Identity Politics
Personal accounts
“Identity Politics is an interesting one and the term itself definitely has a bit of a ring to it. There seem to be two sides to it:
1) Marginalized people trying to be recognized as the full members of society they are supposed to be and
2) This ultimately reinforcing a lot of the categorizations we’d need to overcome in order for point 1 to become reality.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while and don’t really see a way out of this conundrum. We need to draw attention to different identity conceptions in order to wake people up and broaden their view of what identity can be as it’s difficult to grasp how fundamentally different someone else’s experience can be. But ultimately, if we leave it at that (and I’d say we usually do with a lot of slacktivism and a short lived media cycle) this only reinforces the differences between how different groups identify.
I think instead of having public discourse focus on the specifics of certain group identities it should move more towards how we can integrate different conceptions into one, cohesive society. I also think that cannot be done overnight and a lot of it is down to us educating the generations that follow ours.”
