You're Not Welcome Here, Ep. 3: "Identities are like elbows and a**holes."
What is identity? It isn’t something limited to particular social groups claiming equal rights or something that only applies to minority groups of different kinds. On the contrary, “identity” is something we all have and it’s how we categorize and sort individuals and groups to shape our shared social life. It’s also fundamental to our shared political life, which means that the concept of “identity politics” is actually redundant.
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163
SWAJ Apparel is here! https://straight-white-american-jesus.creator-spring.com/listing/not-today-uncle-ron
To Donate:
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi
Venmo: @straightwhitejc
Episode produced by Brad Onishi and Daniel Miller.
Episode edited by Shannon Sassone.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Axis Mundy Axis Mundy You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
Visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators.
Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I am your host, Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
And we are hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, that is the University of California at Santa Barbara.
And I want to welcome people who are listening to this next session of You're Not Welcome Here.
Special series that looks at issues of identity and politics, culture, what identity is, how it works, criticisms of so-called identity politics, and so on.
In our last session, we took a look and said, okay, people decry identity politics, and that this cuts across the political spectrum, that politicians as different as Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, What unites them all is they are critical of something that we could call identity politics or the role of identity in politics.
And I said, what also unites them is that they appeal to identity in politics, even as they are critical of it.
In today's session, I want to carry that just a little bit further.
There's an old saying, and I will clean it up a little bit or for the purposes of the podcast here that says, Opinions are like elbows and a-holes.
Everybody has one.
Everybody has an identity.
And in fact, one of the things we'll be doing as we go along in this series is just sort of adding some complexity and detail to the things that we talk about as we move along.
And one of the issues to which we'll return is this notion that we all have multiple identities.
But for now, let's just stay with this.
Everybody has an identity, and that includes Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Why does that matter?
It matters because it means that this notion that you could somehow have any kind of politics.
In fact, I would say any kind of social order apart from identity is nonsensical.
Identity is fundamental to the construction of our social world.
And so what I want to look at in this session is start taking a look at, okay, well, what exactly do we mean by identity?
We use this term all the time.
We say we identify as this or that, or that person identifies as so-and-so, or maybe we can identify something, or we decry about identity politics or the role of identity in politics.
What exactly is identity and what does it do?
Right?
These are really fundamental questions.
And before we can get into substantive arguments or discussions about what identity politics might or might not be, and whether it might or might not be good, or how it might or might not advance the cause of democracy, or whatever it is we want to ask about it, We need to understand what is identity and what does it do?
And this is also going to show us why I say identity is everywhere.
We all have one, including the people who want to say that they don't.
And I'll just throw this out there while we're at it, that a future question we're going to consider is this.
If everybody has an identity, if identity is something that affects every single social actor, what's the significance of social groups or social actors who don't think That they're playing identity politics or who don't recognize that identity plays a fundamental role in what they do politically or socially.
These are questions that we'll get to.
For now, what I want to look at, as I say, is what identity is and why it isn't.
Limited to particular social actors because oftentimes when we hear the phrase Identity politics or when somebody talks about bringing identity into politics or whatever other rhetoric you'll hear We're talking about specific social groups.
What is in view is for example women?
Claiming work protections or something like the me too movement minorities of different kinds maybe it's So let's start with this.
with organizations like Black Lives Matter, maybe it's LGBTQ community members demanding LGBTQ rights, and so on and so forth, it's often viewed as some social subset and claims that apply to them.
And so the question we want to look at is why it isn't limited to simply some groups among others, but why it is that I say that we all have identity.
So let's start with this.
The term identity can be a little bit mystifying, right?
And I want to work here to demystify it.
So So fundamentally, what identity has to do with is recognition.
When we use the word identity, or maybe the verb identify, to identify something, we are simply talking about the fact that we recognize who we are and who others are on the basis of their identity.
So identity has fundamentally to do With this notion of recognition and recognition in turn is all about categorizing people and organizing social life.
Right?
As we look around, so to speak, the social world, and we identify different people, we group them together.
We see which ones belong here, and which ones belong here, and so forth, and we organize social life that way.
We come to see individuals not simply as individuals, but as belonging to entire classes.
We recognize people as children.
We recognize people as gendered in different ways.
We recognize people racially.
Or ethnically.
We recognize people socioeconomically.
We recognize people in all different kinds of ways.
And as we do that, we are sorting people.
We are categorizing people.
We are ordering the social world.
And that's a really basic function.
Again, it can sound kind of strange.
But if you're in the grocery store and you see a little kid walking around by themselves, it strikes you as strange.
Why?
Because you recognize that this person's a little kid and a child and a whole bunch of information comes to you from that.
Namely, that this child ought to be attached to some adult somewhere and you start to maybe worry and ask the kid if they need help finding somebody or something like that.
Right?
We categorize the social through recognition and that's the function of identity.
And because this happens everywhere all the time, because this is a fundamental thing that we do, it means that identity is always operative.
So how does that work?
Right?
Again, I want to just make this as basic as I can because it's not a mystifying concept.
If we really look at what we mean by identity, what it is, what it does, it work.
We work to socially categorize people to make sense of the social world.
Well, what that means is identity involves similarity and difference.
That's what recognition requires.
The reason we can recognize individuals and groups, the reason that we can categorize people the way we do, the reason that we can sort the social the way we do, is that we perceive in lots and lots of ways, some that are obvious, some that are not, but we perceive how particular individuals are like or unlike others.
We recognize similarity and difference.
We group them together based on their perceived similarities and differences from each other.
That's how we create social categories.
And here's the really crucial point, right?
This is what will bring us to specific questions about identity politics and belonging and exclusion, is that when we look around at people and we perform that categorizing, sorting function, when we recognize similarity and difference, We also determine what people or groups are similar or different from us.
Or we take a look at ourselves and we perceive similarities or differences from other individuals and groups.
Because identity is also how we understand ourselves.
It is not just how we recognize others, it is what we recognize and feel ourselves to be and where we recognize and feel ourselves to belong and with whom.
So when we categorize people and we sort the social, we also locate within the social where we fit.
What is our place within the social?
Who are our people within the social?
And this is why there's no escaping the role of identity.
Thanks for listening to this free preview of our SWADGE episode.
In order to get access to the full episode and so much more, become a Straight White American Jesus Premium Subscriber by clicking the link in the show notes.
It'll take you like two clicks, I promise.
In addition to getting access to this episode, you'll have access to the entire SWADGE archive, over 550 episodes.
You'll also get an extra episode every month, ad-free listening, Discord access, and so much more.
All that for less than six bucks a month, and it helps us keep our flag up and continue to safeguard democracy from religious nationalism, extremism, and rising authoritarianism.
