Identity Politics

Arguably the most famous broadcaster and TV presenter in New Zealand is a chap called Mike Hosking. Hosking is white, male, middle-aged, affluent and a National Party supporter; on his TV show I have sometimes heard him describe himself as 'normal'. This is of course how a dominant group conceals itself in plain sight. Ideology is most of the time invisible, transparent, 'natural'. People usually don't question it or even see it because the rule of rich white heterosexual men is taken for granted, viewed as 'just the way things are'. It is in reaction against this hegemony of the mainstream that identity politics developed, as people sought to pitch themselves bodily against the tyranny of the 'normal' by vocally proclaiming their divergences from it, by saying "I'm black", "I'm Maori", "I'm Jewish", "I'm gay", "I'm a woman" and so on. Identity is a weapon; the personal is the political. In this post I want to discuss identity politics a little, show some ways it is problematic and talk again about some alternative ways of looking at identity.

I myself am white, male, heterosexual and not currently homeless. I'm not quite middle-aged yet. Yet I am very different from Hosking in all other ways, especially in my politics. I don't believe that anyone at all is 'normal' and find his use of this adjective to describe himself offensive. In the previous post "On Jewishness" (which this post follows on from) I described myself as a Pakeha New Zealander: 'Pakeha' is the Maori word for a non-Maori. My employment of the word Pakeha is admittedly a slight appropriation of Maori culture, an appropriation that I want to make however because it makes me feel more connected to the country I was born in and call home. Also in the previous post I described myself as a 'Gentile' but I wish now that I had used the word 'Goyim'. 'Goyim' is the Hebrew or Yiddish word for a non-Jew and using the Jewish word would have shown that I was treating the people I am talking about with some respect. I feel sometimes a little guilty for being white and privileged, and sometimes feel a little rootless, a little like I lack a community. I also often feel a strong sense of empathy with others who are different from me and it seems to me precisely this capacity to empathise and identity with others, with those suffering or oppressed or marginalised, with those different from oneself, that is the essence of Leftish Liberal politics – and which Identity Politics makes problematic.

We can approach the problem of identity politics through some example. In an episode of The Daily Show I remember a little, Jessica Williams began a piece in identity politics mode, in the role of outraged black woman railing against white idiocy or oppression, and then somehow segued into a gushing paean to the Harry Potter books. It was fantastic. I know from an interview she did with Stephen Colbert more recently that Williams's love of JK Rowling's books is sincere. Both times, though, I thought it odd because I couldn't remember any black characters at all in the Harry Potter series. Today I did a little cursory research and found an article on the web which argued that, although none of the main characters are black, approximately seven per cent of the students at Hogwarts are of African descent – about the same percentage as in the population of the UK. There is indeed some ethnic diversity among the magic folk; Harry acquires a Chinese girlfriend called Cho Chang in one book. Nevertheless – wouldn't one expect a proud African-American woman to choose and identify with children's fiction written by African-Americans and concerning African-Americans? Why Harry Potter? Evidently the Harry Potter series speaks to something deeper.

I read somewhere that JK Rowling came up with the idea for the Harry Potter series on a train in Edinburgh, the idea of a boy in modern Britain who's a wizard but doesn't know it until his eleventh birthday. He doesn't know because the wizarding world is kept hidden. In Rowling's world, the world she created, there are two types of people – magical folk, on the one hand, and Muggles on the other. Muggles have no idea that the wizarding world exists, it is concealed from them. Furthermore, magical people are superior, cooler, than Muggles. The wizards and witches are a secret society – like the Freemasons, the Jews during much of the twentieth century (and I think the nineteenth) or the homosexuals before decriminalisation. If I were a Muggle in Rowling's world, a Muggle who had stumbled on the fact of this society's existence, I might well feel threatened, feel that I had uncovered a terrifying conspiracy – but what looks like a conspiracy from the outside feels like a community from the inside. In Hogwarts, regardless of ethnic background, the students are alike in being wizards and witches first and black, white or Chinese second. By engaging with these books, the young reader becomes a de-facto wizard himself, entering Hogwarts along with Harry.

Although the magical people do not seek to rule the world, this division between a kind of elite and a population oblivious to it could be seen as reactionary. Yet the fundamental conflict presented by Rowling in the book is actually an argument for Liberalism. On one side we have the Pure-Bloods and, on the other side, we have the Muggle-born and Half-Bloods. The Pure-Bloods are (often) evil – rightwing, fascist, even eugenic. It is the Muggle-Born and Half-Bloods who are good. Even though Rowling's world is founded on a distinction between Muggles and magical people, the deeper impulse that motivates the good characters is to erase or at least undermine this distinction, to create a world in which anyone can become a wizard, in which the line between magical folk and Muggles is blurred. The message of the book is fundamentally inclusive. Children reading it feel they too can be part of this wizarding community.  It is a leftwing work and may perhaps have been a formative influence on the vast number of kids, such as Jessica, who read it when little, perhaps even inspiring them to identify with and fight for liberal causes when they grew up.

It is interesting to observe, by the way, that none of wizards and witches in the Harry Potter series ever 'comes out' as a magical person publicly to the wider Muggle world or even ever wants to come out.

Another book that hints at this deeper longing for inclusion is The Sellout by Paul Beatty. My brother and sister-in-law bought this novel for me early this year, a lucky accident because I had been feeling vaguely guilty at the time for not having read enough books by African-American authors. The Sellout is very muchly a satire on identity politics and political correctness, a disquisition on what it means to be black in modern America, but behind all the persistent and bludgeoning circlings around contemporary representations of blackness, behind its depictions of the lingering effects of historical racism, its hints at present-day racism, a subtle and comic subversiveness is at work in the novel, a lampooning and inverting of stereotypes, an undermining of all the racial descriptor 'black' suggests and signifies. To give some examples, the novel's black narrator likes the Beatles as well as Hip Hop, loves surfing (which seems to me to go against the black stereotype) and bonded with his on-again off-again black girlfriend Marpessa when young over their shared love of Franz Kafka. Some reviewers of The Sellout argue that it critiques and satirises the popular wisdom that America has become a "a post-racial world", shows this commonplace up as a con, but this utopian ideal does in fact exist in the pages of The Sellout, if only as a kind of yearning or inchoate presentiment, a premonition of a future in which Martin Luther King's dream of a country "in which people are judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character" has been realised. In The Sellout the post-racial world is almost upon us. The reader of the Harry Potter books is vicariously admitted into a community of wizards and witches in which race is irrelevant and likewise the narrator of The Sellout (and Beatty himself) is seeking membership in a community in which race is also, or should be, irrelevant – the community of great authors. And Beatty was perhaps granted this wish when The Sellout won the Booker Prize in 2016.

Both Williams and Beatty want to be seen as black yes, but also as more than just black.

The problem with identity politics is that it is founded on a kind of essentialism, on exclusiveness, on an 'us' and a 'them' – blacks and whites, gays and straights, Jews and Gentiles, Maori and Pakeha, Muslims and Christians, Wizards and Muggles. In the previous post I discussed three ways of defining Jewishness without resorting to essentialism. The first, inspired by Judith Butler, is that Jewishness is performative. The second is that Jewishness is a concept constructed or constituted by various discourses, such as the discourse surrounding the Holocaust, an approach inspired by Michel Foucault. The third, inspired by Family Guy, is that Jewishness is a matter of identification, of choice. On a clip from The Daily Show that I saw recently Trevor Noah suggested a fourth way to define race or ethnicity; in this piece he teasingly chastised Jordan Klepper, suggesting in effect that Klepper, who is white, shouldn't try to speak for the black community because he "hadn't lived the black experience". This seems another good way of talking about race while avoiding essentialism. One feature of the black experience is, for instance, the fact that black people in the US are stopped randomly by the police far more often while driving than white people are. Because black people have more melanin in their skin than white people, it is assumed they are more likely to be criminal. Again a discourse, in this case a discourse about race and crime, has constituted a particular kind of subject – the black criminal.

In 2013, having first become 'ill' in 2007, I was diagnosed schizophrenic and in 2014 I was put under the Mental Health Act, which means I am legally compelled to receive treatment. I have talked about this all before of course. If I wanted, I could fight for the cause of schizophrenics everywhere by saying something like, "We're here, we're nuts, get used to it", by indulging in identity politics. The reason I don't do this, choose not to identify as 'schizophrenic', is because I don't want to tacitly accept a discourse about mental illness that I basically disagree with, a discourse which proposes that I was born schizophrenic (even though I didn't have my first episode until I was twenty-seven), that I'll never recover and so need to take drugs for the rest of my life. I would argue that I have recovered. Nevertheless, even though this label was something I didn't choose but which someone else chose for me, my diagnosis is part of the situation I live with. This doesn't mean I have to talk about it. In many aspects of my life, I am a 'closet schizophrenic' in the sense that it doesn't seem relevant to mention my diagnosis to others; unlike black people, who can be recognised as black at a glance, schizophrenics, like Jews and homosexuals, have to 'come out'. A couple of months ago, after receiving a bad grade for an essay I had written (an essay called "The Reputed Death of the Author" that I have included in this blog) and after attending a truly horrible lecture about gender and Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, I felt it incumbent on me to 'come out' to my lecturer and sent her an email explaining my situation. In the email, I took care to say that I was 'diagnosed schizophrenic' rather than say that I was 'schizophrenic' but still... It is difficult to find the intersection between identity politics and mental 'illness' but there is one.

My own preferred approach to the issue of identity is the one I presented in the post "Situational Ethics". In that post I said, "All souls are the same; it is bodies and situations that differ." Discourses about race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality and mental 'illness' also form part of a person's situation. No, we don't live in a "post-racial world", but it is still possible for individuals to understand and empathise with others with different backgrounds and life-experiences, if we put in the necessary effort, if we look past superficial appearances and try to understand others' situations. If we try to put ourselves in another's place. Empathy is hard work. It requires deep and wide knowledge of other people and it involves also considerable generosity of spirit. I would argue that a politics based on empathy is better, or at least a necessary supplement, to a politics based on identity.

I feel that a person's life has meaning and a shape. In the last couple of days, inspired by my last post, I have thought about my own life and in particular the psychotic episode that I experienced over the summer of 2009 and 2010 that I have described before. Something I didn't clarify in that last post is that, although I said that all the people with whom I believed I could communicate telepathically were Jewish, these people all could fairly have been described as closet or latent Jews – and most of these people in real life probably aren't Jewish at all. Only Jon was openly Jewish and, although this may seem disloyal to say still it is true, in real life Jon quite evidently has an ambivalent relationship with his own Jewishness. To put it one way, for a summer I briefly joined a Jewish conspiracy. To put it another way, for a summer I was a student at Hogwarts. I could clarify further but I will leave it to the reader to decipher my sometimes badly written posts, saying only that something that featured strongly during my first episode in 2007 was the feeling that I lacked a community. Yesterday I saw some excerpts from a conversation between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, something that felt symbolic because Jewishness and homosexuality were my twin obsessions years ago. On the one hand we had Chomsky, the Jew who is prepared to criticise Israel, willing to call it 'colonialist' and 'racist', and who hates capitalism; on the other hand, we had Foucault, the homosexual who rejected identity politics because he thought identity was constructed by others. Chomsky believes that there is such a thing as human nature and Foucault didn't but both are, were, good men. And then there's me, not somewhere in-between but something else.