Armadilha da Identidade: Raça e Classe nos Dias de Hoje

by Asad Haider

Desafiando a maneira como entendemos a história da luta antirracista, este livro enfrenta a uma discussão central na política contemporânea. Qual fator é mais importante: classe ou raça? Para demolir o impasse gerado por tal polêmica, Asad Haider recorre ao rico legado da luta contra o racismo nos Estados Unidos. E, baseando-se nas palavras e ações dos teóricos revolucionários negros, argumenta que a política de identidade não é sinônimo de luta antirracista, mas, ao contrário, equivale à neutralização de seus movimentos. É a partir de Malcolm X, dos Panteras Negras e de vários outros pensadores revolucionários que Haider sustenta a urgência da solidariedade e da luta coletiva contra uma estrutura social opressiva. Para o jornal inglês The Guardian, este é o melhor livro já escrito sobre o identitarismo: “é fascinante. Haider se move com destreza em terrenos difíceis. Sua escrita é precisa e instigante. Seu marxismo não é um mausoléu, mas uma coisa viva que respira, e realiza o que Lênin chamou de ‘análise concreta da situação concreta’, fiel ao método do materialismo histórico, embora flexível diante de uma realidade social fluida. E ele escreve tanto como um militante quanto como um teórico, alguém que acredita que a teoria é parte integrante da luta política e que o rigor teórico é uma ferramenta política”.

“Brilhante e oportuno, ao mesmo tempo reflexão e provocação”.
Judith Butler

“Um livro espetacular que mostra como a esquerda pode ser salva desse oceano de pessimismo e desespero”
Paul Gilroy

"Lúcido e ferozmente polêmico”
Commune

“Vigoroso, inteligente e delicioso de ler, Armadilha da Identidade é um livro maravilhoso”.
Wendy Brown

“Ao mesmo tempo fascinante e provocativo, Armadilha da Identidade se afasta das brigas no Twitter e dos artigos de opinião para contextualizar os debates sobre política identitária e reconfigurar como a ideia de raça conforma os movimentos de esquerda”
The Intercept

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Race, Philosophy, Sociology, Theory, History

164 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2018

About the author

Asad Haider was a founding Editor of Viewpoint Magazine, an investigative journal of contemporary politics. He is the author of Mistaken Identity and a co-editor for The Black Radical Tradition. His writing can be found in The Baffler, n+1, The Point, Salon, and elsewhere.

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 4 out of 5]

4-Star Checklist

☑ A perspective that is shaped by both Universalism and (perhaps unbeknownst to Haider himself...) Individualism: we all belong to the same species; our shared humanity is just as precious as our unique identities. An intelligent mind can recognize that we each have our individual selves and that recognition of our own individuality means we must also recognize the individuality of others; a compassionate mind understands that despite our differences, we all draw from the same palette of human emotions and common, often shared experiences. A wise mind is able to hold both ideas simultaneously.

☑ An understanding that no single identifying trait should be uplifted as the most important identifier for any single individual. Class is of key importance. Race is vitally important. Gender is fundamentally important. Sexual orientation is highly important. All are important. None are the most important. Division of groups into any one trait divides; bringing these groups together unites. Unites to do what? Unites to form a movement! A movement to do what? A movement for equality! This movement is at the heart of all struggles. One fights for another and that fight is for all. Haider identifies himself as a part of this struggle.

☑ An author who contextualizes his ideas by sharing his own life experiences. I love the qualitative. As the saying goes, the personal is political. An author who provides data and citations to back up his rhetoric. I also love the quantitative. As the saying goes, come with receipts.

☑ A book that reminded me of the heady days of my mid-twenties, after moving to San Francisco in the '90s. The frequent focus on class struggle: the ethos of doing the right thing and fighting the good fight, the pathos of recognizing the struggles of all people and how that struggle will never end, the logos of understanding how corporatization and unfettered capitalism will always equal dehumanization and unending inequality. Ah, the sweet nostalgia that this book inspired! I appreciated the walk down memory lane. I also appreciated the arguments that I had in my head with Haider, because not a Marxist over here. And I appreciated that despite my disagreements, I always respected and often admired his perspective.

☞ All requirements for entry into 4-Star Club have been satisfied. Congratulations, Asad Haider!


Progress Notes

Chapter 1: Identity Politics

Haider starts his book in an inspiring place: describing the intersectional goals of the Combahee River Collective, a 1970s group of black lesbian militants. "Intersectional" in the classic sense (and prior to the actual creation of the word by Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 80s), not in the victimhood-embracing modern sense. The CRC first came to the phrase "identity politics" as a way to recognize the specific challenges of specific demographics while at the same time using that recognition of unique challenges to build bridges to other coalitions who also had both unique and shared challenges. The point being that recognizing those unique challenges meant to the CRC that they were building an integrated, multicultural feminist movement that respected diversity, rather than creating a monolithic movement that ignored difference.

It becomes clear in this chapter that Haider will be coming primarily from a place of anti-capitalist critique and will be centering the importance of recognizing class differences.

Chapter 2: Contradictions Among the People

An illuminating chapter in its detailing of Haider's (I guess you could call it) "loss of innocence" at UC Santa Cruz, as he witnessed the unraveling of a grassroots anti-capitalist movement due to what essentially becomes a sectarian struggle within that movement, one that eventually dismembered and then cannibalized itself. Liberals who put on their revolutionary outfits surely do love their circular firing squads. Not much has changed since the early 2000s. Or since revolutionary France!

"When the lethal effects of white supremacy are exerted by a racially integrated ruling class, blackness as an antipolitical void becomes a convenient subject position for the performance of marginality."

Wow, Haider comes for both the racially integrated yet toxically neoliberal and anti-working class Obama administration and that racially divisive, tunnel-visioned purveyor of Afro-pessimism, the ivory tower-dwelling Frank Wilderson. It is simultaneously refreshing and nostalgic reading the perspective of such an ardent, old school Leftist. Certainly, back in the day, my own socialist and anarchist friends felt similarly, but were too shy of attacking modern-day identity politics, due to their own group identity as a multiracial (but, admittedly, predominately white) coalition of, well, coalition-builders.

I appreciate the author's boldness when it comes to confronting the incendiary, faux-empowering rhetoric inspired by POC separatists. Ones who actually ignore the fact that POC exist, struggle, and fight on both sides of their imposed divisions. Ones who actually play into the hands of racially integrated elites whose main loyalty is to neoliberal capitalism and whose vision of an American Dream is one that has been repurposed as a drive for inclusion within the ranks of complacent bourgeois.

"In Santa Cruz, the ideology of identity took us further and further away from a genuinely emancipatory project. Its consequences were not only the demobilization of the movement but also a degrading political parcelization. In the absence of a credible identitarian claim, anti-neoliberal struggles, like the movement against tuition hikes, were artificially separated from "race" issues. "POC" activists would focus on police brutality, ethnic studies, and postcolonial theory; the increasing cost of living, the privatization of education, and job insecurity became "white" issues. I began to realize what a drastic mistake it was when anxious white commentators represented identity politics as an extremist form of opposition to the status quo. This experience showed me that identity politics is, on the contrary, an integral part of the dominant ideology; it makes opposition impossible. We are susceptible to it when we fail to recognize that the racial integration of the ruling class and the political elites has irrevocably changed the field of political action."

Chapter 3: Racial Ideology

A thrilling section! Chapter 3 outlines the challenges that will always arise if class struggle does not respect the unique struggles experienced by people of color. This is a further encapsulation of the Combahee River Collective perspective.

He begins by unpacking Peggy McIntosh's always relevant and always problematic article "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" and its frustratingly ahistorical reliance on the idea of "whiteness" as an intrinsically biological trait. Rather than a relatively new definition that reframed racism as being solely anti-blackness.

"As [Theodore] Allen put it on the back cover of his extraordinary vernacular history The Invention of the White Race: 'When the first Africans arrived in 1619, there were no white people there.'

At the most immediate level, Allen was pointing to the fact that the word white didn't appear in Virginia colonial law until 1691. Allen's argument was to show that racism was not attached to a concept of the white race...

The clearest example is that of the Irish, whose racial oppression by the English precedes their racial oppression of Africans by several centuries... What the example of the Irish illustrates is a form of racial oppression that is not based on skin color and that in fact precedes the very category of whiteness."

Haider continues with the Irish example in the context of the Irish-American immigrant experience. He describes how this new American definition of "whiteness" had as its primary goal the creation of division within those who should be natural allies: the multiracial working class...

"But what Irish immigrants realized after immigrating to the United States is that they could ameliorate their subjugation by joining the club of the white race... They could be members of a 'white race' with higher status if they actively supported the continuing enslavement and oppression of African Americans. So the process of becoming white meant that these previous racial categories were abolished and racialized groups like the Irish were progressively incorporated into the white race as a means of fortifying and intensifying the exploitation of black laborers."

Chapter 4: Passing

Haider uses the case of Rachel Dolezal to frame his discussion on What Is Authenticity and how black identity is not only non-monolithic, black identities (as with all identities) can shift and move between class and racial divides and can therefore alternately ignore, embrace, or reject different forms of identity politics in order to engage in different ways with systems impacting not only black Americans, but all non-middle and elite-class Americans.

He first visits the identity-based psychosocial fiction of Phillip Roth and then, after detailing a clash between the two, deep-dives into Amiri Baraka's life journey through a range of identities. Interesting stuff. Haider tracks Baraka's move from hipster poet embraced by and embracing a predominately white bohemian subset through his shift into a radical cultural nationalist who, due to the civil rights movement, utterly rejects his former milieu and is now determined to establish black people within positions of political power, and finally to his transformation into a universalist class analyst who has realized that the true struggle to uplift Americans should be focused on anti-capitalism and class, rather than a mono-focus on race.

Clearly, the description of Baraka's life trajectory is an analogy for Haider's thesis on how class should take precedence over - or at least be equal to - racial identity, in a nutshell. Or, I suppose, a human shell? The idea of skin color being the shell that covers multiple identities and potential trajectories is an interesting one. But possibly only interesting to me because I literally just came up with that analogy. LOL, self-impressed much, mark?

Chapter 5: Law and Order

The author provides an overview of modern political struggles in the UK as a way of highlighting both the differences and commonalities such struggles have in the US. Haider focuses on how a multi-identity coalition came together to support union rights, was successfully demonized and (somewhat) divided by canny Thatcherites, and whose language and ideas around what could loosely be described as "uplift the people and respect diversity" was then successfully co-opted by neoliberals. He sees a similar history in the US, beginning with Reagan's neoliberalism and continuing on through the Clinton administration's various hypocrisies and their own successful co-opting and mainstreaming (white-sizing? sad LOL) of what was once genuinely revolutionary rhetoric, now repurposed to support the goals of neoliberalism, including its shallow enshrinement of diversity as a supposed central tenet.

Chapter 6: Universality

In this final chapter, Haider delivers his thesis in his most direct way yet: to be a successful movement that does not become prey to the co-opting tactics of neoliberal governments that appear to embrace diversity while eschewing recognition of multiracial working class struggles (all the better to divide), movements must center Universality. Not necessarily in the European sense of the idea - hard to get past the racial divisiveness and atrocities committed by the supposedly enlightened Western model - but in an even broader sense. A universality that rejects any position that one must fight for specific identities and replaces it with the idea that fighting for one identity is fighting for all identities. A universality that is specifically anti-capitalist in nature, above all things. This is a classic Marxist perspective, of course.

I was reminded of how the phrase "All Lives Matter" could have been used as a successful universalist organizing principle, if the phrase hadn't started as a reactionary response to Black Lives Matter. And so has not only been weaponized to attack that movement, but now is seen as an idea that must be... scorned?

"...when the liberal language of rights is used to defend a concrete identity group from injury, physical or verbal, that group ends up defined by its victimhood and individuals end up reduced to their victimized belonging...

when rights are demanded by a particular identity group and the whole horizon of politics is the defense of this category, its members end up fixed as victims. Rights themselves end up reduced to a reaction to an injury inflicted on this victim. Their emancipatory content disappears...

this liberal paradigm of rights and the defense of victims is the foundation of imperialism, of so-called 'humanitarian interventions.' The civilizing mission of imperialism, the 'white man's burden,' claims to defend the mere physical existence of people. People are reduced to animals, excluded from politics; because they are unable to act politically on their own, they require the protection of a state...

Our world is in dire need of a new insurgent universality. We are capable of producing it; we all are, by definition. What we lack is program, strategy, and tactics. If we set the consolations of identity aside, that discussion can begin."

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a brief but energetic, sweeping book which neatly outlines Asad Haider's critiques of what he terms 'identity politics', themselves formed through his experience of political organising and his work within the Viewpoint collective. I agree with most of his conclusions: with the weaknesses and dangers of 'identity' as an organising category (and the pain of trying to 'find' an identity, almost as a condition for being political), with the troubling implications of a focus on 'bodies', with the way that anti-racist politics can be misdirected into the satisfaction of white guilt, with the need to move towards a more universal understanding of liberation. Haider makes his arguments through a series of anecdotes, intertwined with extensive references to a range of intellectuals and histories: Judith Butler, Malcolm X, Barbara Fields, Amiri Baraka, the New Communist Movement, Stuart Hall, Alain Badiou, Wendy Brown, etc. Names that certainly appeal to me! Haider also demonstrates a healthy engagement with more recent scholarship - perhaps unsurprising, given so much of the best of it has come via Viewpoint; I was particularly pleased to see a citation for Diarmaid Kelliher's work on the 1984-85 strike.

However, Haider's combination of anecdote and quotation can serve to disguise the book's weakness (understandable given its brevity) in terms of original research. Whilst largely well-grounded theoretically and historically, Mistaken Identity relies most upon anecdote for its description of the present situation. This is where a danger creeps in that Haider is taking up as his focus an 'identity politics' that nobody really believes in - rebuking the far-right's criticisms but sharing their target. I'm not suggesting that Haider is setting up a straw-man, and I suspect that research would find most of his claims valid, but it's telling how little his work discusses actually-existing political movements outside Occupy and Black Lives Matter. How does 'identity politics' as Haider refers to them play out within, for example, the DSA? For a work which rightly applauds previous studies' attempts to grapple with the material and the particular of 'race' and 'class', Mistaken Identity feels like an introduction to the work Haider could have written on what these look like right now.

Similarly, it should be clear to everyone that the Democrats - whose co-optation of nominally progressive language draws much of Haider's ire - are not the sole enemy in the USA. Although he does criticise vehemently both the far-right and socialists that dismiss race, Haider could talk more about the dangers that both of these pose and the understanding of 'identity politics' which they rely upon. Certainly in the British context, I am much less worried about 'identity politics' (which, for all its problems, has brought numerous people to socialism and is making socialist organising more accessible) than I am about the growth in supposedly left-wing politics which are openly hostile to 'identity'.

I'm also sceptical about some of Haider's historical contentions. Although I would accept his distinguishing between a more 'original', non-essentialist, radically universal politics mobilising identity (including the earliest proponents of 'identity politics' in the Combahee River Collective) and an ossified, essentialist, coo-opted 'identity politics', I am less convinced that there is a temporal gap between them. It seems to me that these politics have always existed and continue to exist, that the danger of the latter is always latent in the former - that there absolutely are groups today in the mould of Combahee, and there are 'identity politics' activists whose concept of identity is anti-essentialist (or at least only strategically essentialist). Again, it's a weakness of the book that Haider doesn't really try to explore what's out there now. Equally, I'm unconvinced by the suggestion that the earlier iteration of 'identity politics' has been politically exhausted by its own success - that the end of legal segregation has been accomplished and that the models of organising which were developed against it have therefore lost their applicability. It doesn't seem to me that the epoch of civil rights is irreversibly closed, that those victories cannot be rolled back - and that would be even more clear if the book was to consider gender as well as class, and especially to trans struggle against ongoing legal oppression/exclusion. I'm not certain that Haider is correct to claim that only mass organisation can be politically effective in the current situation, that more individual acts around 'identity' are necessarily fruitless - it seems to me that individuals that disrupt imposed 'identities' are still doing *something*.

It is perhaps because Haider does not outline decisively what 'class' or 'race' look like in our concrete situation that the book seems to flit wildly between different ideas of what shape Haider wants socialist politics to take. Is the model the socialist universalism of the Communist Party and party-building, subsuming all identity into the identity of the comrade? That seems to be one of Haider's messages, with its celebration of the 1930s CP and to a certain extent the 1970s-80s New Communist Movement. Or is the model the 'Rainbow Coalition' forged by the Black Panther Party, or the networks of activists including Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and the women's support groups which formed during the miners' strike? Those are two different, albeit sometimes in practice overlapping, models: one as the supercession of identity, the other as the complex articulation of identities within a larger movement. Where does Haider stand on the DSA's caucuses, or (looking further back) the Labour Party's Black Sections? Where does he stand on the struggles over autonomous organising within the old Communist Parties?

However, I would like to refute the suggestion - fairly widespread, and predicted by Haider - that this book somehow advances a 'class-first' politics. He has been badly let down by Verso's decision to shift attention in the subtitle from 'anti-racism' and 'white supremacy' to the more attention-grabbing 'Race and Class in the Age of Trump'. That isn't to say he doesn't lapse into it on occasion - I'm certainly suspicious about some claims which seem to situate the 'working class' as having existed for as long as capitalism (contra, say, E.P. Thompson), or as some sort of original, unpolluted and anti-racist 'working class' which was shattered by manipulative elites. But the broad sweep of Haider's argument is against conceiving of politics in this way. Early on, Haider makes an excellent argument against the 'Holy Trinity' of class and gender and race, which sets each of them up as simultaneously distinct and equivalent, as terms for homogeneous oppressions between which parallels can be drawn. Haider simply doesn't conceive of politics in a way that 'class' could be first, because he doesn't think of them as monolithic identities to be placed in some sort of hierarchy. I agree with him here, and criticisms which are too eager to cast the 'class-first' net are mistaken in my opinion. What about an understanding of 'class' (e.g. that of Michael Lebowitz) to which oppressions based on 'race' and 'gender' are internal, rather than opposed? What about an analysis which recognises the significance of 'class' and 'race' and 'gender' but tries to ground them in the material rather than the realm of 'identity'? What about a socialist politics which doesn't regard itself as based on any identity except the identity of socialist, or perhaps 'the people'? It is the latter position to which Haider most cleaves, and that is why the accusations that he is a 'class-first' socialist fall flat - criticisms like 'but class is also an identity' don't work when Haider is making exactly that point. He is precisely not arguing for a party based on the working class - like the Labour Party in Britain - any more than he is arguing for the Nation of Islam. His concluding chapter, which sets out his advocacy of a radical and strategic universalism, barely even mentions 'class'. I don't know exactly what he wants, and without rigorous study it would be impossible to. But I do know that he is thinking about it with greater precision than virtually all of his critics - whether partisans of 'identity politics' or of the identity politics of class.

[Tucker · Rating 4 out of 5]

When faced with injustice, people retreat to identity politics for its "consolations." This is better than retreating to fundamentalism, but not as good as “the project of universal emancipation, of a global, revolutionary solidarity, [that] can only be realized through organization and action.” Informed by “Malcolm X and Huey Newton’s critiques of the precursors of identity politics,” Haider understands identity politics as “the neutralization of movements against racial oppression,” especially “in service of the advancement of political and economic elites.” One way in which this plays out negatively is when poor white people and poor black people assume each other to be enemies rather than seeing each other as victimized in similar ways by the same capitalist hierarchy.

Despite the subtitle, this book really has nothing to do with Trump, other than to note that 36 years earlier Ronald Reagan had campaigned on the “reactionary wave” of ‘Let’s make America great again!’ and introduced “the era of neoliberalism” (so apparently the Trump phenomenon was in the making) and that “authoritarian populism” has “attack[ed] the possibility of strategic alliances” between workers’ movements and social movements.

He thinks that identity politics attract many people because its goals seem attainable (working within the system to extract “the temporary protection of individual comfort”) in contrast with striving for broader social change, a goal that seems out of reach for many pessimists. But pessimistic expressions of the perceived severity of marginalization — he talks about “Afro-pessimist language” in particular — and embracing that intensely negative state as essential to one’s identity is perhaps a poor strategy, in his opinion, given that it seems to contradict the strategy of radical hopefulness led by those who see themselves as part of “a global struggle to refuse to accept suffering, to refuse to die.” He is also skeptical of basing political theory on “what we see and feel”; if all we can say is that we feel terribly oppressed, we don’t have enough of a conceptual toolkit to interpret how the oppressive system actually works against us and how we might unwittingly participate in it. Furthermore, in a case he cites from his own organizing experience, when people of color give a significant amount of attention to issues like “police brutality, ethnic studies, and postcolonial theory,” it can, in practice, mean that they don’t have time to focus on “the increasing cost of living, the privatization of education, and job insecurity,” issues that then become seen as the focus of white people in different splinter groups. In that situation, the white activists, in turn, might then perceive the racial identity politics by people of color as “extremist.”

Haider cites an insight of Foucault and Butler: the modern liberal state begins with “collectivities of people” and inflicts its power upon them which somehow atomizes them into individual “political subjects—the basic political unit of liberalism, after all, is the individual.” People are taught that they have rights as individuals so they must state that their personal identity has somehow been wronged if they are to get reparations from the state. In so doing, they take an identity that was a source of shame and transform it into pride, a process that is consciously and unconsciously appealing, as Gilroy has noted, and thus they feel greater attachment to their identity. But that journey to pride is never complete. He quoted another author as saying that our identities seem to become more about "injury" than "emancipation." Of course, you must be injured in the first place to have a need for emancipation, so the tension never goes away. Perhaps worse yet, these narratives feed the people who are ranked socially higher, since they are invited to look down upon the marginalized from "the perspective of liberal tolerance," to see them as "requir[ing] protection from above," and consent to give them their rights "rather than joining them in a project of collective emancipation." Identities then, Haider writes, are "totalizing and reductive. Our political agency through identity is exactly what locks us into the state, what ensures our continued subjection.”

He talks about how Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989 to refer to a specific legal situation in which black women had trouble gaining legal recognition of their discrimination. Once sexism and racism had been declared not to exist (because white women and black men did not suffer discrimination in a particular situation), there was no way of acknowledging and redressing obvious problems faced by black women (apart from calling it bad luck on the part of certain people, clearly an unsatisfying analysis). Today the discussion of “intersectionality” is no longer so technical and restricted to legal matters. Instead, people want to claim the most oppressed victim status as a badge of pride, “inviting the construction of baroque and unnavigable intersections consisting of the litany of different identities to which a given person might belong.”

He talks a bit about how race doesn't survive an infinite staredown and eventually reveals itself as an illusion. Each person is unique, and the identity labels we claim are often too abstract to make sense of our unique situations. The more “obvious” the abstraction seems to us, the closer it is to “ideology” than reality. White people may look obviously white, but when you start to unpack the metaphorical knapsack of personal qualities that could make them white, you find seemingly irrelevant things like “hair length, gait, dietary preference, computer skills” in addition to a set of privileges, and it’s hard to find “the organizing principle” of whiteness. (Or, as I’d put it, it’s like the fable of the sage who asked someone to disassemble a chariot and then asked, ‘Where is the chariot?’) Haider believes that the larger construct (properly understood) is political and collective and that our personal identities are its component parts. We cannot see the political chariot when it’s lying in individual fragments. We should start with awareness of how the parts fit together into “the social structure and its constitutive relations”.

Identity politics may once have been motivated by revolutionary politics against a common oppressor, but today it begins with personal identity rather than collective political struggle, easily slides into “the individual’s demand for recognition,” and makes it harder for people to organize. This is seen when people begin to organize but, wrapped in their own particular grievances, they become suspicious of their fellows’ ability to accord them sufficient recognition and they end up splintering into small identity-based groups with separate messages and agendas. Weakened by their infighting, which makes the different factions of the movement look unattractive to potential new members, and split by separatist ideology into “a degrading political parcelization,” they cannot accomplish nearly as much as if they worked together. Thus identity politics “paradoxically ends up reinforcing the very norms it set out to criticize.”

Some sentences in this book were clear and elegant, others nearly impenetrable. To make sense of it all, I found myself recalling a college course I took two decades ago on race and gender theory, without which educational background I would have had a little more difficulty reading this.

The hardest part for me to understand was Haider’s occasional mention of the problem posed by the gradually increasing racial integration of the elite class. He stated this without ever fully explaining it. As best as I can tell: He believes that, even as more people of color join the elite class, the elite will still be unable to change its ideology of power. Young, rising, black politicians see the need to prove their mettle according to the elite’s standards and values. Despite their own racial identity, they will enforce the elite values; they will throw subversive activists under the bus; nothing will change.

At the end of the book, he also raises the paradox of how someone can take pride in according a certain exceptionalism or privilege to their own group's ideology (for example, so-called Jewish values or argumentation) and yet use that particular intellectual method to allegedly discover or affirm that everyone is equal and that no one should be treated as exceptional. This is indeed a paradox, but, as he raised it only in the final pages of the book, it wasn't fully addressed.

He ends by insisting that the universalist strategy is necessary and feasible and only requires us to chip in the work of "program, strategy, and tactics." Those three crucial how-tos were not covered in this book. I can't say I know what the program, strategy, and tactics of a universalist movement would look like.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

A provocative and compelling critique of so-called “identity politics” – but not from the stereotypical angry white men of the right, but from a Pakistani immigrant on the left.

Haider’s argument in short is that an overweening focus on individual identity divides and weakens the system-shaking class alliances that are needed to defeat oppression of all kinds. As I say, the idea that a universalist struggle can overcome the racism, sexism and other -isms and phobias of modern capitalist society is compelling; I’m not sure Haider really completes the sale.

One problem is that while Haider’s anecdotal experiences help illustrate the shortfalls of stereotypical campus identity politics, where young adults run away with new ideas without necessarily developing the empathy or wisdom needed to apply them appropriately, he never takes the time to define “identity politics” in a practical sense. So in a way, Haider is battling a strawman – an argument of his own making without any sense of whether it’s connected to actual real-life experiences.

The other problem is closely connected to that one: Haider does not pay out any practical steps for shifting from a liberal identitarian politics (assuming it exists as Haider claims) to a leftist universalist politics.

One of Marxism’s key contributions to the political and philosophical (and theological) conversation is the importance of praxis – it insists that results matter, that economics and politics must have practical, real-life benefits for the masses. In neglecting praxis, Haider provides an interesting, well-written and -researched, thought-provoking critique of a concept that may or may not be real and proposes a response that may or may not be realistic.

I give this 3.5 stars – 4 stars for the writing and pleasure of reading it, 2-3 for the incomplete argument.

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Haider's argument here is short, dense, and stronger on critique. Haider tries to walk a fine line between universalized calls of liberation, particularly black liberation, and a critique of identitarianism and nationalism. The introductory essay states Haider's personal stakes and establishes a pedigree, and his selection of example cases: Malcolm X, Judith Butler, Combahee River Collective, the Black Panther's, the tension between Philip Roth and Amiri Baraka, all construct a case for a universalist and class-based politics.

The case studies are interesting because he pulls so much from outside of Marxism to try to make a case for a classical Marxist universality, but they are also highly selective. In mentioning the Black Panther Party, he seems to speak of it as unified in its approach, ignoring the tensions between Cleaver, Newton, and Hampton often on exactly the issues he is trying to establish a clear pattern on. Haider also focuses on Malcolm X's post-conversion to Sunni Islam rhetoric but doesn't deal with of the ambiguity of Malcolm X's stances towards the end of his life or the way Carmichael tried to pick up that legacy. Amiri Baraka's journey into nationalism is seen as a cautionary tale ending in the Rainbow coalition and Jesse Jackson's campaign, but Haider doesn't comment on the controversies around Baraka's nationalism at the end of Baraka's life. Furthermore, while Haider is often quite good on the historical development and logical problems of things like Afro-pessimism or the problems of the nation of Islam, Haider does not go deeply into the contradictions of past. Haider's use of the radical work of the CPUSA in the 1920s and its dissolution in the popular front and subordination to a Democratic party still loaded with segregationist Dixiecrats isn't given enough attention. I could go on, but the historical selectivity is problematic. While this works for polemic, it's not as convincing to those who know the ambiguities that Haider isn't mentioning.

If one were to analyze this in terms of classical rhetoric: this is a polemic that first goes for an ethos appeal, then is long on example and counter-argument, but the substance of what Haider believes the answer to be short. His discussion of juridical and insurgent universality posits a binary beyond the former's liberal view of universal rights as formal and legal and the latter's emergence. Yet Haider, frankly, does not clarify what the substance of this insurgent universality is to actually be.

Haider's fondness for post-structuralist and structuralists for a theoretical framework to ground his Marxism in leaves me a little confused. Althusser's ideology is involved to explain things that Haider has given a better history of its material development, so it seems like a theoretical crutch. His use of Foucault and Butler are interesting, and he seems to be an attempt to reconcile them to an older Marxist and modernist understanding of universality as opposed to standpoint models often assumed. This is interesting and somewhat novel, although, with Butler's critique's of both gender and Zionism, Haider seems to be a fairly strong grounds.

Haider's discussion of the 60s CPUSA's white-skinned privilege and McIntosh essay is effective, and Haider does pick up some historical threads other studies of privilege theory seemed to have missed. Yet, most of his criticisms here have already been made and in many cases in much more through and sustained ways. Haider's points about diversification of the elites and its lack of effect on everyday people are strongly made, but again, our authors have pointed this out all over the political spectrum.
Haider's point that identity politics “paradoxically ends up reinforcing the very norms it set out to criticize” is something many others, including myself, have said since it first emerged as a trend in the new left.

I sound particularly critical of this, but I think, despite some selectivity in its historical examples and unsatisfactoriness of the conclusions, Haider does manage to take a lot of different critiques of contemporary thinking about identity as a political category and point out how superficial these notions actually are. Indeed, Haider's discussion of how the apocalypticism of Afro-pessimism ends up reinforcing many status quo notions is one of the best critiques I have seen and he does it in a few pages. His historical examples, while mostly Anglophile and British or American, do unearth bits of history and historical connections I didn't see or know despite being fairly well-versed in many things Haider is writing about. Yet, Haider's love for post-structuralism and structuralism--he was educated when these things were out of falling out of vogue as his introduction tells us and this puts him between five-and-seven years younger than me, seems odd. It is not that it is dated, though the examples do feel contemporary, the theory is from the 1980s and 1990s, but that Haider is trying to reconcile it with Marxist Humanist values of the early 20th century which many of the post-structuralists were trying to replace.

While the book is polemical and often grounded in history, the reason why it feels dense is that attempts a lot too quickly. Many of the chapters could easily be books in themselves, and the mixture of magazine-style writing with theoretical reflections can give one whiplash. Many critics, both who enjoyed the book and who disliked it, noticed how it can move from anecdote to theoretical clarity to sentences that are frankly opaque. The opacity gets worse, as I implied earlier, as Haider tries to posit a universalism beyond liberal formalism. Furthermore, as critic Brand Roberts noted at Marxism and Philosophy: Review of Books, "Haider’s insurgent universality is hardly different from the Marxist universality that pushed black revolutionaries such as Aimé Césaire, Richard Wright and Frantz Fanon, to name only a few, either away from Marxism or to build a new set of politics away from universality. That Haider does not address this historic problem shows the potential issues that could arise under such a universalism." Not dealing with these figures, who more directly struggled with what Haider is grappling, is a gap and when paired with the particular use of post-structural theorists, the selectivity of the historical examples, and the mixture of tone in Haider writing, stop this book from being excellent. Despite these criticisms, and in some ways even because of them, I strongly suggest the book: it will have thinking about the challenge of identity and universalism in left-wing politics again. It has implications for everyone from conventional Democrats to far-left Marxists on the way they handle identity and the universal politics they may want to be moving towards.

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book may provide a reasonable middle-ground and call for action between separatist politics and a color-blind version of Marxism for the current generation of socialist activists. However, it is largely a rehashing of positions previously articulated by Ted Allen, bolstered by more explicitly anti-essentialist positions of Paul Gilroy, Judith Butler and Wendy Brown (though it fails to mention the particulars of Brown and Butler's own critiques of Marxism). In fact, the book seems theoretically dated in the mid 1990s for this reason, despite references to Ferguson and the Iraq war. I don't understand why it is being hailed as having something radically new to say or as offering a "way out" of an activist impasse. It is a bit like reading a doctoral prelim or literature review.

[Pavol Hardos · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was initially going to say the book is a lost opportunity since it seems in its arguing against identity politics it constructs what appear to be strawmen (and really engages no theoretically advanced opposing position, unless it’s an anecdote or a laughable slogan) and bases itself in jargony marxism that cannot convince anyone who is not already convinced, but the last chapter shows it is less than that: empty posturing and meaningless distinctions between juridical and insurgent universality (the former being the bad one) show it to be just another impotent exhortation to emancipationary struggles perched on rhetorical vagueness.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Identity is another means of control and containment, and emancipation needs to be able to move.

"positions we now take for granted have not always existed, and their categories are not simply contained in reality. They are ideological constructions embedded in material processes which are more useful to understand than to decry" (x).

"I simply tried to be faithful to the uncountable numbers of people over the course of our history who believed in the eradication of domination and exploitation from this earth" (x).

"For this reason, the great revolutionaries [...] converged on the project of overturning capitalism" (xi).

As he [Malcolm X] said at Oxford University in 1964 "I for one will join in with anyone, I don't care what color you are, as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on earth" (4).

Identity politics as its own form of fundamentalism: "Fundamentalism provides security [...] Rationalists have always underestimated the need people have for belief [quoting Hanif Kureishi" (5).

"In this flat, hopeless reality, some choose the consolations of fundamentalism. But others choose the consolations of identity" (6).

"In 1977, the term identity politics in its contemporary form wsa introduced into political discourse by the Combahee River Collective (CRC), a group of black lesbian militants in Boston that had formed three years earlier" and they also coined the phrase "interlocking systems of oppression" (7).

Judtih Butler "'suggests that what we call identity politics is produced by a state which can only allocate recognition and rights to subjects totalized by the particularity that constitutes their plaintiff status.' If we can claim to be somehow injured on the basis of our identity, as though presenting a grievance in a court of law, we can demand recognition from the state on that basis--and since identities are the condition of liberal politics, they become more and more totalizing and reductive" (10).

"For this reason I don't accept the Holy Trinity of 'race, gender, and class' as identity categories" (11).

"The internal paradox of this foundationalism is that it presumes, fixes, and constrains the very 'subjects' that it hopes to represent and liberate" (12).

"when you understand socialism as Huey Newton did: as 'the people in power'" (14).

"So the Black Panther Party had to navigate between two concerns. They recognized that black people had been oppressed on a specifically racial basis, and so they had to organize autonomously. But at the same time, if you talked about racism without talking about capitalism, you weren't talking about getting power in the hands of the people. You were setting up a situation in which the white cop would be replaced by a black cop. For the Panthers, this was not liberation" (19).

"When identity claims lose their grounding in mass movements, the bourgeois masculinist ideal rushes to fill the void" (22).

"To demand inclusion in the structure of society as it is means forfeiting the possibility of structural change" (22).

"In its contemporary ideological form, rather than its initial form as a theorization of a revolutionary political practice, identity politics is an individualist method. It is based on the individual's demand for recognition, and it takes that individual's identity as a starting point. It takes this identity for granted and suppresses the fact that all identities are socially constructed. And because all of us necessarily have an identity that is different from everyone else's, it undermines the possibility of collective self-organization" (23).

As Demita Frazier, one of the CRC founders would later recollect "You run the risk of having an identity become crystallized and contained and requiring everyone to be conformists" (25).

"Black British scholar Paul Gilroy "Action against racial hierarchies can proceed more effectively when it has been purged of any lingering respect for the idea of 'race' (26).

Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term 'intersectionality' in 1989 specifically to examine "how courts frame and interpret the stories of Black women plaintiffs" (34).

"In its campus activist usage, however, 'intersectionality' appears to move in the opposite direction, retreating from the coalition building of the CRC and instead generalizing the condemnation of the plaintiff: equating political practice with the demand for restitution for an injury, inviting the construction of baroque and unnavigable intersections consisting of the litany of different identities to which a given person might belong. Those whose identity is inscribed with the most intersecting lines can claim the status of the most injured, and they are therefore awarded, in the juridical framework to which politics is now reduced, both discursive and institutional protection" (35).

"How is it that a category that identity politics takes to be a fixed essence turns out to be so indeterminate?" (43).

"Racism equates these social effects of the categorization of people with biological qualities. Such a reduction of human culture to biology is generally rejected and viewed as abhorrent. But it is possible to reject racism while still falling victim to the ideology of race. Taking the category of race as a given, as a foundation for political analysis, still reproduces this ideology. This is not innocent because in fact, the ideology of race is produced by racism, not the other way around" (43).

"this is the failure of liberal thought. A political formation such as whiteness cannot be explained by starting with an individual's identity--the reduction of politics to the psychology of the self. The starting point will have to be the social structure and its constitutive relations, within which individuals are composed" (46).

"the project of emancipation requires overcoming the ideology of race" (49).

"There were ideals of the superiority of European civilization, but this did not correspond to differences in skin color

The clearest example is that of the Irish, whos racial oppression by the English precedes their racial oppression of Africans by several centuries. Today white nationalists distort this history, attempting to use the racial oppression of the Irish to try to dismiss the history of white supremacy. Yet this example actually demolishes their entire framework. What the example of the Irish illustrates is a form of racial oppression that is not based on skin color and that in fact precedes the very category of whiteness" (52).

"Slavery is not always racial. It existed in ancient Greece and ROme and also in Africa and was not attached specifically to a racial ideology. Slavery is a form of forced labor characterized by the markex exchange of the laborer [...]

In fact, until 1660, all African American laborers, like their European American counterparts, were indentured servants who had limited terms of servitude. There was no legal differentiation based on racial ideology: free African Americans owned property, land, and sometimes indentured servants of their own" (53).

"What really changed everything was Bacon's Rebellion In 1676. [...] it gave rise to a rebellious mob of European and African laborers, who burned down the capital city of Jamestown and forced the governor to flee. The insurractionary alliance of European and African laborers was a fundamental existential threat to the colonial ruling class, and the possibility of such an alliance among exploited peoples had to be prevented forever" (55).

"It is at this point, Nell Painter concludes, that we see the 'now familiar equation that converts race to black and black to slave'" (56).

"In other words, the Euro-American ruling class had to advance an ideology of the inferiority of Africans in order to rationalize forced labor, and they had to incorporate European populations into the category of the white race, despite the fact that many of these populations had previously been considered inferior" (56).

"We are all Rachel Dolezal; the infinite regress of 'checking your privilege' will eventually unmask everyone as inauthentic. No wonder, then, that we are so deeply disturbed by passing--it reveals too much to us about identity; it is the dirty secret of the equation of identity with politics" (81).

"It is on the basis of this complex and detailed historical and political analysis that [Stuart Hall's] POLICING THE CRISIS presents an oft-quoted slogan: 'Rac is the modality in which class is lived'" (91).

"Whatever promises may be offered by politicians in periods of prosperity--better healthcare, more jobs, new infrastructure--once these politicians enter into government, they are obliged to manage the capitalist mode of production and secure conditions for growth. In the context of economic crisis, they must necessarily propose solutions that are in the interest of capital and can win its support. Even socialist politicians are not exempt from this requirement and as long as the underlying structure of capitalism remain unchallenged, they must use their links with the leaderships of the trade unions 'not to advance but to discipline the class and organizations it represents'" (93).

"I have come to think that this sadness is the primary cause of the restriction of politics to one's personal identity. Not only has the idea of universal emancipation come to seem old-fashioned and outmoded, the very possibility of achieving anything beyond the temporary protection of individual comfort seems like a delusion" (101).

"In other words, when the liberal language of rights is used to defend a concrete identity group from injury, physical or verbal, that group ends up defined by its victimhood and individuals end up reduced to their victimized belonging" (106).

"Universality does not exist in the abstract, as a prescriptive principle which is mechanically applied to indifferent circumstances. It is created and recreated in the act of insurgency, which does not demand emancipation solely for those who share my identity but for everyone; it says that no one will be enslaved. it equally refuses to freeze the oppressed in a status of victimhood that requires protection from above; it insists that emancipation is self-emancipation" (113).

"I drew from Tomba the distinction between the universalism of abstract bearers of rights--which confined politics to protection by the state--and the universality which surges forth in acts of revolt which refer to the agency of ordinary people" (118).

"...there is no such thing as race, only specific regimes of racialization. That is, in the first instance, race has no biological or civilizational reality; it is a false way of understanding variation in human beings, and it falsely equates nature and culture as functions of this variation. If we believe that race is real, then we are in the realm of racial ideology, which obscures the real social relations that produce it. Instead we need concrete analyses of the production of race" (122).

"What it represents is the division of populations into groups based on arbitrary physical characteristics, corresponding to the subjection of certain people to increased violence and exploitation. In other words, racism is real as a social relation, and it produces an ideology of race, of biological and civilizational difference, which is false--yet has real effects--and reproduces the social relations of racism" (123).

"Real emancipation is the abolition of any distinction between rulers and ruled; it is the universal power to self-govern" (127).

"...necessarily emancipation is based on the premise that everyone has an equal capacity for thought, and that they are already, within the existing society, capable of thinking not only of what *exists* but what is *possible*" (129).

[Andrew]

A reasonable critique of identity politics from the left by a guy who empathizes with a lot of the grounds for identity politics, but is a bit pissed about how they are implemented. The most obvious comparison is the Olufemi Taiwo book from last year, which is a bit more layman oriented. This is more for people who are already committed to the left as such, which is to say a perspective distinct from and partially in opposition to that which is considered liberalism. It's not as forceful as it could be, but it was a persuasive case nonetheless, and a reminder that, to throw out an example, the endless dialogue about "black bodies" does little to materially benefit people of African descent and a whole lot to get speaking engagements and Youtube likes.

[Steffi · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Mistaken Identity' (Verso, 2018) is an important contribution to the left's debate on identity politics.

What's particularly interesting is its form. While the book's entire argument (theoretical framework) is heavily based on the theories of Marx and Butler, it does not try to solve the class versus race question in the abstract. It's a very non-academic style and includes Haider's autobiographical reflection. In this sense it's a very non-elitist prohect, it's also written for those who havent read Marx and Butler's beyond painful theories on ideology and identity. It's also super short, just a little over 100 pages, making this argument accessible for the wider non-book worm audience.

Drawing on the legacy of black freedom struggles the book shows how the ideology of racism exists within historically specific social struggles. Identity politics' understanding of race in isolation of these struggles and as an 'injury' to the individual identity amounts to the neutralization of these wider struggles (and naturalization of the status quo aka capitalism).

With regard to the current rise of racism under Trump, Haiders draws on much of Stewart Hall's work on how the inability of Labour (Social Democracy) to solve the crisis of the post-war consensus paved the way for the Right's new law and order racism in which race takes a specific form within the neoliberal solution to the economic crisis (e.g., austerity and the lazy and criminal blacks). In the US this is very well reflected in Bill Clinton who followed the lead of Thatcher and Reagan (and inspired Tony Blair's Thatcherite rebranding of the Labour Party) and brought the Crime Bill and Welfare Reform Bill and introduced technocratic politics style driven by focus groups and image consultants. That this racist and neoliberal project was also advanced under the leadership of members of the black elite is no surprise (capitalism is an elite project, including members of structurally exploited and oppressed groups, blacks, women, immigrants etc).

Since identity politics understands 'racism' as individual moral failure it is unable to comprehend the specific racial ideology under neoliberalism and to link Trump's success to the centre-lefts (social democracy, Democrats, Labour) ongoing neoliberal answers to the post-war consensus crisis (eg ongoing supply-side measurea, roll-back of welfare state and labour rights etc).

The political implications for the Democrats and social democracy more broadly are clear. As most recent developments in the US seem to show: the centre-left establishment remains the strongest bullwark against progressive change, a genuine radical left emerges from outside the party through linking the many grassroots struggles (minimum wage, free healthcare and education, police brutality, privatization, anti-abortion, gentrification, environmental degradation, anti-immigration policies, free trade etc) into a struggle for an alternative progressive political project. (The elephant in the room, of course, remains the question of the relationship between movement and party, especially in a two-party state without party democracy like the US.)

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very short, but dense book. Extensive quotation from past writers makes for an enriched and historically contextualized examination of the nuances (see: antagonisms) involved in tackling race and activism. Haider urges us to seek a "universal insurgency" based in anti-capitalism, rather than an identity-based politics that risks isolating itself from broader political aims or being folded into a neo-liberal platform which is only too happy to keep the strands of progressive interest from becoming the rope that lassoes and yanks them off their horses.

I picked this up out of frustration with some of the rhetoric I heard during the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement which said that white people should not be involved in protesting issues of police violence, or that they should just give their money to black activists and stay out of sight. Haider, himself Pakistani and well read in the history of black radicalism, points this out and describes his own difficulties in trying to build a movement which was constantly pulling itself apart into identitarian strands. He contrasts this with the attitudes of the black, lesbian feminists who more or less created identity politics, the Combahee River Collective. He quotes their own writing and interviews to show their desire to support other groups in their fights, including unions.

He also criticized the Occupy Movement for missing the opportunity to join their calls for greater equality to the struggles of African Americans who are disproportionately affected by the effects of that inequality.

And he dissects and to some extent dismisses the notion of race altogether (That's what I'm remembering right now at least. There may well be more subtlety to his argument) by giving a brief history of how we even got such a concept. Basically, because white people wanted to separate themselves and thereby otherize those who would serve their purposes better subjugated. My understanding (Because I don't even have the book in front of me now.) is that Haider sees black radicalism which insists on separating itself from others as not only counterproductive but a concession to the oldest most racist concept of all. Race.

Perhaps due to my lack of experience with this kind of text, I was in the weeds a few times every chapter. So, if this looked like an easy read to you, yet you're reading things over 5 times, breaking sentences down into tiny pieces, wondering what is being referred to, you're not alone.

Going back through and summarizing the chapters would probably be a good way to make sure my efforts weren't wasted. On the whole, I'm glad to have gotten some exposure to these slices of radical history.

I hope I did not misrepresent this book in any way. But in case I did, READ IT.

[Faaiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is quite an interesting book. Haider's writing is concise and engaging. In this book, Haider argues against the adoption of liberal identity politics as a means of liberation which obfuscates the real social and materialist relations of power. It argues against the ideology of race and the essentialism of race and other individuating identities as impediments to liberating and emancipatory movements and as agents that create divisiveness between the working class across the different splintering identities. He goes on to overview and specify the conditions that gave rise to the "White" race and how it was constructed as means of class division and control, how the concept of Whiteness was extended to other groups of people privileging them and in turn turning them complicit in the subjugation of Black people.

I'm not entirely convinced by the sentiment proposed by Haider in the quote below...

Although the black and white poor find themselves, objectively, in the same position, thy inhabit a world ideologically so structured that each can be made to provide the other with its negative reference group, the "manifest cause" of each other's ill-fortune.

...not because I think he is wrong per se but because I didn't see an exhaustive level of engagement with some of what the intersectionality proponents purport to be "unique challenges" faced by poor Blacks due to their situation in the subordinate race and class categories. I think taking a historical and materialist approach to the construction of race as a means of class control is hugely important in understanding the origins of class divisions and struggle. However, that alone does little to shed light on the significant barriers to the formation and sustained development of a working class coalition that encompasses people of vastly different lived experiences today. This book does not provide a "so where do we go from here" sort of an answer (or even working theories, suggestions, or educated guesses, etc) to the pervasiveness of race and increasingly other identities as well. He goes to end the book advocating for greater universality but the concept posed seems pretty vague, nonspecific, and abstract. Overall, definitely an interesting read which was also informative for me for getting an overview of the anti-essentialist understanding of race that I didn't have much exposure to before.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like 3 and a half. The most serious, intelligent and subtle critique of identity politics produced to date. But ultimately it's analysis is highly incomplete. The opening chapters are the strongest bits, but I find it almost completely loses its way after 3.

Some of the underlying and underpinning discussions of race seem to affected with the problems that despite him supposedly disputing, actually makes worse for himself.

On p.58, there is a brilliant and important description of the nature of the white racist slave system set up by the colonists and then the Americans (which help dispel some of the more stupid, idealist and 'cultural' inspired analyses of American racism, bringing it back to its economic roots). But he also writes that "in exchange for white-skin privilege, the Euro-American workers accepted white identity and became active agents in the brutal opression of African American labourers. But they also fundamentally degraded their own conditions of existence". Because of this bargain, he argues that white workers "allowed" their conditions to become the worst in America. Where the hell does this leave us? Marxists tend to be believe that objective economic conditions fundamentally underly the behaviour of people (his materialist conception of history would, you think, be his main line of attack against identity politics, right?). If this is so, then how could they be 'allowed' into something that caused so much damage to their objective class situation? He mentions 'white skin privilege'. But if there was no privilege attached to it, what was the incentive to accept it? Only two options remain, it seems to me. Either 1), they genuinely *did* benefit from white supremacy, hence their consent, in which case cross-racial class solidarity is fucked. Or, 2), they didn't benefit at all from white supremacy as workers, in which case workers are so obviously stupid they can happily be persuaded to do things vastly outside their class interest, in which we're also probably fucked. So despite his best intentions Haider appears to shovel back in an idealist, ideology obssesed approach to class that he seems to want to dispute! The materalist analysis just gets dumped by the wayside, as the 'objective circumstances' that workers are in become immaterial to their own conceptions of where they are in in the world. It does, in essence, rearticulate the idea that workers are dupes, something he appears to reject later on.

This is the problem with grafting concepts of hegemony onto periods of history such as the early American South (as Marcus Redikker pointed out), which, as has become commonplace with the increased mania for Gramsci amongst the leftist intelligentsia since '45, searches forever for the phantom ghost of 'hegemonic consent' when they should be looking for active class antagonism and spaces of resistance. Haider is mostly trying to do the latter in this book, but his addiction to sticking to certain intellectual frameworks that have stuck themselves onto the left like a limpet regardless of their intellectual usefulness means he seems to be unable to not trip up as he does (hegemony itself is an increasingly atrocious and muddled concept for understanding much, as Vivek Chibber has persuasively argued https://youtu.be/2dcVoQbhFtQ). This doesn't mean there is an easy awnser to my questions (I think it's a genuine problem in Marxist theory) but despite his claim to be reorientating our discussions back to be class and the material level he seems unable to be actually fully do it justice.

He also, does not in my opinion properly explain why the Marxist conception of class is fundamentally different from liberals approach, hence why it's superior to identify politics (as Paul Heidemam articulates here in Jacobin https://jacobinmag.com/2019/05/workin...). The point is that class opression is overwhelmingly structurally dependent to capitalism. There is no capitalism without a working class, and there is no working class without capitalism. It does structure everything around us. And that working class is global and basically everyone, which means by definition its perameters are pretty broad. With the best will in the world it is hard to argue that racism or sexism even remotely come true to having such exploitative and opressive functionings in our system. Liberal intersectionality theory seems to see class as just another kind of opression along with race and sex, which it's not, as those are artifical constructs created sole out of nothing, rooted in ideology, whereas working class is a *position* one holds in a vast hierachical system, rooted in the socio-economic. The very existence of a "working class" implies exploitation in a hierachy that is innately illigitmate, regardless of the degrees of capitalism's unfairness. Black people and women tend not to struggle to abolish themselves, whereas all working class people do - its implicit in their struggle. Hence why most critiques of Marxism as being 'class reductionist' seem dumb, as it is only reductionist if one believes we don't live in a global capitalist system (a curious position) and that therefore working class exploration is not fundamental to it (which it obviously is). If one accepts both premises it is hard to see how it could be reductionist (as it is only arguably reductionist if one presumes that racism within a capitalist society is as prominent and significant as class opression, which, again, whatever one might think, is not true). That doesn't mean racism or sexism goes away, or that racism and sexism don't have lives of their own, but it does mean actually understanding of those two phenomena is worthless without the prior understanding they are both underwritten by a huge swathe of class opression. This seems pretty fundamental to me, but Haider just doesn't even really go into it much at all.

His last chapter, on 'insurgent universality' is really fucked. My main problem is his criticism of liberal based rights paradigm, although substantially right in many key parts, just turns into the most repugnant ultra-leftist whinging that somehow appealing to the rights of a state based on identity group protection reinforces the victim status of said group, and does nothing to empower themselves as agents. But does it? Does a woman calling for the state to better enforce rape rules somehow actually undermine femenism by reintroducing the notion that women are victims, or is it just a basic sane fucking thing that no human being would doubt? Does calling for the right of Gitmo victims to have due process and the rights of haebus corpus somehow actually damage them by presenting them as 'victims' that need the 'protection' of the liberal state? This becomes patent nonsense. Haider can criticise that these are turning people into victims, but, let's be honest, there *are* victims. Throwing this conception of judicial based rights out the window completely, as seems to want to do, comes across as utterly impotent and worthless. For after all, most if not all of our political struggles are fundamentally a call for rights and justice. One really cannot avoid that paradigm. The main problem is he actually does not go nearly enough in defending the idea of a universalism framework at all, relying on this kind of lazy critique of liberalism's rights based framework (which, in an era where women in Albama and Georgia can look forward to the prospect of shoving coat hangers up their vaginas due to the psychopathically immoral and disgusting bans on their right to an abortion) seem misplaced, at best. His call instead for say "women organising themselves against sexual opression, the kind of organization that implies self-directed mass action" as an alternative to legal policies is laughable. I'm sure women do do that, but does he really expect probably poor, vulnerable rape victims to have the time, energy and resources to constantly defend themselves against sexual opression? Is that his best advice to migrant communities, 'fend for yourselves fuckers, the state isn't going to protect you'? The right agrees, and in fact encourages this kind of approach (if you use the state you're a victim, a parasite, learn some self-reliance). Some Marxist discourse on these kind of rights based issues really frightens me, as one wonders if under a communist utopia if there would be *any* rights based enforcement mechanism, backed up by *some* kind of legal mechanisms. To not have that principle seems really dangerous, as well as worrying.

He also goes to repeat the tired and boring claim, a direct influence from the worst kind of Postmodernist garbage that has infected the academia like a plague, that one can somehow deduce a notion of liberal universalism humanism as the "foundation of imperalism". Really? The Belgium Congo atrocities were based on the presumption that they were victims which needed protection on the basis of universal human rights? Or in India after the Rebellion? Or in Australia? Or in Keyna? Or the Philippines? Or in Latin America during the 80s? Where is he talking about? The language of racist eliminationism is, if anything, far stronger than that of liberal interventionism in imperalist discourse (C.A. Bayly's study of British imperalism in fact showed quite explicitly thar any notion that the British imperal elites were somehow 'Enlightenment inspired' was nonsense.) The British bourgeoisie hated the enlighenment, and one would be hard pressed to seriously argue that the ideas of the more radical Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau, Dideroit or Paine can be consciously linked to their behaviour. It does a simulatenous disservice to the thinkers it slanders and a massive overstatement of the "humanitarianism" of the colonisers. After all, people can claim their actions are based on many things, theirs no connection to then presuming they geuniely *were* acting in that role (why presume they genuinely are commited to rights, when, you know, their entire behaviour shows the exact opposite). Trump certainly is not defending imperalism under the guise of 'liberal interventionism' - more 'bomb the shit out of them', 'take their oil' - the true face of imperalism with its mask of liberal respectability torn viciously off.

Plus, what, if not those evil bourgeois liberal rights do people around the globe fight for than that of the right to non-interference (as laid out in the Charter) and that of the right to unilateral independence? Not only were these rights actively fought for by the colonised, even the crafting of these laws were frequently pursued by people of colour (the UN general assembly was actually, for a while at least, the main vehicle from which the global south articulated it's goals and vision).

This hyper-reductive, contemptuous of all human progress framework that Haider borrows far too uncritically seriously hampers his ability to make a conscious argument rooted in a universalist Enlightenment based Marxism. Haider does provide a somewhat alteration to the picture though, citing the work of Paul Gilroy's work on the "Black Atlantic", the "counterculture to modernity". Even here though, Gilroy, and through him Haider, seem to make far too much of an overkill of lambasting the Enlightenment's many limitations. Once one realises that a project as diverse, multi-facteted and geographically disperse as 'the Enlightenment' did contain within it the seeds of such an anti-colonial approach (by very nature of its universal and global scope, and however imperfectly it articulated it), one wonders if Gilroy's rightful pointing out of the Black Atlantic's articulation of their own rights and liberties should just be considered just a part of its broader discourse thst neccesarily running parralel to it (although Gilroy's suggestion of it being a 'counterculture' is probably adequate). Haider does point out, following on from Wendy Brown, the tensions inside the universalist paradigms of both American and French republicanism, including the potential for liberation. But his muddled and confused simultaneous groping for some kind of universalism and his inability to go through properly with it leads it turning into and serise of nice-sounding, genuinely decent, awfully radical sounding statements divorced from any kind of substantive, practical politics capable of changing anything or helping anyone. It becomes the worst kind of dribbling ultra-leftist pedant intellectual masterbastion tarted up pathetically as pseduo-radical critique (something the academy, especially under postmodernism, has encouraged in droves).

There's another more substantive point which is that all this bashing of liberalism, and the half arsed, muddled and incoherent conclusions drawn from such a jettisoning of so many of its tennets is arguably not just wrong in principle but completely disasterous practically in today's age. As Paul Mason has argued brilliantly in his latest book, the threat we face today risks losing the entirety of the Enlightenment (even the bad bits). We are not facing misguided naive liberal humanitarian interventionism, but full on blood thirsty no-holds-barred genocidal death cults, in the form of the Charlotsville Nazi thugs, in the semi-sane syphilis ridden child like sadism amd cruelty of Trump, and of a whole swarm of murderous thugs, rape apoligists, Holocaust deniers, torturers, racists, jingoists, religious fanatics, misogynists, migrant killers, authoritarian, oligarchcal pyscopaths and scum, whether it be from Salvini or Orban or Bolsonaro or Modhi or Duerte or the Polish Law and Order party. They're not fighting under the banner of liberal universalism, they're fighting under the banner of outright counterevolution, outright counter-modernity, outright lusting after the potentiality of returning us back to the stone age before any of the flawed liberal premises that Haider bashes so much (like right to a fair trial, of due process, rights of freedom of speech and assembly, rights of tolerance and limitations on the arbitrary use of state power). It may be that Marxism's spat upon little brother Liberalism has to be called upon now more so than ever, and unless one has the ability to defend it even at an abstract level - these monstrosities will crush us. Haider's baby out of the bathwater approach is useless in this kind of age.

There are of course plenty of positives, but these kinds of underlying issues with his approach leave it to be a higly frustrating and incomplete read. It is neccesary to have vicious critiques of identity politics (which has just become a way for snide and cynical liberals to pompey waggle their finger at socialists and deny the possibility of any kind of de-esssentalising cross-racial class solidarity). This comes close, but utterly dissapoints in the end.

[Darran Mclaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent and short book on the subject of race and class. It is particularly pertinent at the moment as the relationship between class and race is the cause of a lot of discussion, debate and controversy, particularly in the States, where it is currently central to the conflict between the Clinton and Sanders camps within the Democrats. Haider has produced a useful, clear and succinct account of the history of identity politics, as well as terms such as intersectionality and white privilege. He draws on his own personal experience, growing up the son of Pakistani immigrants in Pennsylvania and engaging in politics and activism in the era of the anti Iraq war movement and Occupy. He argues that it is necessary for the Left to engage with and understand the special character of racial injustice and oppression, and for anti-racist movements to understand that their struggle is inseparable from a wider critique of class. The Right weaponised racial identity as a means of dividing people who may otherwise recognize their common class interests and turn their collective attention towards resisting and overturning an unjust, oppressive system. Haider writes of resistance movements in the American South in the 1670's that saw Black and European indentured servants unite together to rebel against the establishment. The elite realized that they needed to offer the White underclass a sense of common White identity to get them to identify their interests with their oppressors rather than with the Black people experiencing domination by the same people. He also explains that the concept of identity politics was first developed in 1977 by the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black Lesbian radicals, and that they declared that they were Socialists who believed in class solidarity with all oppressed peoples, but also understood that their status as black, female and lesbian also needed to be understood as part of their identities, and that it fed into their radical politics. He also examines the distinction Huey Newton and the Black Panthers highlighted between reactionary and revolutionary Black Nationalism. The Black Panthers understood their fight to be against Capitalism, which is inextricably bound together with racism and colonialism, and felt a sense of solidarity with Socialist movements of all races, as well as with anti-colonial struggles all over the world. Reactionary Black nationalists understood their identity and struggle as exclusively racial and advocated not engaging with universalist politics or the struggles of other oppressed people. They understand Black identity as being uniquely oppressed and victimized. The results of this include a world view which understands Black identity through a lense of victimhood rather than having agency and power to change these conditions, the co-opting of Black activism by members of the Black bourgeoisie who do not share the class interests of the majority of people they are supposed to represent and the reinforcement of divisions from other marginalized people who it would be better to engage with in solidarity and collective action. This reactionary black nationalism has been absorbed by Capitalist hegemony, so you may witness the phenomenon of black police officers, journalists, business leaders and politicians resisting demands for change, because their class interests lie with the current economic order (i.e. the Obama's). I had managed to absorb many of the ideas and insights offered by this book through being radicalized via Twitter, but this book has honed and developed my understanding of the way our class and racial identities intersect and the need to try to help advance peoples understanding of their common interests as best I can.

[M.E. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is perhaps the most intensely debated and discussed book in my section of the American left over the last two years. It directly tackles one of the central and most important question of the entire history of the American left: the relationship between multi-racial working class solidarity, and black anti-racist militancy.

The book tries to walk a nuanced line between two clearly flawed poles that often dominate left discourse: on the one hand that we should all organize from immutable, essential identity-based political positions where our relationships to those of other identities is one of division and competition; on the other that we must set aside such identities to be subsumed under the unifying banner of a shared, universal class politics. Haider sides towards class universalism on that spectrum, but through the thoughtful lens of a reading of Black Marxism. The Black Marxism Haider celebrates, including the Black Panthers, Combahee River Collective, Amiri Baraka, Stuart Hall and Du Bois, is among the most sophisticated and invaluable political analysis ever created, and certainly one of the most rigorously defensible class universalisms forged in history.

I sympathize with Haider that this isn't an easy balance. Repeatedly, however, I think he undervalues the unique value and power of black self-activity (including in separatist or all-black spaces), the specific logics of anti-black racism, and how the universalisms he celebrates as emerging from this tradition was often in profound dialectical tension with deep love of black people, black culture, and black-led movements. Like Haider, I am ultimately interested in a universal politics that liberates everyone, and see Black communist and socialist thought as providing an immense well-spring that should inform and transform us all. But unlike him I don't think it is wise or reasonable to expect black movements to dissolve themselves into anti-racist multi-racial movements, or to see class as an identity that must be positively embraced.

My favorite chapter is his close reading of Stuart Hall's contribution to understanding the failure of the left as central to the rise of mass incarceration and Thatcherism in the UK. What people think about this chapter, from the many reviews by Brits I've read, seems to have a lot to do with what they think about Hall's critique of the Miners' Strike.

I won't go on much further, because there are so many who have considered this book and written extensively on it. This includes some horrible reactionaries passing themselves off as leftists, a brilliant trans scholar reflecting rigorously on afro-pessimism, a praising review from another brilliant trans scholar, and so many others you can find from google.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little book that packs a fair punch and is a must read, particularly now.

Haider works to reveal the fatal flaws in identity politics, arguing that it undercuts efforts for both individual gains as well as universal emancipation. Unlike many recent critiques of identity politics, this analysis comes lovingly from the left, building on the thoughts and words of famous black intellectuals and activists. He takes a material and historical lens in analyzing the contemporary use of identity politics, evaluating its (in)ability to provide insight into the material structures that lead to oppression and its (lack of) usefulness in dismantling them. The shift from collective revolution focused on widespread redistribution to an identity approach centred on recognition, particularly re culture, in the 1970s has been mapped elsewhere before, for antiracism as well as feminism, etc, so this framing won't be new for many. But he gives insight into what I found amorphously problematic about identity politics today, and works to provide avenues forward in building the mass mobilization that will be necessary to make real change. The seductive idea that shared identity (if such a thing is possible) necessarily means shared interest is rejected. Instead, he draws on a rich history of antiracist activism to show that shared interest does not require shared identity - and indeed, political action is literally about bringing together messy diverse multitudes around shared interests. And he argues that combating racism should be a shared interest of all - for both its intrinsic and instrumental nature.

Though it should be noted that, as a POC liberal, I want to be convinced that identity politics is a cul-de-sac to justify my desire for diverse identity coalition building and inclusion in causes I care about. So I'm careful not to comfortably smack on a QED here. It is quite short, which means this is more of a jumping off point for one's own analysis than a fully articulated manifesto. Those who are not convinced that addressing class is fundamental to fighting for universal emancipation will be uncomfortable with his obviously socialist/Marxist understanding. (Though don't worry, he does not, however, argue that class is abstractly the master category). Drawing from a large, at times quirky, range of scholarship, it is also a great way to expand your reading list. That being said, I would recommend starting elsewhere if you are newer to the study of the ideology of race. For example, The History of White People is a classic in understanding this strange and convoluted history of the idea of race.

[Guilherme Smee · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tal armadilha da identidade que este livro de Asad Haider fala não é aquela com que quem estuda identidade está acostumado: a ideia de que a identidade é estanque e fixa. Não. A armadilha da identidade no título são as celebradas hoje em dia políticas de identidade, que exigem e proclama direitos para pessoas enquadradas dentro de um determinado estereótipo que afirma essa tal identidade fixa. Afinal, se a identidade não é fixa, para que servem as políticas de identidade? Que força terão políticas de raça/etnia quando se existe whitewashing e passing em diversos setores da sociedade? Se a classe é pensada como raça dentro dos sistemas neoliberais de trabalho e a raça acaba sendo pensada como classe, e todos esses termos se confundem, apenas para negar direitos e negligenciar pessoas? Asad Haider se considera negro e estudou na conceituada Universidade de Santa Cruz, na California, que se envolve diversos estudos sobre minorias sociais e política. Haider também é filho de imigrantes paquistaneses, o que o coloca em outra condição, além da racial: a de emigrante. Portanto, escolher estudar a identidade é importante para ele. Segundo o autor ajudou a perceber seu lugar ou seu não-lugar no mundo este estudo. Mais importante que isso é perceber neste livro o que levou o autor a romper com a fixidez e as políticas identitárias e por que. Ainda que não trace teorias novas e surpreendentes, é um movimento contrário ao que o cardume e o rebanho estão tomando. E é interessante compreender essa razão.

[João Vítor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uma das melhores leituras de 2020. Fundamental para pensar a "política identitária", a relação entre raça e classe, e a transformação do mundo.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A crash course in the black radical tradition, explaining and weaving the theories of it with that of other Marxists and radicals, such as Ignatiev and Allen. Haider does this through personal memories, and other histories of certain figures / movements.

One thing that particularly stuck out for me when reading it was how Haider managed to articulate a critique of the reformism, of the sort of engagement in wide ranging progressive coalitions - particularly of the electoral form - that was advocated by former radicals, such as Max Elbaum, under supposedly pragmatic justifications:

“The political crisis of the New Communist Movement would be overdetermined by semi-nationalist remnants. The blind spots of racial unity persisted past the Marxist turn to Black Power. Even a revolutionary nationalism continues the assumption of a unified black ‘community’ with unified ‘interests’. Despite the harsh lessons of the 1970s, this approach left Baraka and many other black radicals susceptible to subsuming their politics into the minimal program of black politicians in Reagan’s America. In the context of right wing assault, digging in one’s heels in the black united front may have indeed seemed the best way to defend the achievements gained by the movements of the sixties and seventies. In reality, it meant capitulating to the neutralising tendencies that had emerged to contain them.”

[Sarah Schulman]

A well written attractive book - interesting grounding extending contemporary left movements back to roots in the Communist Party and Black Cultural Nationalism, among other sources. I did miss examples of application- while Haider does talk about his experience in campus organizing which lead to the development of his analysis, he does not have examples of praxis of his subsequent insights applied to actual organizing. My take away is that different theories are relevant in different conditions, times, and towards different goals, and the desire to solidify one analysis never actually works.

[JRT · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book presents a strong critique of liberal identarian reductionism. Centering a revolutionary agenda of what he calls “universal emancipation,” author Asad Haider highlights the issues of liberal “identity politics,” including how it co-opted the more radical and original framework conceived by the Combahee River Collective. As Haider describes, identity is formed within the confines of the existing social, economic, and political order. Liberal identity in a capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal society neutralizes resistance to systemic oppression by individualizing the experiences of members of colonized groups and highlighting their specific “identities,” rather than their objective (and thus collective) relationship to power.

Haider notes that liberal identity politics is nothing more than a demand of group-based inclusion into an unequal social order on the basis of fragile, fleeting, and arbitrary identities. He argues that identity politics is often devoid of any class analysis, and thus impedes mass, anti-capitalist movement building. Liberal identity politics—in other words—merely seeks “diversity and inclusion” into a white supremacist, capitalist ideal. Haider acknowledges the uneasy terrain of his argument, noting that many reactionary conservatives and liberals use “identity politics” as an epithet to quash righteous outrage to racism and patriarchy. Nevertheless, Haider spends a lot of time highlighting the adverse impact that identity politics has on “cross-racial” coalition-building. One of my favorite quotes of the book is “actions against racial hierarchies can proceed more effectively when it has been purged of any lingering respect for the idea of race.” In other words, race—properly understood as an arbitrary Euro-American colonial construction—cannot be the basis of revolutionary movement building.

While Haider’s arguments are compelling and generally ring true, there are moments when he gets a little too close to the sun. Haider does a great job pointing out the necessity of coalition building, but he fails to mention the necessity of Black and Indigenous people being centered in the efforts to decolonize and repair centuries of genocide, enslavement, and oppression. There is a fine line between revolutionaries of all backgrounds doing their part in dismantling the existing order, and Black and Indigenous people being specifically centered in efforts ensure revolutionary self-determination. Also, while labeling him a “class reductionist” wouldn’t be correct, his failure to highlight the *racial* nature of “racial capitalism” was quite evident. Haider could have covered his bases by at least mentioning the fact that color prejudice against African peoples predated Euro-American capitalism by at least a century (and served as a basis for Arab and European enslavement of Africans in the Mediterranean during the 15th Century), and that this pre-existing “racism” ultimately was at the foundation of the social order that capitalist eventually latched onto. Notwithstanding the above, this is an extremely thought-provoking book with a number of strong arguments against identity politics.

[Rodefekas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Los dos primeros capítulos son muy esclarecedores. A partir de ahí se convierte en un ensayo demasiado congestionado y ambicioso.

No se puede tratar el feminismo identitario, el nacionalismo negro (con referencias biográficas a Hurbert Harrison y Amiri Baraka), la necesidad de la creación de un universalismo insurgente que deje la identidad de lado, así como un análisis de la influencia de la universalidad y la racionalidad de la Europa ilustrada en el mantenimiento de un orden de diferencia racial heredado de la era premoderna en 100 páginas (y otras mil cosas que habré dejado de lado). Es una amalgama de contenidos y puntualidades que pueden parecer inconexas por falta de desarrollo. Es un libro que debería tener 800 páginas.

En cualquier caso, D.E.P. Asan Haider.

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Asad Haider refers to “the consolations of identity” at the start of his book and in its final paragraph. He writes: Rationalists have always underestimated the need people have for belief. Enlightenment values—rationalism, tolerance, skepticism—don’t get you through a dreadful night, they don’t provide the spiritual comfort or community or solidarity.[p13] ... Over the years..., I have learned how badly this rationalism can fail. ..., it is devastating to live with questions about who you are; it is also devastating to confront a world in which so much is wrong and unjust. ... But the dominant ideology is hard at work convincing us that there is no alternative. In this flat, hopeless reality, some choose ... the consolations of identity. [p13]

...there is something beyond our individual experience in our forms of identity: they are imaginary representations of our real conditions, of structural transformations and the political practices that respond to them. Fiction gives us a unique window into this nebulous relation. In the “lived experience” of its characters we see how individuals make sense of sweeping historical changes that are indifferent to their hopes, wishes, and desires.[p72]

Haider thinks that identity is in fact self-deceiving.

Clearly “identity” is a real phenomenon: it corresponds to the way the state parcels us out into individuals, and the way we form our selfhood in response to a wide range of social relations. But it is nevertheless an abstraction, one that doesn’t tell us about the specific social relations that have constituted it. [p18] He points out that we are each too complex and too different from each other to be at all well described by means of an identity label. By trying to conform to an imposed identity we succumb to a manipulation that is contrary to our own best interests.

Against the undoubted and powerful grip of identity on so much of our lives, he argues the need to accept the way in which these identities are constructed and the interests they serve at our expense. Rejecting identity is a necessary step to our emancipation.

My own experiences with the rise and fall of coalitions convinced me of the perspective of the scholar of black British culture Paul Gilroy: “Action against racial hierarchies can proceed more effectively when it has been purged of any lingering respect for the idea of ‘race.’ ” [p33]

As Allen put it on the back cover of his extraordinary vernacular history The Invention of the White Race: “When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no white people there.” At the most immediate level, Allen was pointing to the fact that the word white didn’t appear in Virginia colonial law until 1691. Of course, this doesn’t mean that there was no racism before 1691. Allen’s argument was to show that racism was not attached to a concept of the white race. There were ideas of the superiority of European civilization, but this did not correspond to differences in skin color. [p58] ... the early forms of English racial ideology represented the Irish as inferior and subhuman, and this ideology was later repeated word for word to justify both the genocide of Indigenous people in the Americas and the enslavement of Africans... Nor was it only a matter of words: the very practices of settler colonialism, land seizures, and plantation production were established in Ireland.[p59] ... The first Africans to arrive in Virginia 1619 were put to work as indentured servants, within the same legal category as European indentured servants. In fact, until 1660 all African American laborers, like their European American counterparts, were indentured servants who had limited terms of servitude. There was no legal differentiation based on racial ideology... [p60]

What really changed everything was Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. This ... gave rise to a rebellious mob of European and African laborers, who burned down the capital city of Jamestown and forced the governor to flee. The insurrectionary alliance of European and African laborers was a fundamental existential threat to the colonial ruling class, and the possibility of such an alliance among exploited peoples had to be prevented forever. [p61]

It was not Afro-Americans … who needed a racial explanation; it was not they who invented themselves as a race. Euro-Americans resolved the contradiction between slavery and liberty by defining Afro-Americans as a race; Afro-Americans resolved the contradiction more straightforwardly by calling for the abolition of slavery. [p65]

Although the black and white poor find themselves, objectively, in the same position, they inhabit a world ideologically so structured that each can be made to provide the other with its negative reference group, the “manifest cause” of each other’s ill-fortune. As economic circumstances tighten, so the competitive struggle between workers is increased, and a competition structured in terms of race or color distinctions has a great deal of mileage. ...So the crisis of the working class is reproduced, once again, through the structural mechanisms of racism, as a crisis within and between the working classes. [p93]

The remarkable achievement of Thatcherism was its ability to tie the abstract economic philosophies of Austrian liberalism, advanced by libertarian heroes Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, to popular sentiments regarding “nation, family, duty, authority, standards, self-reliance”—powerful ideological motors in the context of the political mobilization for law and order. This “rich mix” Hall dubbed “authoritarian populism,” and its ideological maneuvers could not be reduced to mere trickery: Its success and effectivity does not lie in its capacity to dupe unsuspecting folk but in the way it addresses real problems, real and lived experiences, real contradictions—and yet is able to represent them within a logic of discourse which pulls them systematically into line with policies and class strategies of the Right. [p99]

Haider sees identity as a potentially reactionary position. For instance:

When rights are granted to “empty,” abstract individuals, they ignore the real, social forms of inequality and oppression that appear to be outside the political sphere. [p109]

The framework of identity reduces politics to who you are as an individual and to gaining recognition as an individual, rather than your membership in a collectivity and the collective struggle against an oppressive social structure. As a result, identity politics paradoxically ends up reinforcing the very norms it set out to criticize. [p29]

Traditionalist ideologies of family, church, and nation were a preemptive strike against the potential political barrier to accumulation that these lines of alliance could impose from below. [p105]

The most recent and most striking example was the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, which adopted the language of “intersectionality” and “privilege” and used identity politics to combat the emergence of a left-wing challenge in the Democratic Party surrounding Bernie Sanders. [p16]

A major oversight in our understanding of the neoliberal transition is the failure to understand that this moment was also a defeat for the new social movements, just as much as it was for organized labor. ...the progressive languages of the new social movements, uprooted from their grassroots base, would be appropriated as a new ruling-class strategy. Bill Clinton, who followed the lead of Thatcher and Reagan and inspired Tony Blair’s Thatcherite rebranding of the Labour Party, not only brought us the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Crime Bill, and the Welfare Reform Bill, but also embedded politics in a particular cultural style, driven by focus groups and image consultants, that played on the diversity of the new times—leading Toni Morrison to comment, famously, that Clinton was “the first black president.” Yet while Bill played sax on the Arsenio Hall Show, Hillary Clinton was describing black youths as “superpredators”—a comment of which Black Lives Matter activists reminded her during her 2016 campaign.[p103]... As Michelle Alexander wrote in the Nation, the legacy of the Clinton family was a Democratic capitulation “to the right-wing backlash against the civil-rights movement” and “Ronald Reagan’s agenda on race, crime, welfare, and taxes.” The new brand of Clinton liberalism ended up “ultimately doing more harm to black communities than Reagan ever did.” [p17]

Haider argues that it is important to recognise the operation of class interests in all appeals to identity politics.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls attention to this phenomenon in From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation: “The most significant transformation in all of Black life over the last fifty years has been the emergence of a Black elite, bolstered by the Black political class, that has been responsible for administering cuts and managing meager budgets on the backs of Black constituents.” [p26]... When a Black mayor, governing a largely Black city, aids in the mobilization of a military unit led by a Black woman to suppress a Black rebellion, we are in a new period of the Black freedom struggle.[p27] ... Over the course of several decades, the legacy of antiracist movements was channeled toward the economic and political advancement of individuals like Barack Obama and Bill Cosby who would go on to lead the attack against social movements and marginalized communities. [p26]

It follows from Wilderson’s reasoning that the whole of “white” civil society is founded on this absolute violence, the entire history of which is reduced to an effect of a purported white enjoyment of black suffering—“as though the chief business of slavery,” in the inimitable words of historian Barbara Fields, “were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco.” [42]

To suggest that the acceptance of white-skin privilege is in the interests of white workers is equivalent to suggesting that swallowing the worm with the hook in it is in the interests of the fish. To argue that repudiating these privileges is a “sacrifice” is to argue that the fish is making a sacrifice when it leaps from the water, flips its tail, shakes its head furiously in every direction and throws the barbed offering. [p55]

In his song “Wat about Di Working Claas,” Linton Kwesi Johnson summed up how this dynamic of racial division posed an obstacle to the success of industrial struggles:[p93]... Nah badda blame it ’pon the black working class, Mr. Racist Blame it ’pon the ruling class Blame it ’pon your capitalist boss We pay the costs, we suffer the loss. [p93]

Ultimately, Haider wants to see identity politics subordinated to a mass movement capable of securing real social change.

It’s impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism,” Malcolm [X] said in a 1964 discussion. “You can’t have capitalism without racism. And if you find one and you happen to get that person into conversation and they have a philosophy that makes you sure they don’t have this racism in their outlook, usually they’re socialists or their political philosophy is socialism... [p21]

...the Black Panther Party had to navigate between two concerns. They recognized that black people had been oppressed on a specifically racial basis, and so they had to organize autonomously. But at the same time, if you talked about racism without talking about capitalism, you weren’t talking about getting power in the hands of the people. You were setting up a situation in which the white cop would be replaced by a black cop. For the Panthers, this was not liberation. [p26]

As the historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall elaborates in her analysis of the “long civil rights movement,” Martin Luther King Jr. has been rendered an empty symbol, “frozen in 1963.” Through selective quotation, Hall observes, the uplifting rhetoric of his speeches has been stripped of its content: his opposition to the Vietnam War, through an analysis linking segregation to imperialism; his democratic socialist commitment to unionization; his orchestration of the Poor People’s Campaign; and his support for a sanitation workers’ strike when he was assassinated in Memphis. [p23]

the Black Lives Matter movement came from the grassroots. Accordingly, it did not draw an artificial boundary between class and race. As Erin Gray wrote in her analysis of this “revolutionary 21st century anti-lynching movement”: “The direct actions organized by the outraged in defense of black life have become increasingly anticapitalist—they have included the destruction of property, freeway occupations, gas station and police department blockades, and shutdowns to major corporations like Walmart.”<.i> [p36]

...the black freedom struggle is what most closely approached a socialist movement—as the Trinidadian intellectual and militant C.L.R. James put it, the movements for black self-determination were “independent struggles” that represented the self-mobilization and self-organization of the masses and were thus at the leading edge of any socialist project.

... In 1799, the Haitian Revolutionary leader Toussaint L’Ouverture was asked by France to write on the banners of his army, “Brave blacks, remember that the French people alone recognize your liberty and the equality of your rights.” He refused, pointing to the slavery that persisted in France’s other colonies, and replied in a letter to Bonaparte: “It is not a liberty of circumstance, conceded to us alone, that we want; it is the absolute adoption of the principle that no man, born red, black, or white, can be the property of his fellow.”[p112]... It is still possible to claim the legacy of this insurgent universality, which says that we are not passive victims but active agents of a politics that demands freedom for everyone. [p112]

[Iasmini · Rating 2 out of 5]

O livro trás algumas provocações oportunas ao contexto político norte-americano, sobretudo, nas disputas narrativas no campo das esquerdas. No que o autor vai colocar como uma "esquerda liberal" e uma "esquerda mais trabalhista.

O argumento central gira ao entorno da ideia de que raça é uma concepção que se originaria com a chegada dos escravos afro-americanos. Aqui estou em desacordo e vou ao encontro do marco trabalhado por Quijano e Lugones, por exemplo. Esses autores se debruçam sobre o colonialismo nas Américas e o processo de racializacao desde Colombo, em 1492, com a relação entre colonizador/colonizado com os povos originários.

Além disso, achei bem problemático não trazer Angela Davis pra discussão(Spivak também cairia bem). Digo isso porque várias referências aos Panteras Negras são trazidas como argumento para o texto e me expantou não ver Davis alí (mesmo quando se falava em violência policial, encarceramento da juventude negra). Fora que o autor tá o tempo todo articulando raça, genero e classe sendo que, na introdução, vai colocar que não concorda com essa "divina trindade" ou "espírito santo da identidade".

Num geral, o texto me trouxe alguns incômodos durante toda sua leitura. Particularmente, continuei ele porque tem servido como base para crítica sobre argumentos de opressão de raça, gênero, sexualidade. No entanto, é irônico perceber que o livro aponta ao final, justamente, para aonde as críticas pós coloniais e decoloniais vem apontando. Boa parte dos autores pos coloniais e decoloniais está preocupada em reatualizar conceitos marxistas(são até antigos marxianos!).

[Anna Braga · Rating 5 out of 5]

“a identidade se torna uma armadilha quando se converte em uma política, ou, mais precisamente, em “política de identidade” ou “identitarismo”. O cerne do livro é a distinção entre identidade e política de identidade, com foco na identidade racial. O que Haider nos propõe aqui é que “devemos rejeitar a identidade como base para se pensar a política identitária”. Ou em outras palavras: que não se pode compreender uma ideologia por meio de concepções igualmente ideológicas.

A “armadilha” de que fala Haider não está em se levar em conta a identidade nas análises sobre a sociedade, mas em analisá-la como se fosse algo exterior às determinações materiais da vida social. Afastada de sua dimensão social, a identidade passa a ser, simultaneamente, ponto de partida e ponto de chegada, colocando o pensamento em um loop infinito de pura contradição. Desse modo, o debate intelectual sobre a identidade jamais ultrapassa a si mesmo, incapaz que é de projetar-se nas relações concretas que sustentam as identidades sociais. À sombra do identitarismo, o mundo é uma fantasmagoria em que ser negro, mulher, LGBT, trabalhador e todo sofrimento real projeta-se em narrativas fragmentadas, relatos de experiências pessoais (storytelling) e outros subjetivismos travestidos de método. Ainda que se refiram a experiências comuns de muitos indivíduos, as narrativas e relatos subjetivos não nos oferecem mais do que um caleidoscópio sociológico. O identitarismo, como forma de pensar a realidade, tem o seu limite máximo nas manifestações da ideologia identitária.”

Parte do prefácio escrito por Silvio Luiz de Almeida.

[David Gomez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Instructive. Particularly loved the portion distinguishing the Weatherman view of anti-racism against Ignatiev’s view from “Without A Science if Navigation We Cannot Sail in Stormy Seas.”

The analogy of racism as a worm on a hook, suggesting that anti-racism does not require sacrifice at all, is an important perspective for the age of privilege discourse—it’s a perspective that many have not been exposed to, and to me it seems correct.

Also loves the discussion of Hall’s view from Policing the Crisis, that race is the modality by which many peoples experience class, and the discussion about what that statement actually means.

Anyways everyone who cares about the discussion of “identity” should give it a read.

[Brendan James · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent introduction not only to the current tussle over identity politics but also to the long history of black radicalism in the US, a tradition that Haider argues embodied identity politics' strengths and anticipated its shortcomings.

Approachable text that is still grounded in sophisticated theory.

[Pablo Uribe · Rating 4 out of 5]

good, but not necessarily worth it if you've read or heard recent interviews or seen parts of the argument in shorter form in press about the book.

[Gatlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty good history of the term "identity politics" that doesn't refuse to engage with the CRC who invented the term, the Black Panthers, and the black radical tradition.

However, the book does stake out a strong anti-Afro-Pessimism argument (within good reason IMO) as it shows how terms such as "antiblackness" were appropriated from Wilderson's work by opportunists and capitalists to undermine solidarity among oppressed people and put more black people in charge of oppressing black people. Which is a trending phenomenon among the left wing of the ruling class, e.g. Hillary Clinton—although she mobilizes the woman-as-victim trope despite bombing women in the middle east.

The book also does not skimp out when discussing how these academic works and activism on campuses actively cross pollinate to diffuse the radical potential of student movements and reincorporate grievances into the administration.

Overall I'd recommend this book to people who may be skeptical of "identity politics" but still are left wing / anticapitalist. I'll for sure be mining this book's bibliography for future reading.

However, as another reviewer put it, the argument isn't finished in this book. But I think I see the writing on the wall:

The new universalism of communist or socialist movements is the unifying aspect of struggle. I'm thinking of the quote from the book which goes something like "the liberation of someone completely different from myself is also my own liberation." Like Marx wrote in "On the Jewish Question," the ultimate goal of any movement of oppressed people is freedom and liberty, in a sense of their material circumstances and their ability to live daily life. The book's argument to me seems to be leading towards what Butler, Zizek, and other scholars have suggested as the state of Jewish diaspora as a universalism.

The one strength of this book that I think makes it worth reading even if you feel like much of it is covered ground: its anti-liberalism. If we are going to emancipate all oppressed people, we must leave liberalism in the past. The form of justice in liberalism leads to states of victimization for those oppressed people, when the opposite is often true: they show immense strength.

The book I'd recommend for beginning to think through a non-liberal political world is Roberto Esposito's *Terms of the Political*

I also appreciate the book's anti-Nihlism or more accurately: anti-defeatism. We must naïvely try again and again to emancipate ourselves and all oppressed people of the world in order to create the rhythms of life we wish to live in

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Our political agency through identity is exactly locks us into the state, what ensures our continued subjection. The pressing task, then, as Butler puts it, is to come up with ways of "refusing the type of individuality correlated with the disciplinary apparatus of the modern state."" ⁣

This is a short and readable book that I'd recommend as a read for a critique of contemporary identity politics. Haider includes historical examples of how certain categories did not exist before until they were created & how it completely changed the relations between communities (like the category "white" which was created to dissolve the potential of working class solidarity between indentured white labour & coming slave labour!)⁣
⁣
IdPol was started as a revolutionary way to organise from below by Black feminists from the Combahee River Collective as existing (male-dominated Black Power & white-dominated Feminist) movements did not acknowledge their unique experiences. In its present form however, IdPol reifies identities & seeks inclusion into existing systems & the assertion of rights is made for the injured individual, so the advocacy is thus done (painstakingly slow too) through the level of the individual while also fixing them always as the oppressed & injured instead of also political agents. In this process of flattening, individual "categories" like race, gender, class risk being seen as possessing similar materialist relations when in fact they possess completely different social relations & history & ought to be understood as such.

IdPol is always seen as something that comes from the margin, thereby always setting the most privilege identity as "neutral" when it's untrue (white nationalism is identity politics too). It does not adequately challenge the fact that identity categories are created by existing powers in order to aid in the way they aim to distribute resources or enact certain polices/relations.

I do wonder however if his critique is already dated. I do agree with many of his critiques of the limitations but I’ve also seen people manage to self organise on the basis of identity while also maintaining an insurgency from below, though a lot of problems do persist in terms of lack of collective organising, solidarity, & the persistence neoliberal logic in activism, I feel like we are entering into new territories of organising that people are trying to figure out together!