Black feminist identity politics lodged universal revolution within a particular identity category.

Evidence

As the 1977 ‘‘Combahee River Collective Statement’’ says, ‘‘we realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us… . This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves’’ (Schneir, Feminism in Our Time 179–80). … The revolutionary concept of ‘‘identity politics,’’ steeped though it still was in dominant universalist revolutionary goals (Combahee also says, ‘‘We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free, since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression’’ [Schneir 183]), was a crucial pivot to the postmodern repudiation of these universalist emancipatory goals of modernity. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 830

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘identity politics’ through its originating Combahee River Collective formulation and shows how it pivoted from modern universalism to postmodern repudiation.
• XREF: Links to earlier chapters on sixties politics and subject politics as contests over subjectivity, and to the emergence of postmodern subject politics discussed throughout the book. — connects to: The particular marked body replaces the abstract universal subject in postmodernity — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 549; Postmodern subjectivity replaced the heroic vanguard self with shifting affinity coalitions — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 648