after a day of salaried work.

Unlike the women from the upper classes, those from the proletariat would generally do anything to escape the imperative of production. And that is why there is no common aspiration among women or even among any groups defined by similar identity characteristics: blacks, homosexuals, etc.

 Identity politics does not transcend social class dynamics. 

Instead of promoting equality, identity politics has turned the so-called oppressed into oppressors. Furthermore, identity politics is the disregard of socioeconomic classes and the relationship between workers and producers, which is why it favors neoliberal capitalism at the expense of the working class.