"You’re Not Welcome Here", Ep. 6- "You’re Not Who You Think You Are”
This episode revisits the idea that identity is about recognition and explores the significance of this. Because identity is not only about how I recognize myself, but also about how others recognize me, identity is never merely a matter of individual preference. Rather, identity is always shared and collective in nature. This is particularly true of identities with the “critical mass” to effect social or political change. This is one of the reasons why criticisms of identity politics on the grounds that it is merely individualistic and socially divisive are misguided.
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Produced by Brad Onishi and Dan Miller
Edited by Shannon Sassone
Music by Matt Puckett-Yellow Leaves
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www.StraightWhiteAmerican Jesus I am your host, Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
We are hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, and you are listening to my series on You're Not Welcome Here, focusing on identity, identity politics.
We've been introducing those concepts.
We'll be looking at things like how concrete social identities form and How that informs American religion and politics.
So thank you for joining me.
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So, let's dive right in here.
I want to recap a little bit from the discussion in the last episode and lead into the discussion in this episode.
And last week, I looked at Mark Lilla, a historian from Columbia University, and a little bit from Tucker Carlson as well, but I want to focus on the Mark Lilla bit here, because he's critical of identity and identity politics because he says it represents what he calls a Facebook view of identity, and we talked about this, and it's this notion that Those who appeal to identity as a political force are simply appealing to something that's a matter of personal preference.
It's purely subjective.
It's arbitrary.
It's completely individual.
And so for somebody like Lila, identity politics is actually a contradiction in terms.
Because those who assert identities are only ever concerned about their own interests.
They have no shared in a, excuse me, no interest in a shared sense of us or we or the common good.
And so we talked about this And those who've read Lilla or are familiar with him know that he comes off very much as the angry white guy when it comes to identity and identity politics.
I don't want to hammer on Lilla more.
I only highlight all of that to say that I made the argument last time that that is a ridiculous view about identity.
And it's not limited to Mark Lilla.
It's not limited to the political left.
It exists sort of all over the place, but it's a silly view.
And why?
Well, I made the argument there that social identities that matter politically or socially, and by that I just mean that have what we might call the critical mass, enough social awareness, enough people who are part of them, enough mobilization to have a concrete social or political effect.
Those identities that are in that sense politically salient, right?
They're the ones that matter for politics and society.
They're the ones without which we can't think about politics and society because we're going to lose big groups of people in our discussion.
Those identities, identities like race or ethnicity or gender identity or sexual orientation or political ideology for that matter, religious identity, any number of them, right?
Those identities are always collective.
They are never just individual or personal.
They are never a matter of personal preference.
Lilla's model of Facebook conception of identity is just silly on, well, the face of it.
No one cares how I, taken in isolation, just as myself, all alone, quote-unquote, identify.
Nobody cares.
It may be important to me.
It may be of interest to me.
I might like to tell other people about it.
But if nobody else shares that identity with me, nobody cares.
By which I simply mean that identity is not going to move the needle on any social issues or political issues.
Nobody is going to have to take account of who I am as an individual or how I identify when they decide which political candidate to back.
Or what proposal to support for their local school district, or how to vote on election day.
Nobody cares.
It doesn't matter.
Political identities.
Identities that are, again, to use this phrase, politically salient, that matter politically, that have a social or political critical mass, are collective identities.
They have to be identities that involve a multitude of people, which, again, is why Lilla's suggestion that they have no shared sense of we or us is just silly.
The we or us, that sense of collective identity, it's built into the identities.
There is No politically or socially salient identity group, unless it's a group, hear the word group, which means that that collective sense of we or us is built in.
So that's sort of where we were last week, looking at Lilla's argument and why it just doesn't hold water, it just doesn't work.
I want to move the discussion and the thought forward this week, and I want to connect that point with where I'm headed today.
Or tonight, or whenever you happen to be listening to this podcast.
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