JimBowie1958
Old Fogey
- Sep 25, 2011
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Identity Politics says that a person is defined by what category they fall into, and so a black female heterosexual is fundamentally different than a black female bisexual. It sets up a dichotomy of 'us vrs them' regarding all of its categorizations, and the more acceptable categories of other people are those who share more intersections of key word labels to their groups. So a white homosexual male has more in common with the black homosexual male bringing him his dinner than he has in common with his fellow white heterosexual male CEO's across the country.
Identity politics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
And so the common good is ignored in favor of the categorical identities good, and the voiceless suffer the most, like the unborn and the silenced soldiers out fighting our wars defending freedom.
The final out come is a society divided against itself, and the majority eventually adopting the mentality of the minority as they draw on the collective experiences of getting the short end of the stick. Then we will have the same fascism for the majority that we have seen for the minorities, but in a democracy this is certainly a bad outcome for minorities.
Identity politics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Identity politics are political arguments that focus upon the self-interest and perspectives of self-identified social interest groups and ways in which people's politics may be shaped by aspects of their identity through race, class, religion, gender, ethnicity, ideology, nation, sexual orientation, culture, currency, information preference, history, musical and/or literary genre, medical conditions, profession, hobby, or any other loosely correlated yet simple to intuit social organizations. Not all members of any given group are necessarily involved in identity politics. The practice has probably a long existence; but the explicit term and movements linked to it really came into being during the latter part of the 20th century. It can most notably be found in class movements, feminist movements, gay and lesbian movements, disability movements, ethnic movements and post colonial movements. But wherever it is found it is also open to wide debate and critique.[1] Minority influence is a central component of identity politics. Minority influence is a form of social influence which takes place when a majority is being influenced to accept the beliefs or behavior of a minority. Unlike other forms of influence this usually involves a personal shift in private opinion. This personal shift in opinion is called conversion....
One aim of identity politics has been to empower those feeling oppressed to articulate their felt oppression in terms of their own experiencea process of consciousness-raising that distinguishes identity politics from the liberal conception of politics as driven by individual self-interest.
Identity politics is a phenomenon that arose first at the radical margins of liberal democratic societies in which human rights are recognized, and the term is not usually used to refer to dissident movements within single-party or authoritarian states. The elements of identity politics can be seen to be present in many of the earliest statement of feminists, ethnic movements and gay and lesbian liberation. Formally, it may even be taken back to Marx's earliest statements about a class becoming conscious of itself and developing a class identity. Class Identity politics were first described briefly in an article by L. A. Kauffman, who traced its origins to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an organization of the civil-rights movement in the USA in the early and mid-1960s.[2] Although SNCC invented many of the fundamental practices, and various black power groups extended them, they apparently found no need to apply a term. Rather, the term emerged when others outside the black freedom movementsparticularly, the race- and ethnic-specific women's liberation movements, such as Black feminism began to adopt the practice in the late 1960s. Traces of identity politics can also be found in the early writings of the modern gay movement such as Dennis Altman's Homosexual: Liberation/Oppression ...
The term identity politics has been applied retroactively to varying movements that long predate its coinage. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. discussed identity politics extensively in his book The Disuniting of America. Schlesinger, a strong supporter of liberal conceptions of civil rights, argues that a liberal democracy requires a common basis for culture and society to function.
In his view, basing politics on group marginalization fractures the civil polity, and therefore works against creating real opportunities for ending marginalization. Schlesinger believes that "movements for civil rights should aim toward full acceptance and integration of marginalized groups into the mainstream culture, rather than...perpetuating that marginalization through affirmations of difference."....
The rise of the right-wing in Europe, particularly following the European Parliament election, 2009, was seen as an establishment of identity as reflected against the "other" minorities. A Le Monde/IFOP poll in January 2011 conducted in France and Germany found that a majority felt Muslims have "not integrated properly," something the paper called "Islam and integration: French and Germans admit failure." An analyst for IFOP said the results indicated something "beyond linking immigration with security or immigration with unemployment, to linking Islam with a threat to identity."
And so the common good is ignored in favor of the categorical identities good, and the voiceless suffer the most, like the unborn and the silenced soldiers out fighting our wars defending freedom.
The final out come is a society divided against itself, and the majority eventually adopting the mentality of the minority as they draw on the collective experiences of getting the short end of the stick. Then we will have the same fascism for the majority that we have seen for the minorities, but in a democracy this is certainly a bad outcome for minorities.