In the beginning of “The Power of Identity Politics”, Alicia Garza shares an experience she’s had regarding identity politics; “I‘ve literally been accosted by white people in public places demanding to know why we identify ourselves in ways that divide us rather than just realizing we are all part of one human family” This is such a popular idea, that identifying ourselves divides us, that we are all human and there is “no need for labels.” In reality identity labels can be empowering for many minority groups, especially in helping them find community.
There are some great quotes from Garza’s article that stuck with me :
-”America is built on white identity politics: the attempted geno cide of indigenous people in the Americas in order to access the land and resources needed to build a white Christian nation; the enslavement of people from the African diaspora in order to se cure free labor to build a white Christian nation; the exploitation, internment, and degradation of Chinese and other Asian and Pacific Islander and Latino/a immigrant labor in order to propel commerce forward, for the purposes of making the white Christian nation the most powerful in the world.
-“Identity politics is both simple and hard to define, partially because it’s been so demonized by American conservatives. Because identity politics is ultimately a political concept, to fully understand why identity politics is important, we should start by defining power. I define power as the ability to make decisions that affect your own life and the lives of others, the freedom to shape and determine the story of who we are. Power also means having the ability to reward and punish and decide how resources are distributed.
This is different, of course, from how most of us think about power, which is individualized. Most of us talk about power in relation to how we feel in any given moment. One can wake up in the morning feeling empowered—but empowerment is dif ferent from power. Power is about who makes the rules, and the reality is that most of us lack real power, even over the decisions that are closest to us. Sure, I am empowered to decide what I eat for breakfast today, but larger forces create the options I can choose from—or whether or not breakfast is even available to me. A lack of understanding of power 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. “
