Identity arises from action and struggle rather than preceding politics

Evidence

A central concern with the contemporary discussion around “identity politics” is that the dilemmas and questions outlined here are not adequately addressed. This is largely because much discussion is underpinned by the presumption that one’s identity necessarily defines one’s politics and that there can be no politics until the subject has excavated or laid claim to his or her social identity. Inherent in such positions is the failure to understand the way in which identity grows out of, and is transformed by, action and struggle. This is one of the dangers of the preoccupation with exactly who is covered by the category “black” in contemporary British society. The usage of the notion of black to cover a variety of diverse communities has been rejected by some scholars in favor of other categories such as Asian, Muslim, or African-Caribbean. Yet others have sought to argue for a notion of “black” grounded in “racial” particularity. But the danger with these approaches is that one is presented with no more than a strategy of simple inversion. Here, the old bad black essentialist subject is replaced by a new good black essentialist subject whose identity necessarily guarantees a correct politics. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 121

Categorization

• XREF: This inversion critique of essentialist identity politics connects to the vault’s treatment of racial formation as a process rather than fixed category, and echoes later critiques that anti-essentialist antiracism can itself become a new orthodoxy. — connects to: Identity redefinition succeeds only where mobilization outpowers sedimented resistance. — Stephen Reicher, S. Alexander Haslam, and Nick Hopkins, Social identity and the dynamics of…, 106; Social identities empower even when shaped by oppressive power relations. — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 251; Sartre’s choice-based view of sexuality clashed with emerging born-this-way gay identity politics — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 69 (+7 more)
• DEFINE: Sharpens what the objectionable core of ‘identity politics’ is taken to be — the presumption that identity precedes and dictates politics — useful for defining the term in vault glosses.
• DEEPTHINKING: The final image of replacing a bad black essentialist subject with a good one whose identity ‘necessarily guarantees a correct politics’ is a compact, durable diagnostic of how well-meaning antiracism can reproduce the essentialism it fights.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 121