In The Power of Identity Politics Alicia Garza makes a great point, stating “Identity is the elephant in America’s room” (191). Identity is such a fragile subject to bring up in American society, it’s often met with eye rolls, attitude, and offense. White Americans like to remain colorblind to race issues and men of color like to remain sex blind to gender issues, this necessitated the emergence of identity politics. Identity politics refers to politics that addresses the lived experiences of those whose identities lie outside of the norms defined by American society or singular race and gender movements that ignore Black women’s intersecting identities, experience, and oppression. It is a way to combat power dynamics being replicated in movements that seek to end said dynamics.
Identity politics is about recognizing power, what it is, how it operates, how it manifests, how we contribute to it, and most importantly, how we remedy it. “A lack of understanding is central to how power operates. Power prefers to operate in obscurity; if how power operates was fully transparent, I suspect many of us would rebel against it.” (Garza, 186). People belonging to groups in power, namely white people, cisgender men, and heterosexual people, are blind to their privilege; they don’t and refuse to see that they are the default in society. White people fail to see how whiteness is centered in everything in this country, beauty is defined by Eurocentric features (straight hair, thin nose, fair skin), “flesh tone” and nude are synonymous with the color beige; white people are the default for human. It’s easy to say “I don’t see color” or “there’s only one race the human race” when you’ve lived in the safety of default humanness instead of a racialized body that defines your quality of life.
Allena McKenzie’s Snapshot 10 which shows an image saying “I don’t see race, I’m a good person” and translate it to its real meaning of “I’m going to use my place of privilege to refute and deny the sufferings of those who do not have white privilege while at the and time erasing their personal and cultural history”. I love that meme because it exposes the truth behind those sayings. Ignoring race doesn’t make you a good person, it makes you the opposite because that mindset serves only white people. When you don’t see race, you don’t see how whiteness has committed atrocities against of people of color, you don’t see the history, and culture of people of color, you don’t see our beauty, you don’t see how larger society ignores, abuses, dehumanizes and erases us. It is important to see us, to hear us and to operate from a point of recognizing our presence.
In “Too Latina to be Black, Too Black to be Latina” Aleichia Williams talks about her middling identity of being both Black and Latina and the alienation she experiences from both communities. Erasure of Black people in Latin America erases their contributions to dance, music, language, and culture there, it erases the history of enslaved Africans in Latin America, it erases their presence and current contributions and trials. Imagine being erased from the home and culture you were born and raised in. The sense of not belonging because of the false narrative that Latino is a race, rather than ethnicity. Because the image of a latinx person is the mestizos phenotype that resembles JLO, and Becky G. Deportation is a Black issue that’s not recognized as such because Afro-Latinx people aren’t seen. This is why Identity politics is important, we must identify those who fall outside of what’s defined as the default.
