OPINION: Only the privileged can ignore “identity politics”

Shideh Ghandeharizadeh | Daily Trojan

Last Friday, the New Yorker published a conversation between editor-in-chief David Remnick and Columbia University professor Mark Lilla — who is best known, in recent memory, for his opinion piece titled “The End of Identity Liberalism” published in The New York Times 10 days after President Donald Trump won the election. Lilla is a scholar of the humanities, who writes books about the intellect and history. So what, particularly, about liberals and their identities makes him so set against them?

In his New York Times piece, Lilla writes that identity politics is why the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton lost. Identity politics mean, to Lilla’s dismay, a focus on individual and diverse groups within the great American patchwork quilt — a bad thing, according to him, because “if you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them.”

And yet, in a political climate where issues of campus free speech are coming to a head, Lilla’s words feel like what critics of student activism mean when they say everyone’s voice — the diverse, American student body and hateful speakers, including Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos, who spread discriminatory beliefs — deserve equal weight. It feels like what Trump meant when he equated the neo-Nazis with those who marched for tolerance and inclusion in Charlottesville. And for marginalized students across the country, it feels once more as if they are being told that their urgent concerns hold equal weight with the ideals of those who refuse to see them as full people.

What’s dangerous about Lilla is that he doesn’t view a dialogue about America’s marginalized identities as important or necessary. He thinks those are hindrances in the way of political unity, and this bleeds into a more insidious and generalized approach to how conservatives talk about minorities involved in political discourse in this country: that minorities are wrong to fight over the politics that define their very livelihoods, that they are exaggerating when they decry discriminatory rhetoric and legislation, and that they have it no harder than anyone else. That is why white supremacists continue to rally around the so-perceived crusade of free speech, believing that being held accountable to hateful speech hurts just as much as having rights, resources and safety legally taken away.

To be clear, everyone uses identity politics — not just Democrats. Trump does when he targets discourse and legislation on needs specific and exclusive to white citizens, and so do liberal-minded Americans who ask for focus on causes specific toward women, groups of people of color, and the like. Where this goes wrong is what happens when each side believes the other isn’t seeing the full picture, and the frenzied noise of the left and right’s collective echo chambers escalates to an inescapable pitch.

What’s key, at this point, is to listen. And yet, who must listen to whom?

Simply put, when it comes to politics governing the identity of marginalized groups, it’s not enough to be bipartisan, or nonpartisan or even apolitical. For marginalized communities, identity politics surpasses politics — choices made in Washington not only affect their financial circumstances, but are inherent to what it means to live as a minority or a woman or a disabled person or a member of the LGBTQ community today. Really, to these groups “identity politics” is exactly what it sounds like — a threatening prospect where political decisions are inseparable from who they are fundamentally.

When so much is at stake, for marginalized groups and others like them, rhetoric about what Americans all have in common feels like white conservatives asserting that “All Lives Matter” is the same thing as “Black Lives Matter.” It gets the country nowhere. If an entire side of the political sphere refuses to understand or even acknowledge the problems affecting specific, long-silenced groups, then there is little progress that can be expected to be made. That is what’s causing division on college campuses like UC Berkeley and in cities like Charlottesville: not both sides that refuse to listen to each other, but the right that will not listen to the left. There is no way about it.

Just as transgender students trying to safely use school bathrooms cannot shed their identity, just as DACA students trying to succeed at their studies while unsure what the future holds cannot shed their identity, just as female students struggling to access resources for their reproductive health cannot shed their identity — so students of these marginalized demographics cannot shed the political decisions tied to them. A member of a marginalized group cannot avoid thinking about the political climate without contextualizing about what’s at stake for him or herself. It’s understandable that a wide swath of the country has the luxury of being able to separate themselves from national administrative decisions, but it’s also imperative to understand that there are those who do not.

Though free speech is paramount to American democracy, it is ultimately not what is at stake in today’s political turmoil. When someone who has lived an oppressed existence asks someone who has not to listen, that is not the same thing as silencing. Undoing a long-held narrow-mindedness takes thinking, and it takes understanding, and that’s reasonable. But what’s most useless is talking over marginalized groups, and then bemoaning the growing rift befalling the country. When determining how to heal national division, empathy is a good place to start.