Social activism and the disruptiveness of identity politics

December 16, 2022 8:53 AM

"Many claim that our spaces are “toxic” or “problematic,” often sharing compelling and troubling personal anecdotes as evidence of this . . . If everything is “violent,” nothing really is. If every slight is “oppression,” nothing is." Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, offers a searing indictment of the problems that identity politics engender in left-wing activism.
posted by Gordion Knott (32 comments total)

I haven't had time to read it through yet, but I will say it looks much more nuanced, thoughtful, and empathetic than my initial knee-jerk reaction to "another anti-'identity politics' screed?" had me thinking.
posted by praemunire at 8:57 AM on December 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

Yeah, it can be really hard to critique identity politics and/or call-out culture without seeming reactionary, and of course it's also easy to do so in a way that provides fodder to the types of people who think that identifying racism is worse than racism ("it's the real racism!").

But, I think it's important. Our movements to overcome oppression will only succeed by building political power, and we'll only achieve that through internal strength and solidarity. Some components of call-out culture or identity politics are not about building internal strength, but are about purity politics (or what this piece refers to as maximalism, which I like a lot) and good optics through pointing out how other people are flawed. This is destructive, and vulnerable to interference too.

Anyway this piece is giving me a lot of good things to think about - especially the role of the internet. Things like maximalism, cherry-picking, and disproportionality really thrive on the internet.
posted by entropone at 9:04 AM on December 16, 2022 [14 favorites]

I suspect this will all seem very familiar to pretty much anyone in or adjacent to any left-wing, social or environmental justice movement. And to any long-time user of MetaFilter. It's such a relief to see these issues addressed in a serious, mature way.

I'll probably find myself revisiting this in the future.
posted by klanawa at 9:46 AM on December 16, 2022 [16 favorites]

Identity politics is only a small part of this article, most of it is actually about organizational issues and leadership. I've read other left-leaning critiques of identity politics, and this mostly summarizes them while focusing on the issues inside social justice organizations. I've never worked within an official organization like that so I'm curious to see reaction from people who have. Some of this could come across as "listen to your organization leadership and stay in your place" but I think the issues he identifies ate definitely real and need addressing somehow.

Several of the points are related to the current overfocus on the absolute horribleness of hypocrisy, where many people on the internet think violating critical rights is not as bad as saying inconsistent things about it. Humans are by nature somewhat hypocritical, we have to endorse good ideas to give us the motivation to follow through. Left-leaning organizations are run by imperfect humans, and expecting everyone to be consistently ideological all the time pushes leaders to either be ideologically extreme or deceptive.

I think a good thought exercise is to think about how an organization looks to a young person with undeveloped politics who wants to make a difference in the world. If people on one side say "you're bad because you don't already believe the right thing and you have an inherently repressive identity" and the other side says "you have some interesting ideas and we really think we could change the world together by doing somewhat fascist things" it's not surprising that many people are pushed to the right.
posted by JZig at 9:53 AM on December 16, 2022 [8 favorites]

it's not surprising that many people are pushed to the right.

This essay was linked to in the NYT by Michelle Goldberg and there were several commenter who expressed the "I'm lefty but I feel like I'm being driven out" sentiments expressed. Most of them seemed to be from an older crowd, but there was enough repetition to make it significant.

I haven't finished the Mitchell essay, but what I skimmed looked to be on the mark.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 10:21 AM on December 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

This is a fantastically interesting article. It's incredibly sharply observed and brilliantly analysed. In particular I really appreciate the continual recentering on power analysis as a fundamental part of any kind of movement.
posted by restless_nomad at 10:30 AM on December 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

"Identity politics" or similar derailed movements and organization for a long time. Those disruption tactics improved considerably since the 1950s, while afiak defenses mostly stood still, which makes this problem very hard.

I liked the article overall, but among his solutions the most promising implied excluding distractors, like retention, hiring slowly, etc.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:08 AM on December 16, 2022

This is great and very useful. My favorite article on identity politics in particular right now is from: Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. He has a book too.
posted by latkes at 11:22 AM on December 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

If everything is “violent,” nothing really is. If every slight is “oppression,” nothing is.

Or maybe everything is violent and oppressive. We need to hear from both sides of the debate.
posted by Faint of Butt at 1:13 PM on December 16, 2022

I hope folks will RTFA

let's suppose everything IS violent and oppressive, let's just start there.. surely we are organizing to change that? resist that? find common cause? (this article) appears very much to be (about that): how do we organize effectively?
posted by elkevelvet at 1:26 PM on December 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

Thank you for posting this, and to the commenters who are posting allied material. Going into my bookmarks for probable use in one of my courses next semester.
posted by humbug at 3:35 PM on December 16, 2022

This ShareZone meme encapsulates my feelings about the issues discussed in this article, most of which I read today. The article covers a lot more ground, but on the other hand, it's 6000 words long, and this is a meme.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:25 PM on December 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think the introductory framing here "identity politics" is problematic. In the piece, the author is mostly not talking about the problems of people prioritising identity, but beyond, the phrase used is (my italics) neoliberal identity politics, narrowly defined here:

Using one’s identity or personal experience as a justification for a political position. You may hear someone argue, “As a working-class, first-generation American, Southern woman…I say we have to vote no.” What’s implied is that one's identity is a comprehensive validator of one’s political strategy—that identity is evidence of some intrinsic ideological or strategic legitimacy. Marginalized identity is deployed as a conveyor of a strategic truth that must simply be accepted. Likewise, historically privileged identities are essentialized, flattened, and frequently—for better or worse— dismissed.

which is pretty different I think from the "identity politics" we usually see posed in alleged contradiction (because no one's ever heard of intersectionality) with class politics. Indeed a few paragraphs earlier the author writes "Movements on the Left are driven by the same political and social contradictions we strive to overcome. We fight against racism, classism, and sexism yet battle inequity and oppression inside our movements. " which doesn't sound like what I'd expect from someone about to pull the identity vs class shtick.

Beyond that, neoliberal identity politics is listed as one problem among nine. It very much is NOT what the piece is about. I find the intro in this post misleading at best.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 6:47 PM on December 16, 2022 [12 favorites]

I think the author is not self critical enough. Like, at one point he tells people to stop using/abusing quotes of leftist thinkers... then later he quotes Marx and implies Marx was absolutely right about the point he wanted to make.

I skimmed the piece and I just think a person does not need to be a genius to understand they did that in their own essay. Just a little more thoughtful. Like,, at another point the author says some people are too ideological. At what point in the essay does the author seriously consider the bureaucratic biases in the philosophy he proposes, biases that are a lot more convenient for leaders of nonprofits and NGOs? It would be more compelling if the essay demonstrated that self-reflection rather than be mostly a listing of what their progressive employees are doing/thinking wrong.
posted by polymodus at 10:12 PM on December 16, 2022

I think the author is not self critical enough.

Acknowledged. But maybe we don't need to be maximalist?
posted by dsword at 11:17 PM on December 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

I agree dsword, the perfect is the enemy of the good.
posted by Braeburn at 12:48 AM on December 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

I know Mitchell is a bonafide heavy hitter who has walked the walk. And I strongly agree with his main points here. But articles like this almost inevitably end up as rallying cries for centrist and right-leaning people of various stripes. This has played out so many times, over and over again that at this point I believe any public self-critique of the left requires a strongly worded proviso that, whatever the left's flaws, > 95% of the problems contemporary society faces are from fascists taking our rights away and oligarchs robbing us blind, and < 5% are from lefties being too dogmatic. Leaving out that disclaimer risks dooming this otherwise cogent analysis to being interpreted as an admission that the left is 100% at fault for "genuflecting" at the altar of identity politics.

(Speaking of which, I also agree with i_am_joe's_spleen about not being too keen on Mitchell's casual embrace of the phrase "identity politics." It's one of those expressions like "cancelling" that people tend to associate exclusively with the left even though it's performed to much more devastating effect by right-wingers -- fascism being literally the apotheosis of identity politics.)
posted by xigxag at 1:33 AM on December 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

any public self-critique of the left requires a strongly worded proviso that, whatever the left's flaws, > 95% of the problems contemporary society faces are from fascists taking our rights away and oligarchs robbing us blind, and < 5% are from lefties being too dogmatic.

But this isn't a "public self-critique of the left". It's very specifically an analysis of the challenges faced by left-leaning activist organizations in their internal structure, priorities, and politics. Left-leaning orgs' internal structure and politics are not primarily caused or defined by external oligarchs and fascist organizations, and declining to do any actual critique of the way those orgs are run is completely unhelpful, because they're not perfect, they do have flaws that are often common across different specific organizations, and those flaws do need to be addressed in order for the orgs to be effective and sustainable.
posted by restless_nomad at 7:18 AM on December 17, 2022 [11 favorites]

Just my 2c from my areas of relevant work:

Title is clickbait. Abstract is clickbait ('searing indictment' tf). Author knows more about the words they mean than poster knows how to interpret them, for sure.

That said, in the context of nonprofits, and this being co-produced by non-profit quarterly, I cant help but read some of the messaging as supporting hierarchical systems of organization (by power, economics, prestige, etc) and/or as pushback against critiques by organizers. Where "leaders" and "managers" have Reasons for their approaches that others should acquiesce to in the interest of The Movement. That even bringing up one's own disparate treatment is detracting from "good enough" as defined by those with purse power. "Formal leadership" is touted, but if the workers have no formal power or say, their buy-in must be maintained somehow. Without formalized and democratized/decentralized control, it makes sense that 20 something organizers looking down the barrel at a much scarier 50-year horizon than their 40-50+ year old leaders and managers, it makes sense they might feel a different sense of urgency. They might be sensibly be frustrated with the manager class (and if there's a board that has final say? Oof. Single head of staff? Oof.)

The primary beneficiaries for the majority of nonprofits are the executive director and their direct reports. That's the economics. A volunteer or pittance-waged worker, with at best a health care plan with some coverage for some mental-health services, working 40+ hours a week may need more than a breakdown of "the right way" to not react as threatened when their labor and health are being persistently back-burnered.

Skillsets are real, yes. Experiential knowledge, of course. Also, the people whose labor you rely on to do the work you think is important (the work often necessary for the "experienced and appropriate leaders" to get their commensurate pay) are important as ends in and of themselves. Their trauma is real, even if they are yet to attain the wealth to treat their trauma elsewhere. What they need in order to stay engaged and be OK is what they need in order to stay engaged and be OK. Their perspectives don't need reframes. It's very likely they see the world as accurately as anyone, if not more so. Work with that. It's reality as it is.
posted by CPAnarchist at 8:15 AM on December 17, 2022 [5 favorites]

Yeah, it's also very much not an anarchist critique. I'd love to read one as sharply-observed as this from someone who feels like they know how to achieve their organizational goals with an anarchist ethos.
posted by restless_nomad at 8:38 AM on December 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

Yeah I think those are smart critiques too. The non profit industrial sector is inherently flawed and there are things about it I think are unfixable, and to the extent that this is about that space (the very first word in the article is "Executives") it's just not that interesting to me. Having more functional non-profits is overall a good thing, and he supports unionization which is the most material way to improve conditions for workers in that space, but the article just doesn't seem that... important from that lens.

Perhaps the article is trying to do too much at once: can one piece even speak to non-profits, unions, AND unpaid activists who voluntarily affiliate around common goals?

Still, I think this is a great piece to share with others in the activist world and I've already been doing so because it really summarizes some of the major dysfunctions common in our worlds right now. It gives an accessible explanation of why these problems exist and explains how those problems undermine building real power at scale.

Overall, one of the biggest barriers to action I see right now is the perfectionism piece: no action we take can be free from flaws, nor can it address all harms at once. Our necessary critiques end up ending conversation and hampering any action at all. In the spirit of not doing that, I see this article as one important tool in a bigger toolbox.

But I appreciate you surfacing some of the self-interested threads around holding on to power at the top of a basically powerless world of NGOs.
posted by latkes at 9:10 AM on December 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

I definitely read this as a set of critiques and suggestions to improve particular types of organizing, that involve organizations with formal structures, clearly stated goals, and funding from donors. I tend to think of most “mission-oriented” 501-whatever non-profits in this mold.

Within those contexts, I think this is a really useful article. And the (occasional) political work I’ve done has mostly been in the context of orgs like that. Most of them either followed ideas like those laid out in the article, or could have honestly improved their operations by taking some of these critiques into account. :-P

But… I definitely have friends whose political work doesn’t look like this! Who have more anarchist leanings, or just don’t work well at all in formal organizations. I don’t think an article like this will have much useful to say to them.

Which is just to say… I think this article has a very specific target and context, that isn’t “the Left” more broadly. Useful within that area, probably just irrelevant outside it.
posted by learning from frequent failure at 9:10 AM on December 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

But this isn't a "public self-critique of the left". It's very specifically an analysis of the challenges faced by left-leaning activist organizations in their internal structure, priorities, and politics.

It's public in the sense that it is publicly available on a public website, not some kind of leaked internal memo. And it's a critique that extends outside of the internal issues faced by his groups in that Mitchell states, "Here are some common tendencies that flow from the larger conditions we find ourselves in and the fallacies underlying those tendencies." His goal may be operational cohesiveness but he includes critiques of larger cultural shifts in a way that reinforce stereotypes of dysfuctional behavior as leftist. What's more, as CheeseDigestsAll points out, the article has already been taken up by the NY Times's Michelle Goldberg as a catalog of problems that are "endemic to the left."

All I'm saying is that a little preamble would've gone a long way toward clarifying that issues like maximalism and cherry-picking are not "left" issues even while they may disproportionately impact the left (inasmuch as problems in general disproportionately impact the left because we generally don't have billionaires funding our operations and vast media/disinformation empires at our disposal to gin up sympathy .)
posted by xigxag at 10:14 AM on December 17, 2022

I guess. I don't think there's any amount of qualifying or writing disclaimers that will prevent poor or bad-faith readings of anything, and I get pretty sick of having to do it for literally anything I say in public lest the people on my own side criticize me for not being defensive enough about it, and... I think that's kind of what the article is *about*.
posted by restless_nomad at 10:31 AM on December 17, 2022 [18 favorites]

If the right doesn’t recognize organizational failure modes they share and therefore suffers more from them, that’s… possibly good?

Also, what restless_nomad said.
posted by clew at 10:51 AM on December 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

I also agree with i_am_joe's_spleen about not being too keen on Mitchell's casual embrace of the phrase "identity politics."

This, for sure. Don't put yourself in the box the enemy has built for you.
posted by praemunire at 2:21 PM on December 17, 2022

issues like maximalism and cherry-picking are not "left" issues

Counterpoint: it's very possible that these types of issue do affect left-wing organisations more than the right-wing, because of the left's self-conception as more ethical.
posted by vincebowdren at 2:43 PM on December 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

I don't think critiques need to necessarily be anarchist, but federal nonprofits as currently codified are deliberate bad-faith bastardizations of the rigidly heirarchical, for-profit, corporate model that insists on externalizing of costs and uplifting of metrics. If the perspective lacks deconstruction of this inherently violent form, it's not going to speak to the current and upcoming organizers suffering the crux of said externalities as their habitat, to say nothing of the direct externalities they've absorbed in recent memory. Critiques needn't center anarchism, but lack of consideration in the context of business and market environments dictated by capitalism will likely lead to outcomes that, at best, reach homeostasis with the capital-dictated environment. At worst, they become further weapons (e.g. charter schools, pacs, etc).

Regarding an individual demonstrating a path to achieving goals with an anarchist ethos, my whole thing personally is that one person doesn't have the answer, tbh. Never has. When they espouse they do, I don't begrudge anyone their skepticism.
posted by CPAnarchist at 9:08 PM on December 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

Acknowledged. But maybe we don't need to be maximalist?

I agree dsword, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

It's not "maximalist" to point out that a well-written essay argument needs to acknowledge the weak point of their own argument. Otherwise the essay needs to be revised. This is basic college-level writing skills, not a kind of leftist purity test of self-critique of the author's person (ad hominem) that you had interpreted my remark literally and without context. Do people at least see the difference there? Just clarity of argument, i.e. basic writing skills at the college level that would apply to any topic.
posted by polymodus at 10:13 PM on December 17, 2022

I don't think there's any amount of qualifying or writing disclaimers that will prevent poor or bad-faith readings of anything, and I get pretty sick of having to do it for literally anything I say in public lest the people on my own side criticize me for not being defensive enough about it, and... I think that's kind of what the article is *about*.

That's surely what the article is about. But a well written essay has to make a good case. Like in science writing, it is standard practice to clearly describe the limitations/scope of one's point of view. Why exactly does this sort of essay not have to do that? Like the author himself says, don't dismiss intellectuals and professionals. Then please write like one.
posted by polymodus at 10:30 PM on December 17, 2022

it is standard practice to clearly describe the limitations/scope of one's point of view.

I think he did that just fine. I think the habit of reading anything remotely relating to the left half of the current Overton window as applying to literally anything in that space is a fault on the part of the reader, not the writer.
posted by restless_nomad at 7:10 AM on December 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

I came here for the infighting, read the piece, too, and the thread didn't disappoint.

I think that the piece has a blind side it can't deal with: money has changed political organisating and fractured it away from the lumpenproleteriat. Yes, economy of scale helps fund-raising and, yes, accountability and structure are needed to make best use of those structures. As noted further up, the nod toward being ethical and whatever strategic gains come from moral high ground are needed for this -- but there's the flaw in becoming who you're battling: organising and campaigning power in opposition isn't leading and governing power in office. Maybe we need both sides of that coin.

I did like the call for leaders to state strategic goals and methods and partner with juniors and newcomers to ensure everyone can state that vision and what their role is in delivering the vision.

I did like the advice the scale slowly to embed culture ahead of building misaligned capacity that you need to re-cultrate later. We see this in software teams that scale -- retro-fitting culture is very hard, and getting good colleagues as well as good technologists is a huge challenge in hiring people. Add to it a scarcity of business leaders who can share strategic goals and how to get to them (as in the previous paragraph) and nascent moves toward demanding people have a kind of "professional" that's not attached to certification by any professional body (so it's a hair away from bullying) -- all that and I've got some things to learn and transplant to my industry.

tl;dr Obama win the Whitehouse, and silicon valley techbros won the organising infrastructure.
posted by k3ninho at 7:12 AM on December 18, 2022 [1 favorite]