All right Sussman, let me begin my response by mentioning that I’m glad you think my profanity is cute. I think your beard is cute. It makes you look like a friendly yet misguided neo-Marxist woodsman. I would also like to thank you for comparing me to successful radio and television personality Bill O’Reily. I thought that was pretty cute too. I’m sorry if my language or the fact that my left nipple is exposed right now offends or morally corrupts you in any way. Furthermore, I’m sorry that my quarter page wespeak was not more complex, but I think it needs to be mentioned that many of the aspects of my wespeak that you critiqued were attempts at humor. They were supposed to be funny, and many people have expressed to me that the wespeak as a whole was funny. In that vein, your response was not funny.
You’re so much funnier in your other wespeaks, Sussman. All kidding aside, I think the term “Identity Politics” has been thrown around quite a bit lately and given this undue negative connotation. So I thought I’d give a brief and horrifically oversimplified historical time-line that might help explain the term as I use it.
We begin our journey in the “Enlightenment” era, with the rise of Universalism, which would later become the basis for early progressive thought. Universalism refers to the concept of a singular human experience. Unfortunately all the framers of this ideology were upper-class, (supposedly) heterosexual, Christian white men. The experience they “universalized” was their own, assigning commonality or normality to their own gender, orientation, religion, and race. This ideal is also the granddaddy of Objectivism, which provides many of the same problems, thus leading us to….
Modernism: The collapse of several scientific principles thought to be the foundations of a singular concrete reality led to a period of all around questioning of everything. The concept was that since everyone’s experiences shape the way they think and interpret, no singular objective reality could ever really be expressed. In this light, Objectivism and Enlightenment era Universalism were re-examined and found to be, shockingly enough, biased toward a specific paradigm. Namely ruling class, straight, white, Christian, and male. However, the Modernist movement was contained within a small and elitist vanguard of intellectuals, authors, and artists and authors. And so we move on to…….
Postmodernism: Now, this is a loaded term with thousands of denotations and connotations. But for my purposes, I’m only focusing on one aspect. World War II, mass production/distribution technology, and the rise of the Consumer Republic, while obviously presenting a whole host of problems in and of themselves, did manage to turn democratization into an important virtue. Thus, the Postmodernism movement took the “plural subjective realities” related ideas that grew out of modernism and took them out of the realm of the cocktail party. Which, in a rather roundabout way, leads us to…
Today? (I mean, we aren’t as far along as this next paragraph might imply, as anyone who has attended a PSA meeting might know): Having thankfully dissolved the romanticized notions of a singular human experience based on the flawed and inherently racist, sexist, and classist Enlightenment era ideals, and having seen many of the gains won by the Civil Rights and Feminist struggles of the 50s and 60s, historically oppressed and marginalized communities have been able to band together and agitate for equal rights and respect. Rather than a single, homogenized voice, the progressive left speaks with a multitude of diverse voices. While this does lend itself to inevitable challenge and confrontation, it is necessary in building truly democratic and anti-hierarchal movements. Yet, because of these confrontations, or maybe because they don’t want to share the stage, whiny old straight white guys like Richard Rorty and Todd Gitlin have started to call for a return to Enlightenment era Universalism despite its inherent flaws and biases. They romanticize the “days when we could all be one” while ignoring the historical implications of homogenization and marginalization. Their recent surge in popularity amongst the straight white crowd really scares me. We have way too many miles to go to start regressing now. So Sussman, please rethink your rethinking of identity politics.
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