Identity Politics Loses Its Power
6 min read
Black Lives Matter’s persuasive power and influence climaxed in 2020, in the reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd. It was a time of rare consensus, when some two-thirds of Americans expressed support for the cause, according to the Pew Research Center. But by last year, only half of Americans continued to support BLM, and less than a quarter did so strongly. “A majority of Americans say the increased focus on issues of race and racial inequality in the past three years hasn’t led to changes that have improved the lives of Black people,” Pew found.
Now BLM is weighing in on the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris. One might assume, based on the group’s foundational emphasis on identity politics, that its support for a liberal Black woman would be full-throated. Instead, I was surprised to see it release a statement last week that was strikingly critical of the Democratic Party’s decision to elevate Harris without a primary.
“Democratic Party elites and billionaire donors are attempting to manipulate Black voters by anointing Kamala Harris and an unknown vice president as the new Democratic ticket without a primary vote by the public,” the statement reads. “While the potential outcome of a Harris presidency may be historic, the process to achieve it must align with true democratic values. We have no idea where Kamala Harris stands on the issues.” The group called for a “virtual snap primary” that would give voters a chance to voice their preferences and concerns. Bernie Sanders famously argued that “it is not good enough for somebody to say, I’m a woman; vote for me.” Now Black Lives Matter seems to be arguing that it is no longer good enough to say: I am a Black woman; vote for me.
Refreshingly, Harris herself has not relied on this argument, focusing instead on uniting liberals and their allies to defeat Donald Trump. At her first rally after President Joe Biden left the race, Harris vowed to protect reproductive rights, strengthen the middle class, and fight for a future “where no child has to grow up in poverty.” Still, her candidacy immediately inspired waves of identitarianism among various Democratic constituencies. Hundreds of thousands of Democratic voters segregated themselves by race and gender to attend fundraising calls on Zoom, as if preemptively highlighting superficial differences could somehow help them come together at a later date. Such tactics don’t reflect the fact that many voters are rejecting identity politics, which have only exacerbated the divisions they purported to heal. Coming at a time when Trump has been entrenching counterintuitive gains among Black voters and other minority groups, Democrats’ emphasis on race and identity risks undermining Harris instead of helping her.
There will be no snap primary: With three months until the election, the Democratic Party is saying that it’s already too late. But BLM’s intervention will have been a deeply patriotic and beneficial one if it forces Democratic elites to take seriously the reality that the country is no longer interested in checking boxes and marking “firsts” only for the sake of it, and if it signals a correction to the excesses and miscalculations of the past few years.
When I reached out to ask Black Lives Matter whether this was an accurate read of the group’s intentions, a spokesperson did not follow up after several back-and-forths. I posed the question instead to a few scholars of BLM. Those I spoke with said they did not see an ideological about-face.
“BLM centers Black lives because they see these lives as an exemplary case of the denial of democratic freedoms and rights,” the Brown University political scientist Melvin Rogers told me: BLM’s “identity-based politics are not about identity for identity’s sake but about addressing systemic inequities and ensuring that marginalized communities have a voice in shaping democratic institutions. Given the historical context of exclusion in the United States, they elevate identity as a means of self-affirmation, but they frame this within a larger commitment to democratic engagement, process, and reform.” He thought the call for snap primaries was, in part, a matter of strategic influence—“a tactical move” to try to ensure that BLM would have an “impact in shaping the Democratic platform.”
But whether BLM intended to signal a departure from the lockstep ideology of the past few years, or whether Rogers is right that it’s been asking Americans to think beyond the narrow confines of race all along, the statement is a stark reminder of the limits of identity politics.
Black Lives Matter was founded in 2013, after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of the teenager Trayvon Martin. Through the decade that followed, BLM, as both a movement and an organization, forced Americans to examine complex social, cultural, and political questions through the flattening lens of group identity and race. It was not at all sufficient, activists organized under its banner argued, to view what happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, or to Floyd in Minneapolis, only in terms of police brutality or the precarity of the lower classes. A few years before Floyd was asphyxiated by a police officer who kneeled on his neck while other officers milled about refusing to intervene, Tony Timpa, an unarmed white man, was killed in Texas in near-identical circumstances. But that connection was rarely drawn. In some quarters, it was tantamount to an expression of anti-Blackness to point out any equivalence.
After Hillary Clinton’s unexpected loss to Trump in 2016, the intellectual historian Mark Lilla posed what at the time seemed a controversial question: How should America’s unique and beautiful diversity shape our politics? “In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing,” he wrote in a viral New York Times op-ed. “One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end.” That two election cycles hence, even a constituency founded on race-first activism such as Black Lives Matter has come to echo a version of that moderating sentiment should register not merely as an indictment of the Democratic Party’s history of simplistic thinking about race; it should serve as an emergency wake-up call.
Harris—much like J. D. Vance—is particularly vulnerable to the liabilities of appealing to identity over substance. Trump has already tried to challenge Harris’s racial authenticity, suggesting that she positioned herself as Black only when it became politically expedient to do so: “She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person,” he said on Wednesday, during a simultaneously ingratiating and contentious appearance in front of the National Association of Black Journalists. The best way to undermine this kind of cheap rhetorical gambit is to eschew arguments based on identity in the first place.
It may turn out that Harris is precisely the leader this moment demands. But that cannot be assumed. “Installing Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee and an unknown vice president without any public voting process would make the modern Democratic Party a party of hypocrites,” BLM warned. “It would undermine their credibility on issues related to democracy. Imagine our first Black woman president not having won some sort of public nomination process. The pundits would immediately label it as affirmative action or a DEI move, and any progress made by a President Harris would be on shaky foundations.”
BLM understands that Harris will not become president just because she is some avatar of generic intersectional identity, and that she would have been better off if given the chance to prove herself deserving of voters’ support through a fair and transparent primary process. Put bluntly, descendants of American slaves should not feel the need to search for our redemption or sense of representation through the symbolic ascendance of a child of Indian and Jamaican immigrants merely because she listens to Beyoncé and has tan skin. The presumption that Black politics is or ought to be formed in the epidermis has always been patronizingly false. The Black voters defecting to Trump have recognized this, and the leaders of Black Lives Matter have now stated it plainly. Will the Democratic Party take note?
