This other view of identity politics starts from two premises. First, individuals have social identities, and it is an obligation of democracies to treat those social identities, as much as possible and within the constraints of other democratic values, with equal respect. Second, in contemporary democracies certain social identities are typically less privileged than others, and one way to be less privileged is for your identity—as black, a woman, gay, trans—to not even be recognized as an identity. That’s why many social movements start by advocating for public recognition. It is why, for example, trans activists have argued that being trans is a normal way of being a human being, and that trans people (or gay men or lesbians) are not simply “sick.”
Taken in this way, identity politics just is the politics of recognition. But recognition politics, unlike the politics of tribalism, implies no particular view of what politics is for. One might engage in politics in order to gain recognition for a social group for any number of reasons—to further that group’s standing, to prevent it from being oppressed, or for the common good. One might, for example, argue that everyone is better off, when each of our social identities is recognized under the law. But independently of one’s view on the point of politics, the justification for the importance of recognition in democratic theory is connected to the concept of equal respect—the first premise just mentioned. But why believe this premise?
The concept of equal respect has been a central component of democratic theory since Kant. The familiar idea is that each person should be treated equally under the law. The key is what that means, not just in terms of the notoriously difficult idea of “equality” but in terms of the concept of a person and identity itself.
In Chapter 3 I argued that one aspect of our overall identity—of what it means to be an individual, in other words—is that we each have a “self-identity,” which is the kind of person we aspire to be, including our aspirational social identities or the groups we identify with. If so, then it is wrong to think of our identities atomistically, as if each person were a geometric point separated on a line from all others. Rather, our self-identities are constructed in relation to, and possibly in rebellion against, the social identities we inherit from the culture around us. Crucially, our identities are narratives written by us and others at the same time—partly through the process of recognition. My recognizing you (or not doing so) as being the kind of person you are helps to shape you—whether you like it or not—into being a particular kind of person. Social recognition is part of individual identity formation from the get-go. And so, if democracies wish to treat individuals with equal respect, they cannot help but recognize individuals as falling into certain categories. The formation of our self-identities requires such categorization.
Of course, antidemocratic societies aren’t concerned with equal respect, even if they are concerned with recognition (being recognized as a lord or lady, for example). Only with the collapse of social hierarchies, together with the rising importance of human rights and the idea of basic respect, did the concepts of recognition and identity even become salient. But once they did, the fact that our self-identities are formed partly through social recognition also became politically salient. As a result, the social formation of our self-identities, together with the demands of respect and dignity, provides a reason for wanting one’s identity recognized not just by other individuals but under the law.9
Even if this argument is accepted, there are complications when it comes to real—as opposed to theoretical—politics. Which identities should be recognized, and what counts as legal and political recognition, are issues that continue to animate real-world political discussions about gender, race, and religion. But those are not the issues that interest me here. My point so far is simpler: the politics of recognition is not the same as the politics of tribalism. The former is deeply linked to basic democratic ideals. The latter most assuredly is not.
It is therefore interesting that critics of identity politics often confuse those practicing the recognition version of identity politics with those practicing the tribal version. A good example is the reaction to Black Lives Matter—another group, like the Combahee River Collective, started by black women. The furor over the Black Lives Matter movement started with the hashtag and slogan itself. Many white people—both on the Left and on the Right—seemed to think it meant “only black lives matter.” But as the creators of the movement pointed out right from the beginning, it meant “black lives matter too.” The point of the movement was not to promote one race over the other, but to get whites to recognize that black citizens were disproportionately victims of police violence. The persistence of the misunderstanding was so prevalent that it was hard not to see it, at times, as deliberate.
If the distinction between these two ways of conceiving of identity politics is so obvious—as I’ve essentially just said it is—then why the confusion? Why do so many take recognition politics to be the politics of tribalism?10
One explanation, perhaps best made by the influential feminist and Marxist theorist Nancy Fraser, is that the politics of recognition often leads to damaging—that is, tribal—forms of “communitarianism.” The thought is that concentrating one’s political efforts on recognizing one’s social identity can only underline the distinctiveness of one’s community and serve to enforce that community’s norms—norms that themselves, in the case of traditional communities, might not be egalitarian or progressive.11 In short, Fraser worries that overemphasizing recognition can lead to underemphasizing issues of justice. That may be so, but as Fraser’s critics have pointed out, one might argue that in many cases, certain social groups often need recognition before they can lobby for more just policies.12 One precedes the other.
A different worry about recognition politics is that it can lead to a tribal view of knowledge. In part, this is because recognition politics is often associated with “standpoint epistemology”—a view about social knowledge that, like “identity politics,” is often misunderstood. As developed by early feminist philosophers in the 1980s and ’90s, standpoint epistemology rests on the intuitive thought that where you sit in society can give you insights that others often lack.13 Seen in this way, it is an extension of a very old philosophical idea: experience matters. As the seventeenth-century empiricist John Locke put it, someone who tastes a pineapple for the first time (an exotic fruit in Locke’s England) knows something that those who haven’t had the pleasure don’t know: what a pineapple tastes like. Similarly, pregnancy is an experience that gives a woman access to certain truths about her body, and about medical care, and social and personal relationships. Experiences like being pregnant or having children are “transformative” they change not only what you care about, but what kinds of knowledge you may have.14
Standpoint epistemologists applied this idea to the social realm: because of how they are treated in the general culture, because of how they are harassed by men, or denied certain privileges, women have insights into that culture that men don’t have. The point can be generalized even further. A person who has experienced oppression (for whatever reason) has experiences that someone who has never been oppressed in that way doesn’t have. And that experience can give them knowledge that others might have a hard time appreciating. Indeed, this was part of the point of the Combahee River Collective’s statement.
A good example of how this theory interacts with recognition politics is the growing sensitivity to sexual harassment. Activists and ordinary citizens have used verbal and video testimony to bring public recognition to facts about what it is like to be a woman in this society that have often been overlooked or downplayed. The #MeToo movement has made people—or should we say, men—publicly accept that sexual violence and harassment is deeply widespread and tolerated in our society, particularly when it involves men with financial or political power over women. In doing so, activists have brought to light truths that previously had been appreciated from only a particular standpoint. They’ve brought rec
ognition to knowledge that had been hidden.
Note that none of this requires or even encourages tribal politics. In fact, quite the opposite: it takes public recognition of certain identities as a step toward public, shared knowledge. Of course, that shared knowledge may be limited. I may know that racism and sexism exist without knowing what it is like to experience them. But I don’t need to know what experiencing oppression (or starvation or rape) is like to be able to know that it is bad, and to vote accordingly.
A move toward tribalism happens only when one goes a step further and takes knowledge, and perhaps truth itself, as relative to certain standpoints. This is a step that many standpoint epistemologists have often been reluctant to take, but that many others sometimes do in their name. This was especially true in the 1980s and ’90s, when identity politics and standpoint theory were often identified with postmodernism. A central insight of many forms of postmodernism is the idea that categories that Western culture often treated as natural and given—like race or gender or even identity itself—are to varying degrees actually social constructions.
A social construction is not a literal artifact, like a chair or a hammer. Where hammers are defined by their functions, social constructions are defined by social practices. Some of these practices are totally unregulated. Being cool, for example, is the product of social expectations, but not expectations that are encoded in law or custom per se. The laws of the cool change rapidly from generation to generation, and in ways that the older generation will rarely predict or even understand. But other social constructions—like marriage—are a matter of meeting certain regulated conditions, in this case legal regulations. One can’t be married unless one meets those conditions. And the same can be said for much of what we take for granted in our social world—wealth, religion, laws, and government. You can’t define such things without appealing to certain structured forms of human behavior and thinking.15
The idea that much of our life is determined by social constructions is a powerful philosophical insight. Even more important is the insight that we often confuse a category like race or marriage as naming a natural kind of thing as opposed to something that has been socially constructed. But both of these ideas are different still from the idea that truth itself is constructed. According to that view, the truth of what we say or believe is determined not by how things “really are” but by our social practices. Truth, as the philosopher Richard Rorty once ironically suggested, is what your peers let you get away with saying.16
This kind of relativism about truth is sometimes associated with identity politics and progressivism in general. Those convinced by the association—on the Left and on the Right—often seem to make an inference like this: (1) our standpoints are social constructions; (2) our standpoints determine what we think is true; hence, (3) truth is relative to standpoints.
This can be a seductive argument. Part of its power lies in the fact that its premises are plausible. My social standpoint is largely the result of culture. And my opinions are generally a result of that standpoint—of the collection of social identities and perspectives that make it up. But an even greater part of the argument’s seductive power is the egalitarian appeal of its conclusion. For, the idea that what is true is determined by where I socially stand can seem like a great leveling device, suggesting that every standpoint is as good as any other from the point of view of knowledge. No one has the God’s-eye point of view, so no one should be tempted to claim it. For this reason, perhaps more than any other, many progressives—for whom equality is a supreme value—have been tempted by an idea that seems to make all truths equal.
But it is fallacious to infer truth relativism from those premises. The fact that what I think is true depends on my perspective doesn’t make the truth itself relative to that perspective. That would be like thinking that just because I can see the next valley only from the top of the ridge means that the next valley exists only when I stand there. Moreover, the idea that truth is relative in this way is deeply implausible. It suggests that thinking you are bulletproof (and getting everyone else to believe it too) would mean you really are bulletproof. The fact that all thinking is done from a perspective doesn’t mean that thinking makes it so. In particular, race and gender are social constructions, but that doesn’t mean that that very fact (the fact that race and gender are social constructions) is a social construction.
Truth relativism, however, is an idea that can lead to a form of tribal politics, and, as we saw in Chapter 4, it can support an ideology of arrogance. These outcomes can sound surprising, since, as I just noted, many liberals and progressives have embraced forms of relativism about truth and knowledge precisely because they seemed to promise the ultimate kind of equality: equality of belief. And this was meant to lead to tolerance. (Conservative thinkers like Bill Bennett and Alan Bloom reinforced the connection between equality and tolerance during the 1980s and ’90s, arguing that the idea that all beliefs could be true was the scourge of the Earth, and denouncing liberals for espousing it.)
The number of people who actually embrace relativism is hard to determine. The question is partly one of language. I’ve noticed over the years that “truth is relative” or “that’s true for me” can mean lots of different things to different people—from “I have my opinion, you have yours, so let’s go have a beer” to a commonsense skepticism about the difficulty of knowing what is really true. But taken seriously as a philosophical view, relativism encourages less tolerance and more tribalism than one might have thought.
Here’s why. According to relativism, for any proposition P, P is true at some time if, and only if, my perspective sanctions P at that time. It follows that whatever my perspective sanctions can’t be false, because those propositions are, by definition, true. And the same is the case relative to your perspective. Thus, where your perspective sanctions a proposition and mine does not, we both believe what is true and neither of us is mistaken.
But how, then, can we settle our disagreements? Not by appealing to common facts, because truth is relative to perspectives. So, where my standpoint differs from yours, so does my truth. As such, a rational solution to our disagreement—one based on the facts—seems out of reach. And that unattainability can lead to the dark thought that the only way to resolve our dispute is for me to get you to share my perspective or recognize it as the privileged one. Then my truth will be all the truth there is; there will be no speaking truth to power.
Note that this form of tribalism bites its own tail, for the same logic means, in turn, that I can’t even criticize my own current perspective. What is true at some time, in such a view, is what is sanctioned by the perspective at that time. So, whatever my perspective sanctions at some moment in time is never wrong at that moment in time. Which, in turn, means that we can never describe my perspective as progressing, since to progress is to improve from moment to moment. But if what is true is true relative to a perspective in a particular moment, then my perspective never improves from moment to moment. It only changes. This is the dark place—the denial of the possibility of moral and social progress—toward which truth relativism leads.
There is no doubt that much of the Left for a very long time fell victim to these sorts of ideas. But nothing in recognition politics or standpoint epistemology, or even the idea of social construction requires truth relativism. As Sandra Harding herself—arguably the central figure in standpoint epistemology—argued forcefully way back in 1993:
It is not equally true as its denial that women’s uteruses wander around in their bodies when they take math courses, that only Man the Hunter made important contributions to society . . . that targets of rape and battery must bear the responsibility for what happens to them. . . . Standpoint theories neither hold nor are doomed to hold [relativism about truth].17
So, identifying identity politics—and associated epistemological theories like standpoint theory—with relativism is simply a mistake, but it is a mistake that the Left has paid dearl
y for making. One cost is the arrogance of belief that it has inspired, an arrogance that encourages some progressives to feel that because their truth is their truth, they—and the social groups for which they believe they stand—have nothing to learn from conservatives, or anyone else for that matter. That’s the sort of arrogant ideology that leads progressives to turn their nose up at even talking to Trump voters, or makes some college students unwilling to debate with conservative intellectuals when they come to their campus.
Another cost of linking identity politics with relativism is that it has inspired imitators on the Right—perhaps best epitomized by the Trump administration’s penchant for talking about “alternative facts.” And there is no getting around the fact that the current and frightening resurgence of the Alt-Right is due to a renewed commitment to tribal politics on the Right. Indeed, in the United States the ur-tribal politics has always been the politics of white supremacy, which pits tribe against tribe in the most explicit way possible, and which brooks no truth other than its own dark light.
Know-It-All Society Page 10