If all of politics involves “identity,” and if we all possess identities, why do so many feel like contemporary “identity politics” is something new and experience it as threatening? If identity has always been a fundamental part of shared social and political life, why does identity figure so prominently in that shared life now? In this episode, we explore this question, looking at three significant social and political events over the latter half of the 20th century that help us to understand how identity has come to hold such a prominent place in our social and political life.
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Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus and our series You're Not Welcome Here, which focuses on identity, identity politics, understanding how those things fit together.
My My name is Dan Miller.
I'm Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Straight White American Jesus is hosted in partnership with the CAP Center, University of California Santa Barbara, and I am pleased to say hello to all of those who are listening as we continue to think about identity, identity politics, what those terms are, how they come together, And I'm interested today to pick up a theme that I introduced at the end of last session.
I'm going to take a couple minutes though to remind us sort of where we are, what we're talking about, how we've gotten here.
I have argued that identity, right?
We use this term identity, this concept of identity politics.
It can be pretty mystifying.
But I've argued that this term identity is fundamentally about the recognition of similarity and difference, right?
It's really, really pretty simple.
You look around and you recognize other people as being like you or different from you or like or different from others.
And I've argued that identity, this process of recognizing and recognizing similarity and difference, is a really basic mechanism for social categorization and organization.
That is, it's how we make sense of the social world, right?
We walk around and we identify different people as fitting into different groups.
And again, just to illustrate that this isn't as strange as it sounds, like we think of identity as having to do with like Big things like racial identity or ethnic or gender identity and it does have to do with those things.
But we look around and we identify children as being different from adults.
And we identify people by age.
We identify them by dress.
Maybe we identify them... I'm just imagining walking through a mall or something like this.
We identify and categorize them maybe by what store they're in.
What stores do they go to?
We categorize them for all different kinds of reasons, in all different kinds of ways, and every time we do this, and most of the time it's not conscious, it's not something we're aware of doing, we're using identity, right?
And that means that everyone has an identity, and I'm oversimplifying.
We all have multiple identities, and they come from different places, and they often don't cohere or fit together.
These are all themes that we will get into.
But one of the things that I've suggested is that critics of so-called identity politics, or a focus on identity, and I've identified those as being on both the political right, people like Donald Trump and the Republican Party, but also the political left, people like Bernie Sanders and some of his supporters, people like Hillary Clinton and some of her supporters,
They all seem to presuppose that what they are doing or what they're advocating or what they want is something different from a focus on identity.
And I've argued that identity is something that everybody has.
Everybody is subject to identity.
Identity is a thing that affects all of us and is absolutely fundamentally socially basic, which means that all politics is identity politics or that the concept of identity politics is somewhat redundant.
And the reason it's redundant is the politics is fundamentally about recognition.
Who gets what, who deserves what, what happens to whom, and so forth.
Okay?
Moving forward, we're going to get into the nuts and bolts of all of these things, right?
We are going to dig deeper into what identity is and how it operates, and I'm going to do more work than I've done so far to To back up my criticism, or excuse me, my suggestion that criticisms of identity politics are misplaced, right?
I realize that I've made this assertion.
I've kind of hinted at why that is, but I haven't really supported that.
We're going to get to that.
We're going to dig into all of those kinds of things.
But in our last session, I keep referring to this as a session, it's like everybody's in counseling.
In our last session, my last episode, whatever we want to call that, I concluded with a thought which was this, okay?
Somebody could say to me, okay, Dan, that all makes sense.
Everything you're saying makes sense.
Identity is about recognition.
It's about recognition of similarity and difference.
It's a fundamental social reality.
It's a fundamental part of the structuring of society.
Great.
Cool.
Really interesting.
Uh, that all makes sense.
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