Identity Politics, Social Identity, & Disrupting the Status Quo at Work
If you’ve been paying attention to American news media for the past few decades, you’ve heard of “Identity Politics” by now — whether casually thrown around by media outlets, or by an angry someone often bitterly (gleefully?) complaining about the “other side” of the political divide.
But where does this term come from? According to a number of sources, the first known use of the phrase in writing was in 1974 or 1977, in the Coombahee River Collective Statement, which is sometimes quoted for the following: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”
As originally laid out, “identity politics’’ was conceived of as “the most profound and potentially most radical politics’’ that “come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.” The Coombahee River Collective went on to say in that paragraph,
In the case of Black women this [identity politics] is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.
If it weren’t abundantly clear, the Coombahee River Collective was a radical group of Black women. Perhaps of interest to the reader, not only were they radical Black women, they were a collective of radical Black feminist lesbian women in a time when other such groups did not exist. To say that they broke the mold would be a vast understatement.
Since the concept’s inception in the 1970’s, identity politics has come to be understood to have “grown into a mode of political combat by and for the white people many assume it inherently targets in modern political discourse.” To put it another way, while those who conceived of identity politics saw it as a way of organizing to combat oppression, politically it has been understood as a means of attacking white people — or so many (often white) politicians maintain.
Now, we are all aware that coins have two sides and many swords are double-edged. Identity politics is no different; I’ve written before on Realistic Conflict Theory and how according to the theory, even the suggestion of another group is enough to motivate competition for scarce resources, but for a social science nerd like me, things get really interesting when social identity theory enters the picture.
Not to bonk you all over the head with theory, but hear me out; social identity theory is the idea that a person’s sense of who they are, is constituted by the collection of groups that they belong to. For example, my social self might be made up of my identities of being Filipino, a man, an Asian American, a dog owner, a racial equity practitioner, as well as a conflict management and resolution practitioner. That identity might also be shaped by less well-defined groups such as people who don’t like eggs, people that hang toilet paper overhand, and a person who thinks that sidewalks are not an acceptable place for people to ride bikes.
The point I’m driving at here is that all of this self-identification, while definitely useful in some situations, such as identifying our own triggers, this deeper awareness of the groups that we belong to also brings into stark relief the groups that we do not belong to. As mentioned, even the suggestion of another group is enough to motivate competition for scarce resources, which under our current paradigm, means access to political power. This is why the election of Barack Obama was such a powerful signal of change to Black and Brown people in the US and also why the subsequent election of Trump was so very predictable.
When a majority group of any kind holds such a bias, and members of that group are more visible to one another, that kind of constant reinforcement serves to validate those biases.
But this awareness of who we are doesn’t have to create division. In fact, in conflict management, practitioners often see difference as opportunities for positive social interaction, rather than the negative social interactions that can happen when people don’t bother to pause and think about things. By becoming aware of who we are, the pain that we each experience, our strengths, our quirks, our individual particularities, we actually create a greater variety of points that we can align with one another.
Consider this (as uncomfortable as it may be); there are also people in the KKK who don’t like eggs. There are Republicans that hang toilet paper overhand. And, I am willing to bet that there are serial killers who also don’t think it’s cool to ride bikes on sidewalks. To be clear, I am not in the KKK, or the Republican party (not that there’s anything inherently wrong with being conservative!), nor am I a serial killer (promise!).
The potential for us to connect with one another however, exists because of those commonalities, which is at the heart of the original concept of identity politics — that we can organize ourselves around common interests for a common good and yes, to advance political agendas that serve our groups. If this seems familiar, it may be because you’ve heard people saying things like “BLM is just here to push their political agenda” well, yeah, in a democracy, that’s how politics work. People organize for things that they want to enact whether by statute or by social norms and frankly, there’s nothing wrong with that.
However, when there are groups in a democracy that are unequal, that do not have the same privileges of other groups, then the dominant group gets to decide what’s right and what’s good — often to the detriment of others, even if it is largely unintentional. To illustrate what I mean, let’s take “handedness” as an example (not another theory, I swear!).
For many of us, we are right-hand dominant, meaning that we primarily use our right hands to do stuff. Pick noses, peel fruit, use sticks to get tasty termites, etc. If those activities seem well, apelike, it’s because it is (because we are). In fact, other social apes such as chimpanzees and gorillas also tend to be predominantly right-handed. Why is that? As far as I know, the research is still out on that one. Anyway, many of us today know that “handedness” is not an indication of our inherent goodness, but this was not always so; in fact, a close family friend told me and her son when we were small that when she was a girl in India, the nuns that were her teachers smacked her with a ruler when she wrote with her left hand until she finally learned to be a righty.
What many don’t know is that there is a long history of conflating left-handedness with evil. In fact, the word “sinister” which is a synonym of “evil”, “disaster”, and “trouble” in English, simply means “on the left side” in Latin, its language of origin. Who exactly decided that “sinister” meant “evil”? Unfortunately, the origins of how we use certain words is often very hard to pin down. Given that our species is predominantly right-handed, linguists accept that a bias conflating right-handedness and “good” and conversely, left-handedness and “bad” or “evil” is a likely culprit. I should mention that this is not merely a Western European bias, as in fact, some claim that as much as 2/3rds of the world also maintains a right-handed bias.
When a majority group of any kind holds such a bias, and members of that group are more visible to one another, that kind of constant reinforcement serves to validate those biases. If we extend this to politics, it is easy to see how such a principle could impact thinking, not to mention feeling. It is this principle that is at the heart of the understanding of identity politics previously mentioned. When many white people first saw the slogan “Black Lives Matter” the knee-jerk response for many was, “All Lives Matter”, or some kind of inference that the slogan meant “White Lives Don’t Matter”.
When playing a zero-sum game (otherwise known as “winner-take-all” games) there is only one winner and the rest of the competitors are therefore losers. Broadly speaking, though we frame ourselves as a “melting pot” society, and as “The United States of America”, socially we are told again and again that there is only value in being #1 — the implication being that all other competitors do not matter at all, are losers. In such a society, any rebalancing of power along social, political, economic, or religious lines, among many others, are seen as threats to scarce social, political, economic, or religious resources. Thus, a statement as innocuous as “black lives matter” becomes a provocation.
Though our national politics are largely enacted to serve the demographic majority (which, by the way, maps to the very definition of “identity politics” as laid out by the Coombahee River Collective ), a quick look around the office (or the Zoom/Teams/Meet spaces) will tell many Americans that demographics are quickly changing. As demographics change, politics and industry must also change to match, or else become irrelevant. Thus, “identity politics” is simply “politics”, as members of the Republican party have shown us all with enactment of what is essentially a new set of Jim Crow laws aimed at disenfranchising large swaths of the voting public.
And industry has taken note of this too; Delta and Coca-Cola have taken public stances against such vote-suppression efforts. Many of us, far too many of us understand that social justice, racial equity, and anti-racism work is separate from the work we get up and shower to do during the work week. Here’s a radical take that shouldn’t be radical at all: it’s not. I’ve run into many people who have wondered aloud when they’ll have the time to focus on anti-racism and racial equity work, not understanding that the way we do our everyday work is in fact, activism.
By weaving racial equity and anti-racist work into our processes, workflows, and organizational structures, we have the opportunity to align our workplaces with our communities and from there, intentionally transform our society. All of which means that yes, our local and national politics will change. Is this a threat to the status quo? Absolutely. But what this is not is a threat to non-BIPOC people — that is, unless we as BIPOC people are committed to dying on the hill of maintaining the status quo of winner-take-all capitalism and politics as we seek to share in the political power of our home.
But what might such an alignment with communities and interweaving of racial equity and anti-racism into our processes, workflows, and organizational structures look like? The short answer is: it depends. I know that this is the stock answer from many corners of social and organizational change, and further, that it is deeply unsatisfactory. That said, if I were to sit here at my desk and tell everyone reading what it will look like, or even what it should look like, I run the risk of imposing my biases, sensibilities, and needs on the lived-realities of others. As you may guess, I don’t find that to be acceptable, as in my vision of social change, we have power with one another, rather than power over one another.
That said, to describe what such social and organizational change could look like, is an entirely different story. Like forming any new routine, or indeed, habit, getting started is the hardest part. One way that we can start to change our current social and organizational paradigms is to reorient ourselves from what The Organization needs, to what the people who constitute The Organization need. For example, flexible work hours, greater and increased support for remote work whenever possible, including parental leave (read: maternity and paternity), great healthcare, and incentives to maintain physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and financial health would be a great start.
Yes, you read that right. A great start. Already, in this framing, the needs of community members would be met. That impact would of course then also have an impact on communities. Given sufficient coverage across many communities, real, positive change for racial equity then becomes a much closer reality. If the changes mentioned don’t seem particularly aimed at BIPOC, I’ll ask you to reflect on the social ills that seem to plague BIPOC in general: poverty, lack of access to resources, and being locked into trajectories where people can’t catch a break, much less take a breath. Breathing is pretty important, as is catching a break from time to time. Unless you haven’t been paying attention at all, there are BIPOC literally dying from one thing or another, most often related to the issues just mentioned.
To get more specific in organizations, there is a hyper-focus on hiring and promotions. I’m not sure how many readers have tried to get a job lately, but it is a lot of work to well . . . get work that actually pays the bills and has the benefits that our society has decided will be up to employers to provide, rather than our government. The paradigm of needing 5–10 years of experience for entry-level jobs is quite frankly, a sick joke that absolutely no one is laughing about, except for those that it benefits — a group which invariably seems to overlap with rich white people (gee, I wonder why).
The dirty secret of America is that this is a land of abundance, where the potential to produce enough of just about anything really exists. And yet, we don’t. We intentionally don’t, because not to would mean reorienting how we believe that industry, politics, and society should run, which as of April, 2021 means, for non-BIPOC people. If you want to find out more about how you and your workplace can become disruptors of the status quo for intentional, positive social change, join us in our free online community! Join us on IntentionallyAct.com.