During the last couple of weeks, following the election of an openly white supremacist-endorsing man to the highest office in our land, I’ve been listening to and reading people’s comments and responses to that election. Included in remarks from some Democrats and left/liberal pundits have been critiques of “identity politics,” and calls for us to abandon them as central to our party’s future electoral strategies. A key issue in the commentary has been the raging debate about whether or not those predominantly white people who voted for that man and his Klanvention (aka cabinet-to-be) are “racists.”
My position is that they are. Some of his voters have been overt. Others heard the racism, xenophobia, and misogyny and ignored it—and enabled it—which essentially boils down to the same result. That’s not a shocking conclusion, since I’ve lived my entire life with an awareness of the prevalence of racism here in this country my ancestors helped build on their backs. In many ways, I’ve felt that the discussions have become detached from both a historical and present-day reality of life in the U.S.A. for those of us whose lives are most endangered by this step backwards—the real lives of real people whose “identities” cannot be removed like a change of clothes.
I’d like to share a bit about my identity, and why I view the current American racist backlash with no surprise.
I’m a black woman. I’m not a quiet one, or a passive one, and have spent most of my life fighting against racism and sexism and for civil and human rights. I'm uppity and proud of it. My opinions and actions have placed me in jeopardy of losing my life more than once. Over the course of the last 69 years I’ve lived though many of the phases of change in this—my country. My parents and grandparents raised me to never give up and to never abandon hope that things were getting better, bit by bit. I’m actually glad, at this point in my life to see the racial animus that infests us out in the open again, rather than being hidden from the public eye. Yes, I’m glad that some people in this nation elected a black man—twice—as POTUS. That election did not eliminate racism. In many ways it obfuscated it. What disturbs me is that some of those people who profess liberalism or progressivism keep ducking what is core to my view and experience of the world we live in, from my position as a woman of color.
We are now entering a backlash phase. Black Kos founder and managing editor David Reid said on Tuesday: “As my mom always reminded me it’s always darkest before the dawn. But as I’ve written many times over the years, I’m never surprised by racial backlashes. Every bit of racial progress we have made as a country has later faced a backlash.” The question will be, as it always is: who will stand with us during this phase? Some of you will, some won’t. We will persevere nevertheless. We always do.
That portrait above is of my great grandmother, whose spirit is always with me—as are the spirits and life histories of all those who came before me, to deposit me here in this time and this place. Today I want to talk about some of them. Who they were shaped my fate. My identity. I take pride in my roots and the inimitable courage they demonstrated—to survive, and prevail. Like them, I believe we too will prevail. Each year thins the ranks of the racists and bigots. Not fast enough for some, but my great-grandmother taught us, as did so many elders, that this is a very long struggle. I may not live to see the journey’s end. My task is to keep my eyes on the prize and fight on.
Amelia ‘Milly’ Weaver was born into bondage in Loudoun County, Virginia. I’ve written about my Virginia family here, in the past. She was unable to read or write. She vowed that her children—all of them. male and female, would learn to do so. They did. She was also one of the lucky women who was not raped during her enslavement. She was considered to be “valuable” in her role as a midwife and herbalist. Nor did she have to bear a child for an owner, as my great-great-grandmother Hannah did.
Amelia, seated in front of a portrait of her deceased husband, Presley Roberts, with her children. From r to l are Henry, Martha, Joseph, John, James, Hannah and my grandfather Dennis. All of them went to black colleges.
The indomitable children of the Roberts family fulfilled their mother’s dreams for them. None could escape being black, and wouldn’t have tried. They, like so many black folks in the U.S. fresh out of enslavement, strove to not only simply survive, but pushed the envelope of white supremacy that surrounded them. Life was not easy—and all the Roberts children owned guns, including the young women, and were prepared to use them in self-defense. The women in my family were blessed to be a part of a unit that never limited their roles or dreams because of gender. That is a key part of my identity and went a long way toward making me a feminist at a very early age.
During Reconstruction my grandfather and his brothers, armed with shotguns, faced down a group of white racists (who hated “educated n***ers”) without blinking an eye. In later years, during the Depression, three of the brothers fed an entire black North Philly neighborhood with the game hunted with those same guns. Great Uncle Joe, who with his sister Martha raised my mom and her siblings, had become a doctor, financed by my grandfather Dennis who was a Pullman Porter. I grew up being taught a strong respect for unions—black unions in particular, since I learned that the Pullman Porters were rejected by white trade unionists. Joe went out and about on his medical rounds—always armed. My mom told me Aunt Martha used to walk through the house at night, barefoot, carrying a rifle—on defense.
They never forgot where they came from and the perils they faced as a proud black family who no longer lived in the South. They knew that racism in America had no geography. Those black folks who prospered knew that they were targets of hate. Black families in America knew about the Tulsa Massacre and the Destruction of Black Wall Street. They knew of the other black communities wiped out by racist, envious, resentful whites. They knew of the lynchings, rapes, and cross burnings. Yet, they persevered and multiplied. They never returned the hate, but were mighty particular about which white folks they could trust.
My mom went to an HBCU in West Virginia, where she met my dad. He was the child of a proud black man, George S. Oliver, who worked as a chauffeur and went on to work for the rest of his life as a driver for the Post Office. His wife was my grandmother Mabel Bodine, who I called ‘Bobby.’ She was a white farm girl from bible-belt Kansas who helped raise me. She left the farm to work as a domestic, where she met my grandfather and fell in love. Later in life she worked for the Singer Sewing Machine company. Her marriage to a black man in 1915 was anathema to her proudly racist mid-western white family. She was scratched out of the family Bible after she wed my grandfather. Both of them were active Republicans in Chicago, where they moved to get away from Kansas. My dad was born to them in 1919. I told my dad’s story here, in “Strange Fruit revisited.” His white mother didn’t make life any easier for him. He almost died right here in the U.S. while returning to his base in Tuskegee, were he was training with the Tuskegee Airmen. .
My father’s joy in serving his country at a time of war and doing it with pilot’s wings was short-lived. His skin color again made a difference. During a break in training he went home to Chicago and returned to Alabama on a bus with a childhood buddy, another airman, also black, but there was one difference. Daddy looked too white. The two buddies, leaving the bus, were spied by a group of 10 or 12 rednecks, who seeing them together, arm in arm – both in their uniforms, spat out epithets of "nigger lover" and proceeded to try to kill my dad and his friend. Two against many was impossible odds, and my father – who took the brunt of the attack, was hospitalized. A rumor got back to the base that my father had been killed. The Airmen were ready for battle; they broke out equipment from the armory and were headed into town to extract revenge. My father was quickly removed from the hospital on a stretcher to prove that he hadn’t been killed to quell the revolt. For this incident, my father was court-martialed for "inciting a riot". Years later, his record was cleared.
As a result of those trumped up charges my father, like many other black men, did not benefit from the G.I. Bill. The program was essentially a massive affirmative action welfare program for white men which built what we now refer to as “the white middle class.” Years later, with the help of a lawyer, he finally got his due.
My dad was a militant black leftist. He also had close friendships with white communists and socialists, many of whom were in the theater and the arts. After suffering through the persecution of the McCarthy period my dad moved us to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where I got an education in Jim Crow. I watched my dad and other young professors take a stand against the KKK. My mother hated it down there and we moved back to the North. Thanks to daddy finally getting his G.I. Bill benefits we were able to buy our first home. We had been living with my grandparents in Brooklyn. Our new home was in Hollis/Saint Albans, Queens, NY. My grandfather had died in 1955, so my grandmother moved to Queens with us. In a very short time after we moved there, the neighborhood shifted from almost all white to all black. White flight is swift.
After attending sixth grade in Hollis, I wound up going to a new junior high school in Springfield Gardens, Queens. I was bused there along with several other gifted black students from my local public school. The first day of school there was an ugly race riot. The nice working-class white folks of Springfield Gardens didn’t want us N-words at their school. Life was horrid for all of us who were bused there. We faced open racism daily, from students and teachers. As a result, I joined the local NAACP youth group. We fought back against the open racism at area schools.
I was certainly not surprised by the racism that greeted us. My white grandmother had warned me. She used to shake her head and say, “Pray for white folks. Most of us are bigots. Make sure you learn to tell the difference.” I was lucky—I escaped Queens and bigots by getting accepted to a special arts school in Manhattan, where we had an amazing group of young people of all colors and ethnicities who were left-wing politically and committed to racial equality and the civil rights movement. After I graduated in 1964, other movements were unfolding and sometimes intersecting—the anti-war movement, the women’s movement, the farmworkers, the American Indian Movement (AIM), and Stonewall.
Fast-forward—through the civil rights marches, the bombings, the riots, the murders by white supremacists of civil rights workers, black and white. I had left home in 1965 to become an activist. I later joined the Young Lords and the Panthers to fight back—against external racist forces and COINTELPRO, and internally against the machismo and male chauvinism that infested “the left movement.” We won court cases, civil rights laws were enacted, and as we inched forward on the road to equality there was backlash. We sang … we shall overcome—someday. Racism and sexism did not go away.
In the ‘70s my parents still lived in Queens. On the home front, they were disturbed by racial incident after racial incident. One of the neighborhoods near them, Rosedale, which had managed to stay “white,” got its first black family.
Bill Moyers tells the tale in Rosedale: The Way It Is:
The people who live here are almost all white; working-class Americans of Italian, Irish and Jewish roots. They’ve worked all their lives to afford these homes. Many came from the inner-city, refugees from neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn and South Jamaica; neighborhoods they saw changing, and dangerous to live in. These people saved their money and made their escape to what they call “the last frontier” in New York City … to Rosedale, to what they hoped would be a safe and quiet life. In the early 1970s a few middle-class black families with very much the same idea in mind began to move to Rosedale too. The whites saw their coming as a threat: the forerunner of more blacks bringing crime, blight and poor services they had witnessed in other neighborhoods in the city, and the peace of Rosedale was shattered.
In 1971, a score of men and teenage boys using axes and picks nearly destroyed a house, reportedly bought by a black man married to a white woman. Two hundred residents stood by and watched. Since then more than 10 acts of violence have been aimed at the few blacks living in Rosedale. The tension escalated with the coming of the Spencers. In the summer of ’74, Tony and Glenda Spencer bought this 7-room house on 136th Avenue. They came to New York from the West Indies after living in London. Spencer, a photo- engraver in Manhattan said they just wanted a good place to live. But some whites suspected them of block-busting, of trying to force lower property values on Rosedale homes so other blacks could afford to buy here. Before the Spencers moved in their house was set on fire with gasoline. They moved anyway. On New Year’s Eve Day a year ago, while the Spencers and their son slept, a pipe bomb exploded on the porch and smashed through the windows of the house. Police said the bomb was intended to wipe out the family. Attached to the bomb was a note that read: “Nigger, be warned. We have time. We will get your firstborn first.” It was signed: Viva Boston. KKK.
Ah yes—Boston.
I can’t forget Boston and the desegregation of Boston schools via busing—and the hate that ensued. Violent, open, seething hatred. Images from that time are engraved in my mind. People in Boston died as a result of the conflict—black and white.
In the ‘80s my mom was teaching at a school in Howard Beach, Queens. She was the only black teacher there. Howard Beach was the scene of the death of 23-year-old Micheal Griffeth, who was fleeing a group of racist white teens and was struck and killed by a car. By the end of the ‘80s the black and Puerto Rican community in New York City was reeling from the Central Park jogger case. The witch hunt against the defendants was spearheaded by Donald Trump. More virulent northern racism ensued.
In my own life domestic violence had become my lot, and I was struggling to deal with a male stalker who had tried to kill me and had threatened to kill my parents. My dual identities—black and female—had flipped in my life and the vulnerability of being a woman took precedence.
I was intensely aware of lessons learned from other women of color. As part of the process of struggle against varied forms of oppression, expanding beyond simple issues in black and white, the concept of identity politics was developed by a group of women who were black, female and lesbian in 1974.
The term identity politics has been used in political discourse since at least the 1970s.[3] One aim of identity politics has been for those feeling oppressed to articulate their felt oppression in terms of their own experience by a process of consciousness-raising. For example, in their germinal statement of black feminist identity politics, the Combahee River Collective said that "as children we realized that we were different from boys and that we were treated different—for example, when we were told in the same breath to be quiet both for the sake of being 'ladylike' and to make us less objectionable in the eyes of white people. In the process of consciousness-raising, actually life-sharing, we began to recognize the commonality of our experiences and, from the sharing and growing consciousness, to build a politics that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression."
Identity politics as a mode of organizing is closely connected to the concept that some social groups are oppressed (such as women, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, etc.); that is, individuals belonging to those groups are by virtue of their identity more vulnerable to forms of oppression such as cultural imperialism, violence, exploitation, marginalization, or powerlessness. Identity politics starts from analyses of oppression to recommend a restructuring of the existing society
The power in finding solidarity with others who intersect with one’s (in some cases) multiple identities began to enhance coalition building to effect change. As with any ideological development in the struggle there were also useful critiques:
In her journal Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color, Kimberle Crenshaw treats identity politics as a process that brings people together based on a shared aspect of their identity. Crenshaw applauds identity politics for bringing African Americans (and other people of color), gays and lesbians, and other oppressed groups together in community and progress. However, Crenshaw also points out that frequently groups come together based on a shared political identity but then fail to examine differences among themselves within their own group: "The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend differences, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite—that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences." Crenshaw argues that when society thinks "black", they think black male, and when society thinks feminism, they think white woman. When considering black women, at least two aspects of their identity are the subject of oppression: their race and their gender. Crenshaw proposes instead that identity politics are useful but that we must be aware of intersectionality and the role it plays in identity politics. Nira Yuval-Davis supports Crenshaw's critiques in, Intersectionality and Feminist Politics and explains that "Identities are individual and collective narratives that answer the question 'who am/are I/we?"
In her journal Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color, Crenshaw provides the example of the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill controversy to expand on her point. Anita Hill came forward and accused Supreme Court Justice Nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment; Clarence Thomas would be the second African American to serve on the Supreme Court. Crenshaw argues that when Anita Hill came forward she was deemed anti-black in the movement against racism, and though she came forward on the feminist issue of sexual harassment, she was excluded because when considering feminism, it is the narrative of white middle-class women that prevails. Crenshaw concludes that acknowledging intersecting categories when groups unite on the basis of identity politics is better than ignoring categories altogether. In other words, Crenshaw argues that people should continue to unite on the basis of shared political identities, particularly in efforts to create narratives that might help oppressed groups, but should also consider intersecting categories within these groups.
Today, a new generation of younger activists are fighting—yet again, the same racism and sexism that hasn’t gone away. We see it in #Black Lives Matter, and the cries to #SayHerName, as we witness the deaths of not only young black men. We see it in trans activism and the Transgender Day of Remembrance as part of an intersectional struggle. On top of these pressures, in my own life I once again have to worry about my husband, who “looks” Muslim. We have been thrown back into the tension from the time of 9/11, when we felt compelled to put a Puerto Rican flag on our car. Yet another layer is added to my identity quilt.
Which brings me to up to today. My husband and I spent the day after Thanksgiving with our transgender god-daughter. She is the person who convinced me to come and post at Daily Kos. She is the person who got me to become active in the Democratic Party during the first Obama campaign, rather then just being a passive voter. Our conversation was very somber—she knows her life is at risk as a trans woman of color. We can’t predict the future, and no matter how strong we are, we know that we are targets. We had the confidence that our big tent party—no matter the loss of the election—would remain a safe harbor from the Trumps, Pences, and the Klanvention. But the current rumblings leading in the opposite direction are worrisome. The right has launched, yet again, its rants against “identity politics” and “political correctness.” That right-wing assault has also found a voice among some elements of the “left.” I hear far too often a “left” push back against immigrants, against feminism, against Muslim refugees, against the defining and acceptance of “white privilege.” Talk of privilege or white supremacy can get you falsely accused of ‘hating white people.’
The battle now rages between and among Democrats, slyly egged on by vile voices from the supremacist right—like this National Review piece titled, “Can Democrats Quit Identity Politics?” It was written by Rich Lowry and seconded by so-called liberals like Mark Lilla in his New York Times piece on “The End of identity Liberalism.”
There have been numerous responses to this new zeal to dump or sideline what makes “us” (Democrats) “us.” Some are more harsh than others. Marcus H. Johnson recently wrote, “Stop Calling it ‘Identity Politics.’ It’s Civil Rights:”
Opposition to “identity politics” is opposition to civil rights. Period. The opposition to civil rights today is similar to the opposition to civil rights in the 1960s: There are political actors on both sides of the spectrum that want to make sure that the interests of white men of all classes are put first. There are plenty of famous civil rights leaders, such as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Shirley Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Ida B. Wells, who today might be called “identitarians,” because they focused on fighting for the rights of marginalized people instead of using class to recenter whiteness. Notice that they never call Donald Trump’s white ethno-nationalist movement “identity politics.” To those on the alt-left and the right, the politics of putting white people first, regardless of class, is simply “politics.” They reserve the “identity politics that must be stopped” bit for women, minorities, and other marginalized groups.
I think what they will find is that marginalized groups and their interests won’t go silently into the night. They will stand up to the alt-left, and they will stand up to Donald Trump. Diversity is something to be championed, not discarded.
Other responses from people cite MLK’s 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” King delivered a critique to white moderates.
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
I go back further, to 1913 and W.E.B. Du Bois’ Socialism and the Negro Problem.
W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois, 1868-1963
Du Bois was an avowed socialist his entire political life. He certainly never eschewed his battle to eliminate capitalism, or his support of working-class struggle. He did take on the white left for their willingness to sideline black issues with white racism until after the class struggle was won.
He concludes his piece with:
The Negro Problem, then, is the great test of the American Socialist. Shall American Socialism strive to train for its Socialistic state 10,000,000 serfs, who will serve or be exploited by that state, or shall it strive to incorporate them immediately into that body politic? Theoretically, of course, all Socialists, with few exceptions, would wish the latter program. But it happens that in the United States there is a strong local opinion in the South which violently opposes any program of any kind of reform that recognizes the Negro as a man. So strong is this body of opinion that you have in the South a most extraordinary development. The whole radical movement there represented by men like Blease and Vardaman and Tillman and Jefferson Davis, and attracting such demagogues as Hoke Smith, includes in its program of radical reform a most bitter and reactionary hatred of the Negro.
The average modern Socialist can scarcely grasp the extent of this hatred; even murder and torture of human beings holds a prominent place in its philosophy; the defilement of colored women is its joke, and justice toward colored men will not be listened to.
The only basis on which one can even approach these people with a plea for the barest tolerance of colored folk, is that the murder and mistreatment of colored men may possibly hurt white men. Consequently, the Socialist Party finds itself in this predicament: If it acquiesces in race hatred, it has a chance to turn the tremendous power of Southern white radicalism toward its own party; if it does not do this, it becomes a "party of the Negro," with its growth South and North decidedly checked. There are signs that the Socialist leaders are going to accept the chance of getting hold of the radical South, whatever its cost. This paper is written to ask such leaders: After you have gotten the radical South and paid the price which they demand, will the result be Socialism?
The pursuit of the white, working class, rust belt Trump voter argument being bandied about here and elsewhere by some people, along with the ”you Democrats are the party of the blacks, the latinos, LGBTs and feminists and that doesn’t work ...” lament is dangerously flawed.
The oft repeated mantra that “it’s about economic insecurity" negates a present and past steeped in racism that is foundational. No one is suggesting that we don’t address poverty, jobs, and working conditions. A large segment of the working class in this country are people of color, which was pointed out recently by Keith Ellison. Women still do not receive equal pay for equal work. Moral Mondays is a stellar example of blending economic issues with those stemming from racism/identity in a broad-based coalition.
I walked away from the socialist and communist parties here in the U.S. because of their inability to deal with racism. In their book, class always trumped my race and my gender. I threw in my lot with Democrats, no matter how flawed (and there are plenty of flaws) because of the ever-expanding tent. I refuse to waste one second of my time chasing the people who knowingly voted for policies and behavior that deny my humanity.
Those who want my body and reproductive rights suppressed.
Those who advocate forced conversion of LGBT folks.
Those who want to build walls, not bridges.
Those who are both Islamophobic and anti-Semitic.
Those to whom I am an N-word.
Those who want to make America white again, who will never admit that this entire edifice was built on stealing the land and attempting to wipe out its original peoples.
As long as my identity can get me (and mine) killed in this country, I will continue to fight those of you who want to change course while donning blinders, refusing to see what has just happened. The white supremacist right has to be fought by all of us. We must call it out, and refusing to look away from the stark reality that some of you have only recognized recently (and others of you are still denying) won’t make it go away.
It’s real. I’ll be damned if I will give up. There are more of us in the rainbow than there are of them, even though they’ve stacked the deck.
If my great grand mother Milly could survive enslavement and fight for her dreams— so can I. I don’t give a damn if I live to see the end of the journey, but I’ll be damned if a bunch of bigots are gonna make me turn back.
Moving forward together is stronger than all the forces of the haters.
Which side are you on?