You’re Not Welcome Here Ep. 5: “It’s Not Like Social Media”
Contemporary critics on both the right and the left essentially accuse those who politically mobilize around social identities of being fundamentally selfish in nature. The charge is that their politics reflects only personal interest, that they seek special treatment or privilege on the basis of an identity that isn’t shared with others, and that they fragment any shared political vision. But none of these criticisms hold up if we consider the actual social groups that figure prominently in current discussion of identity politics. Rather, we find that these groups originate in the experience of marginalization and social and political exclusion, radically changing the light in which we should view identity and identity politics.
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Produced by Brad Onishi and Dan Miller
Edited by Shannon Sassone
Music by Matt Puckett
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www.StraightWhiteAmerican Jesus My name is Dan Miller.
I'm Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College and one of the two co-hosts of Straight White American Jesus.
We are hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at the University of California Santa Barbara, so my thanks to them.
And my thanks to everybody who takes the time to listen.
My thanks to everybody who has reached out to communicate with me.
And as a reminder, it's old school, but email is the best way to reach me, danielmiller at landmark.edu, and I've appreciated the comments that I've gotten from so many people.
I've tried to respond to those when I'm able.
And people have brought up a lot of topics and issues and questions that we are going to get to.
The issue of identity and how it relates to politics and culture is really thorny and complex and multifaceted, and I am committed to spending as much time as we need to untangle all of the The thorny issues and to look at as many of those facets as we can.
And so we'll spend the time doing that.
And so I just want to thank everybody and just acknowledge how perceptive people are at figuring out and seeing what some of those really important issues are.
So thank you to everybody for that and diving into this week.
I want to recap just a little bit.
Last episode, the question that I looked at was, if, as I've argued, identity is a fundamental social category, a social mechanism, it's a way through which we recognize ourselves and others and our relation to each other and our place in society.
If it is a fundamental organizing operation to the social, why is it that what we call identity politics, a kind of political mobilization around a felt sense of shared identity with others in various domains, why does that feel new?
Why does it feel different?
Why does it feel unfamiliar?
And I tried to offer a few reasons why I think that is, why it is, you know, what it is that I think has changed about the political and social terrain on which we currently stand that has changed if the notion of identity itself and its social role has not.
So that's where we've been.
What I want to spend some time on this week is something that I see is related to this is if we looked at like last time like, okay, so why now?
Why is identity politics something that catches on now?
What I want to look at this week is a little bit of why are the kinds of groups that we think of when we think of identity politics, why those groups, right?
In other words, why now and why these people, whoever they are?
And in doing that, I want to look at a criticism, another criticism of identity politics that I think in many ways, despite its differences, is shared on both the political right and the political left.
And this is the idea that identity is inherently individual and subjective.
And so a politics built around identity is basically a politics of social fragmentation.
A politics that seeks, is just basically individuals seeking to serve their own interests.
Seeking what is good for them.
Individuals who are not thinking about the common good or a larger society or something like that.
This is the idea that identity is a matter of sort of personal interest or preference.
And together with that, it carries the idea that appeals to identity amount to privileges given to particular individuals at the expense of others.
That when somebody says, I identify as X, And I want these political rights, or these social protections, or what have you, but what they're actually doing is claiming some sort of entitlement that can only come at the cost of others, and that reflects only their personal interests, or their personal desires, or their identity of themselves.
So identity politics, on this kind of understanding, amounts to claims that individuals make on the basis of their identity to get something they don't deserve, Or to get rights or privileges that the rest of us don't get.
And so appeals to identity are considered unfair or partisan.
And as I say, this line of criticism comes on both the political right and the political left.
And I want to give an example of each of these to think about for just a moment here.
The first is an example of somebody who's center-left, and here I'm looking at the historian at Columbia University named Mark Lilla, who wrote an influential book a few years ago called The Once and Future Liberal After Identity Politics.
And I'm going to highlight what it is that Lilla has to say here.
It's a sustained diatribe against identity politics, and I use that word advisedly.
It is not an argument.
Uh, he doesn't cite anybody.
It's just basically Lilla, you know, raging against identity politics for, you know, 100 or so pages.
But it's been very influential, and what he really does is capture and illustrate really well the criticism that we find on the mainstream left-of-center crowd who argue that identity politics leads to social fragmentation.
And this is very much the view.
The logic in his book is what we hear coming from the groups that I've mentioned, the supporters of Hillary Clinton.
Or Bernie Sanders, who essentially argue that if it wasn't for identity politics breaking up the social, Donald Trump would not have won the presidential election in 2016 on a Christian Nationalist Party platform.
It's basically the argument that identity politics fragmented the social And let Trump and those who support him come into power.
I want to just pause for a moment here and note one general criticism I have of this line of thinking.
And it's a criticism that is related to this, but it would take us further afield.
I don't want to dig into it too much.
But it's this notion that I'm concerned about any line of criticism that says the problem with Christian nationalists, or the reason that Christian nationalists is a problem, is not Christian nationalists.
The reason why Christian nationalism is dangerous or gains political power is not because of Christian nationalism, but it is somehow secretly because of those who oppose Christian nationalism.
So I just throw that out there as a source of frustration that I have when people want to blame The results of some really negative social and political movement, not on the adherence of that social and political movement, but on those who oppose it.
And so we hear that a lot, whether it's, you know, criticisms of the so-called angry black woman, and that's why anti-black affect exists, or criticisms of, you know, the Islamic community being opposed to Islamophobia.
And so somehow that's the reason why people are Islamophobic.
Or people who are too affirmative of immigrants, thereby somehow being responsible for people's xenophobia.
These kinds of criticisms.
And so I'm just going to throw out there as a sort of side issue how frustrating I find that.
But coming back to this, what does Lillis say?
Well, he says on page 87 of his book, he argues against what he calls a Facebook model of identity.
This is how he sees identity politics.
And what he means by that is he says that on this model, quote, The self is a homepage I construct like a personal brand, linked to others through associations I can like and unlike at will.
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