Identity politics as I have always understood it strives to highlight the forms of domination against communities and classes of people who have been systematically marginalized and oppressed. It aims to right those injustices by privileging modes of discourse of the marginalized against the historically privileged (White Males first and foremost). But in countering injustice, do the advocates for social justice go too far?

Writing at Bitch Media, Sharday Mosurinjohn seems to think so.

Why the use of violence against violence? Gender-based oppression against gender-based oppression? What accounts for the terrible irony and hypocrisy of using the tactics condemned by feminism in its defense? I don’t want to find a way to give anybody a “pass,” I just want to think about why this happens.

Indeed, what many don’t understand is that in using power to resist, and using it in very forceful ways—which is not say physically forceful, though that is not excluded—only serves to reinforce the types of power structures one is resisting. (This is all in Foucault, btw, but that’s a post for another day.)

What Mosurinjohn doesn’t notice, I’d like to suggest, is that identity politics fails for the simple reason that it is, ultimately, divisive and tears apart the social fabric of the public sphere because its understanding of who we are, humans qua humans, is so utterly shallow. At it’s core, it’s tragically reductionist, arguing that if a person is descriptively X (women, racial minority, etc.), her politics are, or ought to be, Y. (Or that if someone is A, his prejudices must be B.) Writing as a minority, I’ve always found this thinking overly simplistic. Identity is a much more complex and multi-structured thing such that for all the categories of socio-economics, education, religion, and the like, a person’s true identity will always a remain infinitely richer, deeper, and complex.

Thus, when I say that identity politics is shallow, I mean that it fails to account for who and what humans are, qua humans. Ultimately the goal of identity politics is fighting against the social domination of one class over another, and that is emphatically the goal to which we all should strive. But it seems to me that this goal is better achieved when we see a human for who she is: Imago Dei. Rather than eschew religion as oppressive, racist, homophobic, or whatever, practitioners of identity politics would be well served if they took the time to contemplate what it means to be made in the image of God: to understand personhood as universal, whole, across all classes, genders, and races. That Man—i.e., mankind—is made in such a way reminds us that the content of our character is what truly matters. Or to put it another way, Imago Dei is the real identity politics.

We could also take a different tact on these questions, perhaps by looking at classical liberalism for paths forward. Perhaps Pettit’s “non-domination” could be a start. More hard questions. But again, without laying down preliminary thoughts, it is unclear that our thinking on this and related issues will improve.