That bad calls are made in the name of identity is no news to anyone. The question is whether those bad calls (whether hypervigilance over microaggressions or, more egregiously, policing of gender borders) are endemic to this thing called identity politics or merely endemic to all politics. God knows plenty of bad calls – and more – came out of and continue to come out of those forms of politics we deem not identity politics.
Suzanna Danuta Walters, ‘In Defence of Identity Politics’ (2018: 482, emphasis in original)
In September 2018, the, since axed, Australian daily satirical news show Tonightly ran a segment called ‘Lefty Boot Camp’ (ABC Comedy 2018). It opens with a bearded white comedian, Jazz Twemlow, sitting in a leather armchair. ‘Hello,’ he says, ‘I’m left wing.’ Being left wing, he explains, means not taking too kindly to the rise of the ‘Alt-Right’, who have ‘somehow gone mainstream, gaining a rock-and-roll, anti-establishment vibe. But there’s nothing very rock-and-roll about a bunch of white men hating multiculturalism.’ Then, Twemlow continues, ‘What is more interesting is who is to blame for making neo-Nazis look like the new rock-and-roll punk, and the answer is, unfortunately, partly us.’ The left’s problem, according to Twemlow, lies with those who insist on pointing out racism. Brexit, for example, was the fault of those who insisted on ‘slagging off’ 17 million members of the UK population by calling them racist and failing to put forward a positive agenda: ‘Yelling raciiiiiist online made us feel good about ourselves and had no long-lasting side-effects.’ For Twemlow, the left replaces dialogue and debate with name-calling. He interviews an academic who says, ‘I think that if you call a bunch of people sexist or racist, but they don’t believe they are sexist or racist, all it’s going to do is get them to rally around their own tribe. … I mean how would you feel if I said, you’re entrenched in white privilege?’ The clip ends with Twemlow alternately donning yellowface and dressing as Hitler doing yoga: ‘Remember, calling someone racist isn’t going to unracist a racist.’ Antiracists have been doing antiracism wrong.
While ‘Lefty Boot Camp’ is far from original, it summarizes a popular view that a ‘reduction’ of complex political issues to questions of race, gender, and sexuality is unhelpful and alienating. The virality of the video spoke to a belief on ‘the white left’ that it has ceded irony to the right and that progressives lose by taking themselves too seriously, as though all that was missing in the fight against racism was better jokes. This view twists Twemlow’s repetition of racist tropes for a white audience into ‘a punch at power’ (Razer 2018). However, this wishful thinking negates the fact that it was overwhelmingly people of colour and antiracists who criticized the sketch, explaining how it served white supremacist aims by casting racism as an unhelpful explanation.1 I refer to ‘the white left’ to suggest that ‘not all white people’ are the agents of white supremacy (Aouragh 2019: 11), although I share Daniel C. Blight’s insistence that there can be no antiracism that is grounded in white identity (Blight 2019). Referring to ‘the white left’ makes it clear that Twemlow and other critics of ‘identity politics’ actually use the label ‘the left’ only to refer to the proponents of social justice whom they see as thwarting leftist aims.
Encapsulating the left’s problems in ‘Internet call-out culture’, as this comedy sketch does, reveals a profound lack of engagement with the actually existing challenges presenting themselves to antiracists. Twemlow’s thesis is inspired by Angela Nagle’s book on the ‘online culture wars’, which argues that a ‘deep intellectual rot in contemporary cultural progressivism’ that she observes among users of the Tumblr website is responsible for the failure to beat the alt-right (Nagle 2017; see also Harman 2018). In these digitally mediated times, splits on the left are arguably exacerbated by white complaints against antiracist projects that receive disproportionate exposure and generate distraction. The lack of interest in the multiple histories of antiracism, which also differ widely between locations, leads to the struggle against racism being caricaturized and antiracists having to spend significant energy challenging damaging stereotypes of the type the ‘Lefty Boot Camp’ sketch exemplifies. Because antiracism has rarely been subject to serious study, being ‘consigned to the status of a “cause”, fit only for platitudes of support or denouncement’ (Bonnett 2000: 2), there is very little understanding of the movement’s diversity. Disagreements abound, but it is a stretch to hold them responsible for the failures of ‘the left’ to make political gains. It may be more fruitful to ask why ‘the white left’ so often fails to think race matters.
The demand on ‘the white left’ to stop playing the conceptual ‘race card’ and alienating white publics reveals how race functions to hide whiteness. Race is attached exclusively to minoritized groups whose presence within the nation is questioned. By conceptualizing racism as irrational, western societies largely conceive of themselves as antiracist or non-racist. This assumption allows calls for the construction of the discourse on race to coalesce around ‘open and honest debates’ that posit, as Angela Nagle did, ‘the left case against open borders’ (Nagle 2018) or whether Australia should curb immigration, as a debate held barely a week after the Christchurch massacre was framed.2 The white innocence which these questions imply, as Gloria Wekker writes, allows for racism to become ‘cemented and sedimented’ while at the same time being declared ‘missing in action’ (Wekker 2016: 3). To bring race in is thus seen as an overreaching for a racialized perspective when things are ‘more complex’. In fact, to refuse to see race is to choose simplicity and ignores the layers of power in and resultant complicity required in dealing with what race continues to do.
The rest of this chapter looks at how the question of race’s explanatory helpfulness, or lack thereof, animates discussions of issues such as migration, Islamophobia, antiblack racism, and Indigenous sovereignty. I assess how doing antiracism is impacted by an analytically white framing of this adjudication of helpfulness. The recited truth that antiracism – re-labelled and dismissed as ‘identity politics’ – is responsible for elevating an anti-material and superficial recognition-based politics over a universalist – and, it is intimated, a more serious – politics of class plays a role in disabling race-critical analyses that foreground the imbrication of race in capitalism and the state (Goldberg 2011; Robinson 1983). By focusing on how themes of moralism, equivalence, and the perceived cul-de-sac of identity circulate within these political perspectives, I draw attention to what is lost when race is deemed useless.
The reason why the ‘Lefty Boot Camp’ worked comedically for many was because it spoke to the feeling, expressed by other white people, that ‘you don’t convince people by abusing them’ (Sparrow 2013). Antiracism is seen as imbued with a moralism that blames individual voters for racist policy-making (Tietze 2014). Moralism was a touchstone of the pre- and post-Brexit debate in the UK and the Trump election in the US. Racism is portrayed by ‘white left’ writers as a middle-class stick to beat the working class with. ‘Whenever working-class people have tried to talk about the effects of immigration on their lives,’ wrote socialist Lisa Mckenzie, ‘shouting “backward” and “racist” has become a middle-class pastime’ (Mckenzie 2016). It matters little that ‘whether it is Brexit, Trump or the French Front National, this kind of vote comes for the most part from the (lower) middle class, and the middle class’ who are more likely to vote than the working class of any ethnicity (Winter and Mondon 2019).
According to Eric Kaufmann, a ‘left-modernism turned moralistic and imperialistic’ (Kaufmann 2018a) and backlash against the ‘perfectionist creed of multiculturalism’ (Kaufmann 2018b) were triggers for Leave and Trump voters. In his version of history, 1960s US social justice protests quickly descended into ‘a frontal assault on intellectual merit and the norms of rules-based deliberation’, resulting in the trumping of ‘evidence and logic’ by protest, ‘emotional release’, and ‘moralistic poses’ (Kaufmann 2018b). This opprobrium for the negative influence of 1960s counter-culture on what is presented as the true Socratic mission of the university is shared by Columbia University Professor Mark Lilla, for whom a ‘moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity’ stunts liberalism’s ability to govern and obscures such ‘perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good’ (Lilla 2016). Australian Marxist writer Jeff Sparrow sees what he calls a ‘delegated politics’ that replaces the direct protests of the 1960s as responsible for the institutionalization of a ‘leftism embedded in various professional settings’, such as universities, thus detaching the concerns of the left from their roots in the working class. The right-wing anti-political correctness of the 1980s could easily be tapped into by politicians among those whom Sparrow calls ‘ordinary people’ fed up with the sneering, ‘smug politics’ of these newly institutionalized elites (Sparrow 2018: 95).
Two racially coded sides – smug and ordinary – gather together simplified bundles of political interest. Sparrow’s narration of the move from the streets to the campus recites a lament for the reduction, as he sees it, of leftist demands to ‘achievable goals’ such as the inclusion of Black and other ethnic studies in the curriculum (Sparrow 2018: 30–1). He does not see ‘ordinary people’ as benefiting from the capacity of ethnic studies to ‘unsettle the normativity of the white academy’, as Black Marxist Cedric Robinson saw it (Osuna 2017). The radical scholarship that wedged its way onto the US campus, is still being fought for elsewhere (Andrews 2018; Shilliam 2018a), and is far from secure even in the US (Osuna 2017), can only be seen as irrelevant for ‘ordinary people’ if race is seen not to concern them (Mitropoulos 2007). The Black radical historian Robin Kelley notes how, although the way in which ‘the fire this time’ – the time of Black Lives Matter – spread from town to campus recalled the historical pattern following the Harlem and Watts rebellions of the 1960s, its ‘size, speed, intensity, and character’ were noteworthy. Black students led ‘coalitions made up of students of color, queer folks, undocumented immigrants, and allied whites’ to fight the police brutality that targets Black people in the US, who, after all, are ordinary people too (Kelley 2016).
My intention is not to glorify student activism, some of which surely focuses on the narrow project of ‘making the university more hospitable for black students’, and not enough on how to ‘become subversives in the academy, exposing and resisting its labor exploitation, its gentrifying practices, its endowments built on misery, its class privilege often camouflaged in multicultural garb, and its commitments to war and security’ (Kelley 2016). However, it should be possible to criticize the conditions created by the American academy, and the neoliberal university more broadly, that individualize aspiration and police radicalism without seeing that as originating in the idea of Black studies or with radical Black scholars holding out against these systems. That is not to say that Black and other ethnic studies in the US have not been co-opted and commodified, more or less successfully. As Charisse Burden-Stelly shows, Africana studies ‘was formed to fundamentally challenge the statist and imperialist logic of the traditional disciplines in the academy by focusing on redistribution; African and African descendant struggles for liberation and self-determination; and the importance of internationalism to the larger project of Black freedom’ (Burden-Stelly 2016: 157). The fact that it quickly took on what she calls a ‘culturalist’ bent that moved it from materialist analysis to the humanistic disciplines should rightly be understood as part of the US Empire’s ability both to accommodate and to discipline ‘challenges to Eurocentrism, Euro-American coloniality, and white supremacy’ (2016: 158). Therefore, while we can never discount individual agency in the move to institutionalization, it is important to read the story of Black studies against race as a structuring force.
The failure to see race as central rather than as peripheral to analyses of sociopolitical structures is what conjures the caricatures of the smug/ordinary binary. Beyond all other topics, race, and especially race intersecting with gender and sexuality, is the fault line that separates the ‘plain speakers’ from the ‘out of touch’. The codification of race within terms such as ‘ordinary people’ and ‘smug elites’ defies the reality in which those most likely to be living in hardship in societies such as the US, Australasia, or Europe are Black, Brown, Indigenous, or of migrant origin (Shilliam 2018b). The historian of race and class David Roediger recalls that while writing his book How Race Survived US History in 2008, he kept a Post-it note with ‘7×’ written on it to remind himself that ‘that was then the ratio both of white wealth over Black wealth as well as of Black male prime-of-life incarceration rates over those of white males of the same age’, the latter of which has since increased (Roediger 2019b). Despite Lisa Mckenzie’s tweeted declaration that ‘I also don’t think race is central I think class is’,3 by setting racism up as a middle-class concern and economic hardship as a ‘white working-class’ one, she refuses the fact that austerity has on average had a worse effect on Black people and ethnic minorities in Britain than on the rest of the population (O’Hara 2014). Black people, migrants, and people of colour are thus excised from an ethnicized vision of the working class as white (Shilliam 2018b). As the sociologist of gender Alison Phipps has remarked, it is better to talk about ‘working-class and white’ people than to suture the working-class experience to a mythical vision of ethnic whiteness (Phipps and Lewis 2019). The desire to silence talk of race with the aim of encouraging greater interethnic unity, while commendable in theory, is impossible if it involves the denial of facts. Yet these facts are drowned out when talk of race is heard only as an accusation of racism rather than a critical analysis of how racialized power structures operate through class, nationality, citizenship, and gender (S. Hall 1980). Can we see a way to admitting how racial rule is predicated on the creation of ‘white advantage’ (Roediger 2019b), and thus on white complicity, without it being heard as calling white people ‘racist and misogynistic uneducated losers’ (Arruzza 2016)?
The desire to silence talk of race with the aim of encouraging greater interethnic unity, while commendable in theory, is impossible if it involves the denial of facts.
In March 2019, Wolfgang Streeck, a ‘pre-eminent economic sociologist’ (Roos 2018), was interviewed in the New Statesman magazine on his view that a second referendum on the EU would tear British society even further apart (O’Brien 2019). Streeck’s move, following the 2008 financial crash, from ‘third way’ German social democracy to a more Marxist inspired anti-capitalism has been accompanied by his growing alarm about the impact of migration on national well-being (Roos 2018). His anxiety about the power of a ‘Marktvolk’ (market people) over the ‘Staatsvolk’, the national public that governments should first be answerable to, evokes antisemitic ‘conspiracy theories favoured by the alt-right’ that equate transnational financial elites with a people whom, as Adam Tooze remarks, they quite simply do not represent (Tooze 2017). Streeck repeats the anti-immigration right’s theory that immigrants are incompatible with western societies by startlingly claiming, ‘If you had no borders, you could have no collective property belonging to a society … would you want Nelson Mandela to be a refugee in Germany? No! He’d be a mail carrier bringing Amazon parcels to your house … he was needed somewhere else’ (O’Brien 2019). Leaving aside the assumption that an African migrant can do nothing but work for a labour-exploiting, tax-avoiding transnational company, online radical theory and history archive Libcom pointed out that the suggestion that Mandela was solely responsible for the anti-Apartheid movement strikes from history the fact that the ANC was a mass movement.4
Streeck, like many on the nativist left, sees the political world through the looking glass. In this world, those whom Streeck calls the ‘dishonoured’ working class, or whom others refer to as the ‘left behind’ of economic globalization, are stifled by the orthodoxies of antiracism imposed by aloof cosmopolitan urban elites. Using the well-worn language of contrarianism, Streeck said, ‘If everyone is of the same view in the room, I begin to feel uncomfortable’ (O’Brien 2019). Speaking up against the unfettered migration of his imagination is speaking truth to power in a remarkable reversal of the world as seen from the actual members of the – Black and Brown – working class. Streeck’s critique of capitalism cannot be disentangled from two interrelated positions he takes: the first, against open borders, is a factor doubtless motivating his joining the left-nativist, anti-immigration Aufsetehen platform, established as a left-wing answer to the virulently anti-migration and Islamophobic Alternative für Deutschland party (Weisskircher 2018); the second is his admitted failure to, as he puts it, ‘warm up to identity politics’ (O’Brien 2019). Streeck’s increasingly extreme pronouncements on the negative effects of migrants and refugees, whose short-lived welcome to Germany he sees only through a lens of Germany’s ‘chronic hunger for labour’ (Streeck 2016a: 2), cannot be disentangled from his belief that identity politics are ‘synonymous with consumerist society’ (O’Brien 2019).5 The co-constitutive effect of these two positions could be seen in his post-election analysis of ‘Trump and the Trumpists’ (Streeck 2017).
The vote for Donald Trump, for Streeck, was a cry for help of a ‘dishonoured’ working class. He admonishes a centre left, enamoured of globalization and cosmopolitanism, and too ready to champion the rights of racialized and otherwise marginalized minorities to the detriment of ‘ordinary people’. The centre left, he claims, has reaped what it has sown by abandoning ‘the demobilized working class’ in favour of ‘ever new minorities [discovered] by experts and politicians’ (Streeck 2017). These minorities, in particular the ‘supply of low-skilled and low-paid service workers’ he places outside the working class, have been unjustly prioritized over the ‘silenced majority’ that cannot be made to fit into ‘status groups’ ‘defined by color, gender, national origin, sexual identification and the like’. In Streeck’s world, cosmopolitan urban ‘neoliberals’ are gleeful that Americans are ‘shortly to become a “minority in their own land”’ because they are unaffected by the pressures created by outsourcing and undercutting (Streeck 2017). He pits white against migrant workers, who are redrawn as a mere ‘supply’ for financiers, neoliberal politicians, and, presumably, hipsters. No effort is made to disentangle the exploitation of migrant workers from the concerns of racialized people themselves, as though there were a direct conduit from the campaigns of undocumented domestic workers, for example, to the right wing of the Democratic Party; as if a counterfactual migrant Mandela were responsible for Amazon’s shoddy labour practices.
Streeck’s perspective goes beyond that of the political theorist Nancy Fraser, which resists the nativist conclusions he draws. Her writings on Trump have been the object of particular interest in Germany, making readings of the US context available to other locations (Hamade and Fraser 2017). Fraser proposes that the incorporation of all but the most marginal of ‘feminists, antiracists and multiculturalists’ into the ‘progressive neoliberal cause’ by the Clinton campaign led to the victory of a politics of recognition over one of distribution, which, she argues, Trump abandoned. Instead, she claims, he proceeded to ‘double down on the reactionary politics of recognition’. In this way, Fraser shifts the blame for Trumpism onto the nebulously defined progressive political realm (Fraser 2017). Similarly, for Streeck, an elitist antiracist orthodoxy crystallized in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and in her dismissal of Trump supporters as a ‘basket of deplorables’. It is unsurprising that Streeck, who argues for a ‘return of the nation’ against the EU (Tooze 2017), shows complete disregard for the materiality of race, and is unable and unwilling to accept that racism and nationalism have always existed in a relationship of ‘reciprocal determination’ (Balibar 1991: 52). He brushes off the lived realities of mainly working-class, Black, Brown, Latinx, and Indigenous women, men, and gender-diverse people. (‘Transgendered restrooms infuriated everyone except those seeking access to them’, he mocked.) His irritation with Clinton’s emphasis on race and gender to the detriment of his preferred colourblind, class-based politics leads to the concerns of the Black and Brown workers being simplistically aligned, in his reading, with those of Clinton and her ‘financial back[ers] on Wall Street and Silicon Valley’ and her endorsement by celebrities such as Meryl Streep and Beyoncé (Streeck 2017).
It may have come, then, as a surprise to Streeck and Fraser, although certainly not to those who rejected the unempirical assertion of Clinton as an antiracist leader and pro-transgender trailblazer (K.-Y. Taylor 2016), when in November 2018, in a Guardian series on ‘the new populism’, Clinton said, ‘I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame’ (Wintour 2018). Clinton urged European leaders to send out a stronger signal that they were ‘not going to be able to continue to provide refuge and support’; in other words, a call to close the borders. These declarations make it clear that the tendency, displayed by Streeck and others, to confuse pseudo-‘woke’ references with a real commitment to hard-fought antiracist principles, and, worse, the collapsing together of actual antiracists, such as Black Lives Matter activists, and neoliberal political leaders is an erroneous one. Streeck would probably not be interested in Black socialist scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s analysis of the Black Lives Matter movement five years from its birth. In it she notes the divergent opinions among different actors in the movement about whether or not to attend a ‘closed-door meeting at the White House in February of 2016’ (K.-Y. Taylor 2019b). There was no simple equation of antiracism with Democratic politics. Clinton and Streeck clap to the same rhythm on migration and borders, both with a nod to the imagined spectre of the refugee as terrorist. As Streeck has made no bones about saying, ‘[T]he migration of the violence … is destroying the stateless societies of the periphery into the metropolis, in the form of “terrorism” wrought by a new class of “primitive rebels”’ (Streeck 2016b: 73).
Streeck rejects identity politics because, by seeing them as consumerist, he fuses them together with unfettered global capitalism, which in turn is made synonymous with open borders. This is concerning because his influential voice contributes to an erroneous view of national resources as finite, only justifiably shareable among members of the (white) nation. Such a view ignores the ‘colonial matrix of power’ determining relations between western and majority-world regions (Quijano and Ennis 2000). Although Streeck claims to believe that an end to capitalism will only come from below (O’Brien 2019), he displays a complete lack of interest in what that ‘below’ looks like. He cannot imagine that the concerns of refugees and migrants to Germany or African-Americans, Latinos, and LGBTIQ people in the US are the concerns of the working class, or that their struggle may, in the words of the Combahee River Statement, lead to everyone becoming more free: ‘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’ (The Combahee River Collective 1977).
The Combahee River Statement, written by the Black lesbian socialist members of the Combahee River Collective (CRC), has become a touchstone of left-wing accounts of how identity politics went wrong. The CRC coined the term ‘identity politics’ to emphasize action by Black women who ‘were radicalizing because of the ways that their multiple identities opened them up to overlapping oppression and exploitation’. The members of the Collective ‘looked to “extend” Marxist analysis to incorporate an understanding of the oppression of Black women … as an oppressed group that has particular political needs’ (K.-Y. Taylor 2019a). The political in the slogan ‘the personal is the political’ was as important as the personal. The statement uncovers how a universalizing drive, particularly when mobilized by white feminists, and the left more broadly, leaves race out of the picture: ‘We are not convinced … that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation... . [W]e know that [Marx’s] analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women’ (The Combahee River Collective 1977).
For many critics, identity politics have been subverted by those with radically opposing politics to those of the CRC. The ‘identity’ in identity politics is said to be misconstrued as based on ‘something “authentic” – one’s skin-colour or membership of a specific group – rather than on ethical, historical and social affinity’ (Aouragh 2019: 18). I do not disagree that there is often a lack of knowledge of the history of antiracism on display in contemporary social justice discourse. This was a topic of discussion on a podcast produced by Black British writer Reni Eddo-Lodge on ‘political blackness’, the umbrella term for people from different migrant groups which was in use within British antiracism until the 1990s. She interviewed both older and younger antiracist activists. Angelica, a member of Black feminist group Sisters Uncut, remarked that ‘for a lot of people I think of our generation … they are so adamantly against the idea of political blackness and they think it’s like insulting, it’s offensive. … I appreciate what it was at the time.’ For Black British Labour politician Diane Abbott, who was an antiracist activist in the 1980s, the ‘backlash’ she believes there is against political blackness today is unfounded. In her view, political blackness was emblematic of a spirit of collectivism born of shared struggle. She suggests that today, ‘Hindus saying we’re not Muslim and Muslims saying, well we’re not Hindus and then even in Africa you had people from Northern Nigeria saying we’re Hausa, we’re not black, and you got Yorubas saying we’re Yoruba, and you got Igbos saying we’re Igbo’, is in part due to a lack of knowledge of antiracist history (Eddo-Lodge 2018).
Nevertheless, I worry that the emphasis on this lack of historical knowledge and what is seen as the stress placed on intractable differences over commonality among antiracists today, which can largely be found among students and younger academics, is often overstated. Does too much emphasis on everything that is wrong with an inconsistent version of identity politics not risk missing the fuller picture when it comes to the struggle against racism? As my friend and comrade Gavan Titley once put it to me, ‘Can you imagine asylum seeker movements tying themselves up in knots about the rights and wrongs of identity politics?’ With this in mind, I want to ask, what if talking about identity politics as a distraction from antiracism were not itself a distraction from antiracism? Asking this would lead to an interrogation of some of the issues raised by the debates on identity and how they influence the question of what race does as an instrument of power and stratification.
One figure who has published a book about the problems with identity politics is Viewpoint Magazine editor Asad Haider, for whom a ‘mistaken identity’ disrupts effective organizing around race and class in the US today (Haider 2018a). I propose to consider Haider’s 2018 book Mistaken Identity because it is representative of a body of work that engages a serious critique of identity politics while foregrounding a materialist account of race (Aouragh 2019; Kumar et al. 2018). Haider’s contribution is worth taking seriously because it sets out to avoid the colourblind pitfalls of postracialism. However, its attempt to present a new universalist politics that goes beyond the narrow choice of race or class ends up nostalgically replaying lost political opportunities, symbolized by the Haitian revolution and the 1960s US Black liberation movement, and mapping the narrow experience of the US activist scene onto the heterogeneous antiracism movement beyond its borders. Yes, we need to understand our antiracist history, but we must be careful not to mythologize what was after all a past replete with its own conflicts.
Frustration with the limitations of identity politics is a key dimension of the question ‘What’s the use of race?’, or, in the terms of this book, ‘Why does race matter?’ Haider sees race as a categorical distinction that is created by the ideology of racism (Haider 2018a; see also Fields and Fields 2012). Race is thus of no use as ‘a foundation for political analysis’ because it ‘reproduces this ideology’ (Haider 2018a: 44). This view of race as having been created out of ideological racism differs substantially from the one I have been presenting in this book: that race itself is a technology, rather than a category, that pre-exists the idea of a taxonomical system of biological ‘races’. Race, from this perspective, should be understood as a project and a process elaborated by regimes such as colonialism and slavery and within which structures and ideologies take shape over time (Wolfe 2016). Racial ideology, for Haider, reduces ‘human culture to biology’ (Haider 2018a: 44). This misses the extent to which the biological is only one register in which race is played, as I have been arguing throughout (see also Stoler and Lambert 2014). To adequately critique the insufficiency of tightly bonded concepts of identity as a basis for political action, it is necessary to elaborate more profound accounts of how the instability of race means that it requires constant remaking. In other words, it is only by having a sophisticated account of how race works, which does not reduce it to the merely ideological, that we will be equipped to build the relational interpretations that can foster more productive alliances of solidarity.
In what follows, then, I examine Haider’s problematization of what he sees as the excessive emphasis on victimhood and trauma in identity politics. This is portrayed as an obsession of contemporary social justice discourse. An examination of how it is treated in Mistaken Identity, and especially the connections Haider draws between movement politics and academic theory, leads me to ask whether the focus on these ultimately narrow debates may do more harm than good when it comes to the business of becoming more free, or, as the Italian-Ivorian trade union activist Aboubakar Soumahoro puts it, having ‘the right to happiness’ (Soumahoro 2019).
I ask what is lost when we fail to adequately explain how and why race matters in these discussions. I conclude the chapter by questioning the utility of a narrow US perspective on identity politics for antiracism in other locations that are nevertheless forced to exist in the shadows of its racial legacies.
Part of the difficulty with the way in which ‘identity politics’ are discussed is that certain precise challenges within antiracism are conflated with the problem of organizing around identity per se. Haider suggests that antiracism today is far too concerned with the impact of historical trauma on racialized people in the present. This assumes that subjugated people have no capacity to resist the effects of trauma. Haider organizes his discussion of the negative impact of the language of trauma around his experience of the 2014 occupation at the University of California Santa Cruz. During the occupation, he claims, ‘the race question already dominated everything’ (Haider 2018a: 32). He proposes that discussions held among the occupation participants were steeped in an anti-material understanding of race as equivalent to trauma which construed people of colour as always victimized. In his description, this led to protesters being divided into people of colour, on one side, and whites, on the other. The former ‘would focus on police brutality, ethnic studies, and postcolonial theory’, while the latter got to take on ‘the privatization of education and job insecurity’ (Haider 2018a: 41). Reading this, I was hoping for a more fine-grained sociological analysis of how and why this split manifested. A social movements approach may have considered the roles played by the various actors involved and been better equipped to come to a conclusion as to whether it was the participants’ identity alone that positioned them on either side of this split, or whether there were other factors in play. What would participants themselves have to say about Haider’s observations? Instead of providing this viewpoint, Haider incongruously turns to a theoretical debate within Black studies to make sense of what he sees as the narrow focus on trauma and victimhood and the detrimental impact that this has on antiracist organizing in the US today. According to Haider, the ‘reactionary separatist’ trend he witnessed in Black activism that relegated ‘white “allies” last and “brown” people … in the middle’ is derived from the status granted to the ‘pseudo-philosophy’ of Afropessimism (Haider 2018a: 38).
More than any other branch of theory, Afropessimism has been held responsible for making US Black experiences incommensurate with those of any other racialized group. Whether or not this fully characterizes the approach taken by all scholars associated with the label, many of whom do not use it for themselves, is debatable. To briefly summarize it, Afropessimist thought sees Orlando Patterson’s theorization of slavery as social death (Patterson 2018) as the abiding feature of African-American existence ‘in the wake’ of slavery (Sharpe 2016). The world since slavery, according to Afropessimism, is irremediably antiblack. Because, to cite its principal proponent, Frank Wilderson, Afropessimism ‘seeks to “destroy the world” rather than rebuild a better one’, the transformative or revolutionary aims of a previous generation of more radically aspirant students have been abandoned (Wilderson cited in Haider 2018a: 40–1).
The ‘insistence on absolute negativity’ in Afropessimism has been widely criticized from within Black thought itself. Lewis Gordon, for example, agrees that Black people face an objectively antiblack world, but he does not agree with the Afropessimists that the world itself is antiblack; an important distinction. To see the world as an ‘antiblack racist project’ is to see no point in attempting to remake it. For Gordon, this view of things renders Black struggle ‘stillborn’ (Gordon 2018a). In such a world, ‘actual people with names, experiences, dreams and desires’ are turned into ‘vulnerable and threatening bodies’ (Kelley 2016). The result, according to Gordon or Kelley, is disabling and individualizing, replacing a ‘discursive, social, and relational’ view of the human world with ‘the non-relational, the incommunicability of singularity’ (Gordon 2018a).
As we can see, then, Afropessimism at its most crude raises concerns. What I wish to interrogate here, though, is why a serious discussion of the problems around solidarity-building in US campus antiracism is conflated with a theoretical debate in Black theory. How does taking this approach add to a discussion of whether or not ‘identity politics’ have negatively impacted on the struggle against racism to the extent that they are suggested to have done by Haider and many others. In other words, while it is true that there is an ‘increasing symbiosis between activism and academia’ (Aouragh 2019: 5), we have to ask why debates that take place within universities have come to stand for problems in antiracism writ large. We might also ask where this leaves antiracists who are not students or academics.
Owing to the influence of Afropessimist thought, Haider contends, students are unable to envision more than the bare minimum of demands, appealing to a corporate university to furnish them with the accoutrements of ethnic studies: safe spaces and a decolonized curriculum. He believes this has caused them to give up on fighting for material issues which affect everyone, and arguably Black and Brown people more than anyone else, because the vicious cycle of interminable antiblackness means the fight is already lost. Haider worries that just when Black Lives Matter was showing the world the full extent of Black people’s capacity to resist in the face of unspeakable violence, a discourse that privileges Black trauma over Black agency received undue attention. It is not that Haider’s discussion of the limitations of Afropessimism necessarily misdiagnoses a theoretical difficulty. The problem is that he makes unsubstantiated assumptions about the influence of heavily contested Afropessimist ideas on the multi-sited and often internally conflicted politics that go under the banner of Black Lives Matter and antiracism more generally. When it comes to student politics, much-maligned ‘safe spaces’ are most often straightforward demands for physical protection in an increasingly volatile and polarized environment. When universities allow extremists onto campuses in the name of ‘academic freedom’ or when students burn books such as that of Latina author Jennine Capó Crucet after her talk at Georgia Southern University in October 2019, ‘safe spaces’ are a modest and justifiable demand (Beckett 2019).
Given the anger and energy driving the Black Lives Matter protests, erupting with the 2012 acquittal of George Zimmerman, accused of the murder of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, it is tenuous to claim that Afropessimist thinking was responsible for hijacking the radical potential of the movement. Yet that is what Haider intimates when he drastically expands his claim that Afropessimism had an intellectually disabling effect after the 2014 Ferguson uprisings that had activated Black Lives Matter protesters around the country. Haider states that Afropessimist language circulating on social media served ‘as an ideological ballast for the emergent bureaucracies in Ferguson and beyond’ (Haider 2018a: 40). A ‘radical rhetoric of separatism’ encouraged by Afropessimist thought ‘and the reformism of the elite leadership’ of Black Lives Matter, he claims, ‘have converged to foreclose the possibilities of building a mass movement’ (Haider 2018a: 41). However, there is little to prove that there is a direct link between the spike in interest in Afropessimist thought online and the problems of antiracist coalition-building, which have a longer and more complex history. And to call the grassroots Black movement in Ferguson a bureaucracy is also an imaginative stretch.
Haider’s argument is part of a wider trend of identifying social media as a unique source of political challenges, from the links between ‘Tumblr liberals’ and the emergence of the alt-right drawn by Angela Nagle, to the assumptions about the origins of far-right extremism on the ‘dark web’ in the wake of the Christchurch massacre. The connections are rarely as direct as it is suggested. In the case of Black Lives Matter, the movement’s history is generally narrated as having begun with a hashtag that emerged from a ‘love letter’ written by one of its founders, the Black activist Alicia Garza, and summed up in her Facebook status update of 13 July 2013: ‘Black people I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.’ Her friend and movement co-founder Patrisse Cullors put a hashtag in front of the words ‘Black lives matter’. As Garza herself notes, of course, ‘hashtags don’t start movements, people do’ (Scroggin 2016). Therefore, the extent to which BLM has been portrayed as a uniquely social media phenomenon should be treated with some scepticism (Freelon et al. 2016). People put their bodies on the line and were faced with the tear gas and rubber bullets of the trigger-happy ‘Blue Lives Matter’ police force with the backing of a largely antiblack public.
Nevertheless, Haider is justified in being concerned about the movement from the hashtag to the streets. He centres his criticisms on BLM ‘representatives’ who, spurred by social media, came to Ferguson following the protests in 2014. One such figure is Deray McKesson, then executive director of the educational not-for-profit Teach for America, an organization that promotes school privatization and opposes teachers’ unions (Haider 2018a: 41). The role played by these social justice entrepreneurs is also criticized by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in her five-year assessment of BLM (K.-Y. Taylor 2019b). And it is intimated in the documentary about grassroots activists in Ferguson, Whose Streets? (Folayan and Davis 2017). Therefore, it should not be discounted. However, it is not clear why Haider links these questions about the clash between the grassroots and platform politics with Afropessimist thought. He suggests that Afropessimist language provided cover for professionalized out-of-town activists. But the nature of the actual relationship between either Afropessimist thinkers themselves, adherents to the theory in university classrooms and online platforms, and the BLM spokespeople ‘who got the most media play’ is not made sufficiently explicit (Haider 2018a: 40). The reason why it is important to question the connections Haider draws is that it is precisely this type of fuzziness that lends itself to distracting from the important and necessary conversations that antiracists need to have.
There is plenty of evidence for the internal struggle within the Black Lives Matter movement over the involvement of figures such as McKesson. Activists on the ground at Ferguson, such as Darren Seals, who accused outsiders of ‘hijacking the Ferguson movement’ were not concerned by what discourse was used to do so (Kendzior 2016). Indeed, the words of Seals, who was found dead in suspicious circumstances in September 2016, like six other Ferguson organizers since (Dickson 2019), may well hit more Afropessimist notes than those of someone like McKesson. Seals believed that, ‘if you are a black US citizen fighting for black rights, you are the underdog – up against a white supremacist system in which brutality toward blacks is legitimized and practiced, especially by police’ (Kendzior 2016). Thus, because attacking ‘identity politics’, as we have seen throughout this chapter, has become so central to challenging the legitimacy of organizing against racial rule, we must be very careful to distinguish between contested theories and actual political practice. The extent to which the problems facing antiracism are due to bodies of thought and intellectual discussions, rather than the very clear and present threat of right-wing attacks, police infiltration, the criminalization of activism, and the top-down effort to co-opt and neutralize autonomous action, demands questioning. Why has so much airtime been given to academic arguments – in both senses of the word – about ‘identity politics’ when we could be working out solutions to exposing and ending racial oppression?
Furthermore, the suggestion that Afropessimist-inspired Black activism places too much emphasis on trauma and not enough on agency and resistance is called into question by Alexander Weheliye. Weheliye asks why we tend to equate freedom with western conceptions of humanity that see resistance and agency as central to what it means to be fully human. He is concerned that, in so doing, we risk overlooking the potential that human beings have for survival, which, although often barely perceptible, can be found even in cases of extreme ‘depravation and deprivation’ and in the places where humans have suffered most (Weheliye 2014: 39). Agency, resistance, and the neoliberal word ‘resilience’ are often mobilized to paper over the extent to which race is embedded in a Eurocentric conception of the human which divides between individual white subjects and a racialized mass of others. Weheliye looks instead for the instances in which, even when people appear to be utterly banished from the realm of humanity, their actions, no matter how small, signal the impulse that we all have for survival. This forces us to ask whether we find the political not by turning away from trauma but by looking intently at the potential for freedom therein.
Weheliye gives the example of the Muselmänner of the concentration camps, racistly named so because they were ‘so ravaged by chronic malnutrition and psychological exhaustion that they resembled phlegmatic but still living corpses’ (Weheliye 2014: 53).6 The fact that, their near-death state notwithstanding, they expressed a yearning for freedom reveals the extent to which their ‘(in)humanity is survival’ and is thus in itself political (Weheliye 2014: 121). As I now turn to discuss, it is only by failing to think critically about how it is a racial logic that establishes the criteria for what constitutes human action that we are left with a partial understanding of antiracism that highlights resistance and agency to the detriment of an observation of the minuscule, almost imperceptible, yet stealthily ever-present beating pulse of what Hortense Spillers calls ‘the flesh’ (Spillers 1987). As Audre Lorde wrote, the trauma of fear is a constant for those who live on its ‘shoreline’. It is therefore ‘better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive’ (Lorde 1978).
It should not be that because some Afropessimists view race as a ‘static ontology’ rather than a political project – which because it was created under certain historical conditions can also be overcome – that race itself loses all capacity as a framework for analysing current social conditions and fighting against them. A second problem, then, in Haider’s Mistaken Identity is to be found in his understanding of race. For Haider, ‘race discourse engages in a regression of identity to the biological, the biological disguised as the ontological … rather than inscribed on the body by the chain, the brand, and the lash’ (Haider 2018b). However, the inherent instability of race and the emphasis placed in critical scholarship on race as project and process clearly denotes that it is anything but an objective marker of identity. W. E. B. Du Bois was clear on this when he invoked the ‘badge of race’ that all those who ‘have suffered a long disaster and have one long memory’ are forced to wear (Du Bois 1940: 59). Race is attributed, not chosen. It is therefore important to distinguish between race as an analytical framework and its subversion by either the radical anti-humanism of Afropessimism, on the one hand, or the neoliberal ventriloquy of antiracist activist discourse, on the other. It is equally important not to conflate the two.
Far from race producing fixed categories, the need under racial rule to constantly submit Black people to disciplinary control exposes the intrinsic instability of the very idea of race, which purports that each ‘racial’ group coalesces around a ‘natural’ place in the world. However, if there really was an equivalence between race and identity, there would be no need to discipline and punish people with the lash, the prison, or the constant tracking of Black life because everyone would be in their ‘natural’ place. Thus, race must be understood relationally as a process of racialization that attaches to various groups of subjugated peoples differently but which coheres in the service of white supremacy (Harris 1993).
These interplays between race and identity are parsed by Hawaiian scholar Kēhaulani Kauanui, who distinguishes between race, indigeneity, and the study of Indigenous people. Kauanui remarks that,
just as critical race studies scholars insist that race is a useful category that is a distinct social formation rather than a derivative category emerging from class and/or ethnicity, indigeneity is a category of analysis that is distinct from race, ethnicity, and nationality – even as it entails elements of all three of these. However, Indigenous peoples’ assertions of distinction and cultural differences are often heard as merely essentialist and therefore resembling static identities based on fixed inherent qualities. (Kauanui 2016)
Indeed, a conflation of indigeneity with race has been at the heart of the evasion of material redress for racial-colonial rule in the settler colonial states and an erosion of hard-fought Indigenous political autonomy. In order to access a modicum of rights, Indigenous people have often been reduced to essentialized palimpsests of their past and forced to perform a cultural authenticity that in fact has been lost to many as a result of colonial dispossession. In Australia, the insertion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people into a multiculturalist framework means that it is very difficult in practice to attain the land rights enshrined in law by the 1993 Native Title Act. Communities litigating for rights to their ancestral lands are judged on whether or not they are able to demonstrate attachment to Aboriginal cultural practices, which in reality have been eroded by genocide, forced relocations, the mission system, and the theft of Aboriginal children under a policy of assimilation and racial ‘improvement’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015; Povinelli 2007; Wolfe 2016). On the flipside, child protection agencies are seen as hamstrung by so-called ‘cultural baggage’ when it comes to the protection of at-risk Aboriginal children. In reality, more Aboriginal children are being removed from their families today than at any other time in Australian history, often immediately after birth (Wahlquist 2018). In one public pronouncement on the dysfunction of Aboriginal families, social workers were described as being ‘pressured to be “culturally appropriate”… “to the detriment of Aboriginal children”’ (Bond 2018). These practices of racial rule are predicated on the still common belief that Indigenous cultures are not fit for the purposes of modern life. Indigenous demands for sovereignty thus centre on the right to a family life as well as the right to land.
Asad Haider, however, does not seem to have engaged with the writings of Indigenous scholars and activists on these and other topics. In Mistaken Identity, he conflates Indigenous sovereignty claims with the essentialist identitarianism of the ‘race first’ approach he claims to have witnessed at the UC Santa Cruz occupation. Haider could not fathom students’ opposition to ‘the very words occupy or occupation’ (Haider 2018a: 33, emphasis in original; see also Kauanui 2016). The reduction of the term to ‘celebrating the genocide of Indigenous people’ was a ‘stunning reversal of earlier academic fads’, he claims (2018a: 33), although he does not elaborate on what these ‘fads’ were. Haider himself notes the 2011 Occupy movement’s general failure to adequately address race because of its inability to ‘take hold in the poorest neighborhoods’ and ‘diversify its ranks adequately’ (2018a: 29). Therefore, his resistance to Indigenous people’s objections to the meaning of Occupy are concerning. In fact, he compartmentalizes issues in exactly the same way that he accuses others of doing when they retreat into rigid identities by failing to consider Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s insistence that,
for many Indigenous people, Occupy is another settler re-occupation on stolen land. … The pursuit of worker rights (and rights to work) and minoritized people’s rights in a settler colonial context can appear to be anti-capitalist, but this pursuit is nonetheless largely pro-colonial. That is, the ideal of ‘redistribution of wealth’ camouflages how much of that wealth is land, Native land. In Occupy, the ‘99%’ is invoked as a deserving supermajority, in contrast to the unearned wealth of the ‘1%’. It renders Indigenous peoples (a 0.9% ‘super-minority’) completely invisible and absorbed, just an asterisk group to be subsumed into the legion of occupiers. (Tuck and Yang 2012: 23)
Haider does not take into account the significance of the fact that ‘indigenous dispossession was the historical precondition for Wall Street itself’ (Kauanui 2016) and dismisses objections to the word ‘occupy’ as a signifier ‘restricted to a single meaning traced back to Christopher Columbus’ (Haider 2018a: 33). Singularly troubled by the racialized divisiveness of the UC Santa Cruz protests, Haider thus fails to consider that these conflicts take place within a context in which those of us who live on colonized lands continue to participate in the ongoing occupation of unceded sovereign country, a problem that is far from historical (Byrd 2011; Bhandar 2018; Kauanui 2016; Moreton-Robinson 2015; Wolfe 2016).
Taking Indigenous activists and scholars seriously would mean being unable to reduce their – wholly material – demands to mere victimhood claims. As Tuck and Yang point out, ‘Land (not money) is actually the basis for US wealth. If we took away land, there would be little wealth left to redistribute’ (Tuck and Yang 2012: 24). It is too easy from a settler perspective to reduce Indigenous people’s demands to victimhood and performed trauma. Doing so means claiming dominance over Indigenous people, a position which should be untenable for those who wish antiracism to be grounded in the commonality of racialized people’s struggles. Haider cannot in one breath admonish Frank Wilderson for denying the parallels between Black people in Ferguson and Palestinians under Israeli occupation,7 and in the next reduce the demands of Indigenous people and their supporters to ‘a debate that should probably have happened in a semiotics seminar’ (Haider 2018a: 33). In fact, this puts Haider uncomfortably close to Wilderson, who denies the mutually constitutive nature of antiblack and anti-native racial rule in North America. According to Wilderson, although both antiblackness and colonialism are relational dynamics, they ‘are secured by radically different structures of violence’, thus making analogy and subsequent coalition impossible (Wilderson 2016).
This is where Haider’s frustrations with race as a framework for understanding and resisting power and his complaints about the supposed dominance of the language of victimhood and trauma come together. As Indigenous people know, because they experience it every day, being told to ‘just get over it’ is a right-wing mantra repeated by the shock jocks and pundits of the Murdoch channels and tabloids and by intellectual proponents of the argument that it is time to ‘move on’ from the guilt of colonialism (Bruckner 2012; Ferguson 2004). In Australia, these arguments have been used in calls from government ministers to abolish sections of the Racial Discrimination Act.
It is not immaterial that this doubling down on the dismissal of the effects of centuries of racial domination comes at a time when, emerging from the haze of multiculturalist disappointment, more Indigenous and Black people and people of colour are talking about decolonization. From the calls to decolonize the curriculum by students in South Africa, the US, and the UK (Bhambra et al. 2018), to the rejection of the ‘recognition’ agenda by First Nations people in both Canada and Australia (Coulthard 2017) and the rise of a ‘political antiracism’ directly opposed to the ‘moral antiracism’ of ‘the white left’ in France (Bentouhami 2018), racialized people are resisting the terms of their participation as decided upon by liberal governance. It is not surprising, then, that they are met not only with ‘white innocence’ (Wekker 2016) but also, in these more openly racist times, with derision for ‘playing the victim’; always a strategy for deflecting from demands for reparation, autonomy and sovereignty. Might it not be the case that what is interpreted as the overemphasis of victimhood and trauma is in fact the demand for Euro-American societies to face up to the ongoing effects of colonization, genocide, and slavery at a time of deep white crisis?
The (re)turn to anticolonialism is grounded in the realization that the demands of racialized people for inclusion, acceptance, and recognition have largely failed. I think Asad Haider agrees, and he correctly diagnoses the limitations of assimilation and multiculturalism in his discussion of the struggle of religious Muslim women banned from wearing the veil since 2004 in France. However, the way he approaches this theme reveals that he is not aware of French antiracist politics, reading it instead from his vantage point on the US left. This is clear in the way he frames his discussion as a critique of ‘liberal rights discourse’ by imagining the campaign against the hijab ban as a timid request for social inclusion. Haider argues that fighting against the hijab ban should not be organized around ‘a defence of the rights of Muslims’. He points out that emphasizing rights over freedom privileges ‘the perspective of liberal tolerance [and] traps the Muslims it claims to defend within a victimized identity rather than joining them in a project of collective emancipation’ (Haider 2018a: 104). However, to propose that French Muslim activists and their supporters frame their struggle around ‘rights’ reveals Haider’s lack of knowledge of the realities of French activist debates. While this has been a feature of Muslim French campaigns against Islamophobia, it does not adequately describe the position taken by most activists, faced today with an onslaught of top-down discrimination, mediatized hate speech, and violence on the streets. Haider’s mischaracterization results in a conflation of what he calls the ‘liberal tolerance’ perspective with the actual demands of anti-Islamophobia campaigners in France. It exposes the wider problem of imposing a narrow perspective on race, grounded in particular US debates, on the world in general.
Similar to his amalgamation of Afropessimist discourse and Black Lives Matter, Haider problematically juxtaposes French philosopher Alain Badiou’s criticism of ‘today’s self-congratulatory discourse of moral responsibility and the ethics of military intervention’ (Haider 2018a: 105) with Muslim French demands. Prominent transatlantic neoconservatives such as Bernard-Henri Lévy or former French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, a proponent of western military intervention in Syria, are made to appear adjacent to the demands of Muslims and their supporters when Haider claims they mobilize a discourse of victimhood and appeal to the French state to recognize their rights. Haider, following Badiou, criticizes ‘humanitarian interventionists’ for seeing those on whose behalf they intervene as nothing but victims. However, campaigners against Islamophobia have nothing in common with these neoconservative ideologues. In fact, not only do French proponents of ‘humanitarian intervention’ have no concern for the rights of Muslims in France, they also have disdain for them, often supporting their outlook with racist statements about Muslims. For example, Lévy declared in 2006 that ‘the veil is an invitation to be raped’ (Pitt 2006). While he sees the Jewish head covering as a ‘religious symbol,’ the Muslim veil is ‘a political emblem’. He has also criticized Green Party Senator Esther Benbassa for claiming ‘that a miniskirt is no less alienating than a chador’ (Lévy 2016). In a less offensive tone, Kouchner, while admitting that the ban on the hijab and the burqa would draw international criticism, said it was necessary for the sake of ‘women’s dignity’ (20 Minutes 2010).
Far from being seen as victims, in reality, mainstream opposition to Islam casts Muslims as threats to French society and mores. France is presented as the real victim, forced to bear more than its fair share of the brunt of Islamic fundamentalism. No more clearly can this be seen than in the growing acceptance of the aforementioned discourse of ‘anti-white racism’, not only on the extreme- and centre-right, but also on the left, including among several leading French antiracist associations (A. Lentin and Titley 2011; Munier 2014; Vincent 2012).
Haider uses his misreading of a local case to make the theoretical point he actually wants to make about the primacy of victimhood in antiracist rhetoric. In his view, a discourse of victimhood has travelled from the identity politics margins to the right and the centre. Haider argues, following Wendy Brown, that the state’s construction of rights in relation to groups perceived in terms of the ‘particularities of their injured identities’ is anti-emancipatory (W. Brown 1995; Haider 2018a: 105). Nevertheless, these claims require a much stronger grounding in the evidence, especially where the chosen example of French state Islamophobia is concerned. Indeed, French foundations for the need to take a strong stance against ‘ostentatious religious coverings’ have had recourse to many avenues of legitimation. But the signification of the veil in the context of France’s defeat in Algeria – when France to this day continues to paint itself as the unjustifiably injured victim – is undeniable (Fanon 2007 [1965]). So, it is not possible to separate contemporary Islamophobia, ongoing settler colonial domination of Indigenous lands, or, indeed, racism more broadly from colonialism, not only in the past, but also today in the state’s treatment of Indigenous peoples and those racialized as other than white. Race matters here because the assignation of victimhood is itself a racial-colonial determination; colonizers reserve the right both to reduce Indigenous, Black, or migrant demands to performances of victimhood and to cast themselves as victimized in the face of these demands. It is another example of the way in which political conflicts are made to work in and through race. In these debates, the marginalized are given roles and forced to play according to racial rules.
Haider concludes Mistaken Identity with a call for an ‘insurgent universality’ (Haider 2018a: 109). However, his arguments remain focused on particular political disagreements on the US left, so it is questionable whether they can form the basis for a new universalist politics unshackled by the false universalism of Euro-modernity. If a major problem facing antiracism today is the mistranslation of local specificities across the accelerated times and flattened spaces of digital communications, we will not be better served by further contributing to the mapping of antiracism in the US onto other contexts. A view from the periphery might serve to temper the zero-sum mood that pessimism about the dominance of identity politics creates.
Colonizers reserve the right both to reduce Indigenous, Black, or migrant demands to performances of victimhood and to cast themselves as victimized in the face of these demands.
There is no golden era of antiracism, a time when it was not beset by internal conflicts around representation, respectability, or gendered hierarchies, and externally thwarted by paternalism, tokenism, or subsumption under the weightier concerns of class solidarity or universalist feminism. Today, at a time when the FBI has created a new category of crime – ‘black identity extremists’ – which criminalizes protesters who act ‘in response to perceived racism and injustice in American society’ (Blades 2018, emphasis added), separating something called ‘identity politics’ from social justice struggles in general might just be handing the right a language with which to further justify an increasingly repressive agenda. There is no equal fight between ‘white identity politics’ and race consciousness ‘as a source of survival and support against a violent modern humanity committed to a “race” system’ (M. White 2019). How we navigate conflict and division does not have to come at the expense of recognizing this.
As I now turn to suggest, the increased tendency for top-down condemnations of antisemitism to act as a proxy for antiracism means that a politics that is attentive to the structures and strictures of race is more urgent than ever.