Identity politics needs a shared vocabulary to become radical democratic solidarity

Evidence

At the same time, public intellectuals need to recognize the limits of a politics based exclusively on theories of difference and identity. Not only does this suggest a notion of the political that engages the relations between everyday life and the state, but points to broader political categories for analyzing identity politics and its limits against the growing globalization of capital and culture. Public intellectuals need a new discourse for grasping the unity of the social, political, and global community, not so much as to shut down a proliferation of identities based on theories of differences but to engage them through relations of solidarity engaged in broader struggles that reveal both the strengths and limits of such particularities. Progressive public intellectuals need to develop a critical vocabulary that provides a purchase both on particular struggles and on what those struggles have in common in order to create a radical democratic hegemony; at stake here is the need to construct a democratic politics that affirms differences that matter but at the same time moves beyond a politics of limited interest groups. Difference in this sense becomes a marker of solidarity within and across relations of specificity and particularity. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2695

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines difference as a marker of solidarity rather than fragmentation — a conceptual re-framing of how difference and identity relate to political unity.