User:Wrig36/Identity Politics

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Black and Black feminist identity politics:

See also: Black feminism, Combahee River Collective, and Black women in American politics

Black feminist identity politics are the identity-based politics derived from the lived experiences of struggles and oppression faced by Black women.

In 1977, the Combahee River Collective (CRC) argued that Black women struggled with facing their oppression due to the sexism present within the Civil Rights Movement and the racism present within second-wave feminism. The CRC coined the term "identity politics", and in their opinion, naming the unique struggle and oppression Black women faced, aided Black women in the U.S. within radical movements and at large. The term "identity politics", in the opinion of those within the CRC, gave Black women a tool, from which they could use to confront the oppression they were facing. The CRC also claimed to expand upon the prior feminist adage that "the personal is political," pointing to their own consciousness-raising sessions, centering of Black speech, and communal sharing of experiences of oppression as practices that expanded the phrase's scope. As mentioned earlier K. Crenshaw, claimed that the oppression of Black women is illustrated in two different directions: race and sex.

In 1988, Deborah K. King coined the term multiple jeopardy, theory that expands on how factors of oppression are all interconnected. King suggested that the identities of gender, class, and race each have an individual prejudicial connotation, which has an incremental effect on the inequity of which one experiences.

In 1991, Nancie Caraway explained from a white feminist perspective that the politics of Black women had to be comprehended by broader feminist movements in the understanding that the different forms of oppression that Black women face (via race and gender) are interconnected, presenting a compound of oppression (Intersectionality).

A contemporary example of Black identity politics is #BlackLivesMatter which began with a hashtag. In 2013, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi created the hashtag in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the officer who killed Trayvon Martin in 2012.  Michael Brown and Eric Garner were killed by police in 2014, which propelled the #BlackLivesMatter movement forward, first nationally, and then globally. The intention of #BlackLivesMatter was to create more widespread awareness of the way law enforcement engages with the black community and individuals, including claims of excessive force and issues with accountability within law enforcement agencies. The hashtag and proceeding movement garnered a lot of attention from all sides of the political sphere. A counter movement formed the hashtag, #AllLivesMatter, in response to #BlackLivesMatter.

White identity politics

See also: White identity, White nationalism, White supremacy, White defensiveness, White backlash, and Identitarian movement

In 1998, political scientists Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg predicted that, by the late 20th-century, a "Euro-American radical right" would promote a trans-national white identity politics, which would invoke populist grievance narratives and encourage hostility against non-white peoples and multiculturalism. In the United States, mainstream news has identified Donald Trump's presidency as a signal of increasing and widespread utilization of white identity politics within the Republican Party and political landscape. Journalists Michael Scherer and David Smith have reported on its development since the mid-2010s.

Ron Brownstein believed that President Trump uses "White Identity Politics" to bolster his base and that this would ultimately limit his ability to reach out to non-White American voters for the 2020 United States presidential election. A four-year Reuters and Ipsos analysis concurred that "Trump's brand of white identity politics may be less effective in the 2020 election campaign." Alternatively, examining the same poll, David Smith has written that "Trump’s embrace of white identity politics may work to his advantage" in 2020. During the Democratic primaries, presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg publicly warned that the president and his administration were using white identity politics, which he said was the most divisive form of identity politics. Columnist Reihan Salam writes that he is not convinced that Trump uses "white identity politics" given the fact that he still has significant support from liberal and moderate Republicans—who are more favorable toward immigration and the legalization of undocumented immigrants—but believes that it could become a bigger issue as whites become a minority and assert their rights like other minority groups. Salam also states that an increase in "white identity" politics is far from certain given the very high rates of intermarriage and the historical example of the once Anglo-Protestant cultural majority embracing a more inclusive white cultural majority which included Jews, Italians, Poles, Arabs, and Irish.^{[undue weight? – discuss]}

A contemporary example of "White identity politics," is the right-wing group Proud Boys. Proud Boys was formed by Gavin McInnes in 2016. Membership is comprised of males only, who identify as right-wing conservatives. They take part in political protests with the most infamous being January 6, 2021, at the US Capital, which became violent, with 1106 members of the Proud Boys arrested for their participation. Proud Boys identify as supporters of Donald Trump for President and are outspoken supporters of Americans having unfettered access to firearms by way of the 2^nd amendment of the US constitution, having expressed the belief that gun law reform is a “sinister authoritarian plot” to disarm law abiding citizens. According to an article published by Southern Poverty Law Group, Proud Boys members are regularly affiliated with white nationalist extremists and are known for sharing white nationalist content across social media platforms.

Another contemporary example is the hashtag movement #AllLivesMatter. #AllLivesMatter began as a counter narrative to #BlackLivesMatter. People who identify with this counter-movement use this hashtag to represent what they call “anti-identity” identity politics, which is supposed to symbolize a movement against racial identities but they've been criticized as being a white nationalist movement. Created, adopted and circulated beginning in 2016, #WhiteLivesMatter exalted themselves as an anti-racist movement, while identifying #BlackLivesMatter as the opposite.

Columnist Ross Douthat has argued that white identity politics have been important to American politics since the Richard Nixon-era of the Republican Party. Historian Nell Irvin Painter has analyzed Eric Kaufmann's thesis that the phenomenon of white identity politics are caused by immigration-derived racial diversity, which reduces the white majority, and an "anti-majority adversary culture". Writing in Vox, political commentator Ezra Klein believes that demographic change has fueled the emergence of white identity politics.

Viet Thanh Nguyen says that "to have no identity at all is the privilege of whiteness, which is the identity that pretends not to have an identity, that denies how it is tied to capitalism, to race, and to war".