Identity Politics
IS CRUCIAL
Identity politics is where people remove themselves from the greater whole because of a certain trait they have, like being black or a woman, and fight for those rights politically. A lot of people see #BlackLivesMatter and the #MeToo movement as political campaigns, and those can be described as movements underneath identity politics. These campaigns get huge amounts of backlash because of the alleged separation it creates between two groups of people. In the case of Black Lives Matter, it is black versus white, and in #MeToo, it is wrongfully deemed female versus male.
In the eyes of people who disagree with these movements, they usually have a “see no color” mentality, where they believe if we just ignore the problems and see each other as equals, we are suddenly equal. When speaking about equality, civil rights activists do not aim to advocate for switching gears and suddenly believing that color, religion, sex, and sexual orientation do not exist. It is about understanding how, despite someone’s physical differences and experiences, they are no more or less human than you. Black Lives Matter is coined as being a group of angry black people who are upset that they are marginalized and misunderstood Truly, Black Lives Matter is filled with black bodies who are rightfully tired of the biased justice system, brutality, and generations of hatred, so I would say they have every right to be up in arms. And no, not to remain silent.
Race and identity will always have harmful stereotypes and microagressions we will have to deal with. I believe the obsession with race today should not come from trying to get rid of identity, but from trying to understand why identity has grown to become a huge wall that stops compassion and empathy within the human race. The goal should be trying to eliminate that wall. Race isn’t the problem, how we treat it is. So, political identity has gone too far in a way that some people are kind of obsessed with it (esp. race). When topics like these get overlooked, more and more people get dehumanized. But as soon as people come forward to learn about these topics, more and more people get labeled human again. We should not be obsessed with our cultural differences, but we should be obsessed with minimizing how they affect our rights in this country. One thing we can all agree on is that we are all human and that is the one identity we have in common. We are all different shapes, sizes, colors, heights, sexualities, religions and more, but those have nothing to do with what we can bring to the world, what we can achieve and what we can change. MODULE 9 ASSIGNMENT BY IZEL PRAISE FERNANDEZ | A51