Activist identities must be reinvented as practice, not inherited as belief

Evidence

Reference like this to the American tradition of active political participation was rare. The other explicit reference I heard to that tradition was in a speech Neil gave at a rally to support a state initiative on the ballot. Dumping tea into Swift River, he decried Montgomery, a foreign company, saying that two hundred years ago, Americans dumped tea in the harbor in Boston to assert local rule against British forces, and here he was, doing the same, with the same goal in mind. The activists were tentatively trying to redefine the meaning of ‘‘volunteers’’ — they wanted to be the kind of volunteers that held the Boston Tea Party: people willing to stand up for themselves, even if it meant disagreeing in public and confronting powerful institutions, rebelling, and speaking in terms of principles. While the group did know about this cultural category for political involvement, it was a very abstract and distant concept. The activists had to reinvent it, as a practice and not just a static belief. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 1269

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to reader’s solidarity question: activists reach for an historical civic tradition (Boston Tea Party) as a shared positive reference point to build practice from. — connects to: Identity politics must return to the past only through narrative reinvention; Identity is transformed by political action, not a precondition of it; Identity politics can trade one master narrative for another rather than escape them (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Identity is transformed by political action, not a precondition of it #corroborates (0.90)
• Identity politics must return to the past only through narrative reinvention #expands (0.85)
• Improving intergroup relations requires changing identity thinking, not identity categories. #complicates (0.80) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 587
• Politicized identity converts a group from thing-in-itself to actor-for-itself #corroborates (0.80)
• Identity politics can trade one master narrative for another rather than escape them #qualifies (0.75)
• Identity is both a source of agency and increasingly constructed rather than given #qualifies (0.75)
• Identity is a political claim to belonging, not a fixed trait #corroborates (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2696