While reading “The Power of Identity Politics” by Alicia Garza, I felt like I’m having a therapy session with my own beliefs. They were challenged. This text unpacks the concept of identity politics. To start, the writer uses an image of a young woman that they overheard in the bar, who also happened to be white and blonde. The woman felt irritated by the frequency with which race was mentioned everywhere. She believed it was dividing people even more. As a young white blonde woman, I admit that I can relate to her a lot — I often have the inner monologue of “I wish we just didn’t have the concept of race at all.” That’s why I’m grateful for this piece of writing. Such a view of mine came from not understanding how my privilege functions. As Williams states, “power prefers to operate in obscurity.” That is to say, we are hesitant to acknowledge the differences between the quality of life of certain race groups because privilege exists when it is ignored. One part that helped me understand the whole dilemma is this: “If white people had not enacted a system of enslavement where Black people from the Caribbean, Africa, and Latin America were stolen and forced into subjugation for generations, would we be having this conversation?” It’s like a trap or a loop that white people put themselves into long ago. And despite their desire to let go of history and just move on, we cannot and should not. As I read about why I couldn’t help but compare it to the struggles of my homeland. “The willful forgetting of traumatic experiences allows their harmful effects to continue.” There were two man-made famines in Ukraine, aimed for both humiliation, genocide, and profit. There were generally a lot of things happening to erase Ukrainian culture and history as if it never existed. It was so traumatic that many survivors of the famine have never spoken a word of it. They all pretended that it never happened. Because this and many other historic events that were forgotten until recently, an image of brother nations have established, leading to the further assimilation of Ukrainians. Apparently, the same thing is asked of Black people – to move on, forget, and expect that the historic oppression would never happen again. But as we see, it certainly can happen.

That’s why identity politics should not be suppressed – they raise awareness of diverse cultures that deserve to exist and to be different. We can observe it in the second reading by Aleichia Williams, who struggles to put herself in one category – she is both African-American and Latina. Her writing reminded me of myself — born in one country, speaking a language of the second country, and being moved to the third country as a teen. Who am I? I was influenced by 3 different cultures and they all found a way to coexist inside of me. I’m speaking not only for myself but for many other immigrants and/or people of mixed origins. Williams’s words echoed in my heart: “just because I don’t fit into one specific mold or the other doesn’t mean I’m any less of who I am.”