We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent

by Nesrine Malik

The only thing white elites are out of touch with is the pervasiveness of white identity politics.

‘White Americans are encouraged to invest in whiteness to remain true to an identity that provides them with resources, power and opportunity.’

If there was a pithy way to summarise the damaging identity politics myth, it would be with the anti-Black Lives Matter slogan, ‘All Lives Matter’. Like the heavily memed ‘economic anxiety’ trope, ‘All Lives Matter’ has become facetious shorthand, an eye-roll, calling out logic that swerves the issue by using whataboutery. This is the tool of universalism. It sidesteps specific concerns by dismissing them as special treatment tantrums, thus avoiding engaging with, or invalidating them. ‘All Lives Matter’ does not only suggest that black lives are not lost more brutally and more frequently than white lives, it suggests that to care about black lives is to do so at the expense and exclusion of others.

That is not to suggest that there are instances where defensive identity politics has not resulted in individualistic patterns of behaviour that have led to dead-end, identity-for-its-own-sake, politics. It has spawned ‘as a’ culture, where it is fashionable to ground one’s opinion in their experience ‘as a Muslim’ or ‘as a black man’. As a way of approaching the world, it links credibility to identity, rather than critical faculties. This is doubly damaging – it cedes and vacates space to the white experience as ‘mainstream’ and diminishes the authority of non-white people by painting them into a corner where they are unreliable witnesses, because everything is based on their own subjective experience.

If there is a young black girl somewhere in the UK right now, who dreams of writing science-fiction but sees that her most likely route to publishing is via a personal immigrant story, then a certain strain of identity politics, one I call representative identity politics, has failed her.

This makes it easier for the tool of universalism to be effective. But again, this is not the fault of representative identity politics, it is the fault of white monopoly on the means of cultural production.

If there is a criticism to be made of the left and how it has pursued identity politics, it is that it has done so, in the United States at least, in a tokenistic manner since the big electoral conversions of the 1960s. The loyalty of blacks and other people of colour to the left is taken for granted and gestured towards without there being any substantive engagement. Hillary Clinton’s buzzwords of ‘intersectionality’ and ‘privilege’ may have turned off some voters, but they failed to win over others. This has enabled the ‘All Lives Matter’ tactic of invoking universalism – which always means one thing, passiveness. And it is something which the right, the centre and the left agree on because identity is so subjective – you cannot hold on to it, you cannot achieve traction with it, it is too atomised for an ideology, whether that ideology is nationalism or socialism.

we are doubling down on a mistake, which is to allow populists to set the terms of the debate around identity, and ultimately use it to win votes.