Identity politics is now back with a vengeance at the center of US politics. In the New Hampshire Democratic primary, belying all the polls and media accounts that had Obama ahead by as much as 13 points, Hillary Clinton’s unexpected victory opened up the historical antagonism between race and gender that has always haunted US politics.

Speculations in the media among politicians and pundits in the wake of that primary have been discussed here, here, and here.

Identity politics involves the privileging, in political practice, of one of the categories of difference (race, class, gender, and sexual orientation), hierarchy, and discrimination that exists in US culture and society.

However, in this election cycle, Progressives have to be vigilant not to let race and gender short-circuit each other the way that happened in the 1960s. In that decade, the civil rights movement elided gender, while second-wave feminism elided race. In the latter, in the name of universal sisterhood, white feminists elided women of color (in the US and in the third-world), who stood at the nexus of gender and race. In a New York Times article on Sunday, Mark Leibovich implied that the race between Clinton and Obama is zero-sum: one side wins, the other loses. On the contrary, we say it should be nonzero-sum: both sides win. The discourse and debates in this primary and general presidential run should of course engage the issues of gender and race, among other issues, but absolutely should not be defined by them. Progressives need to form tactical and strategic alliances across these categories of difference in order to achieve desired political goals.

In the context of political (and social) movements mobilized for political(and legal) goals in the US, the historical antagonism between race and gender can be traced back to the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony in the 19th century, and not to Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as Leibovich claimed in his NY Times article. (Douglass and Stanton knew each other but weren’t friends).

In 1869, the long-time friendship between Douglass and Anthony dissolved over the debate preceding the 15th Amendment to the Constitution that gave the vote to black men, but not to women. A highly devoted abolitionist, Anthony questioned why women should support this Amendment when black men did not support women’s voting rights. After the passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870, Anthony devoted her work exclusively to the agitation for women’s suffrage. The 19th Amendment in 1920 eventually granted women the right to vote.

In the 1960s, second-wave feminism picked up the relay of the race-gender divide. Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique; Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex; Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics; and Gloria Steinem’s Ms Magazine: in the name of white middle- and upper-middle-class women, all these seminal texts of second-wave feminism and publication theorized a first-world feminist politics that posited a global sisterhood in the primary struggle against patriarchal oppression, thereby eliding the specific historical, economic, and social conditions of the woman of color in the US and third world who stood at the axis of race and gender. (Third-wave feminism later came to question this global feminist theory.)

(Simone de Beauvoir is often mistakenly credited for launching second-wave feminism. But even in 1949 when she wrote her book, The Second Sex she seemed to have anticipated its limitations. She wrote in the Intro:

But there are deep similarities between the situation of woman and that of the Negro. Both are being emancipated today from a like paternalism, and the former master class wishes to ‘keep them in their place’ – that is, the place chosen for them. In both cases the former masters lavish more or less sincere eulogies, either on the virtues of ‘the good Negro’ with his dormant, childish, merry soul – the submissive Negro – or on the merits of the woman who is ‘truly feminine’ – that is, frivolous, infantile, irresponsible the submissive woman.)

Women (white and black) were mostly absent or marginalized in the civil rights, Black Power, and Black Panther movements. Ironically, in 1955 Rosa Parks came to embody, as it were, the race-gender commonality in the struggle against white patriarchal oppression when she refused to give up her bus seat for a white man, a highly significant event that mobilized and animated the civil rights movement in the 1960s. At that moment in US history, as a woman of color, Rosa Parks occupied that liminal space straddling the sutures of class, race, and gender, a dispersion of subject-positions at conflict with legal institutions, social and state policies, and cultural norms and authority.

And the case of Anita Hill in 1991 exposed the bankruptcy of the race-gender divide in US politics. When Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment in the workplace and testified at his Senate confirmation hearing, white and black women mostly rallied around her in the nimbus of a common awareness of gender discrimination and patriarchal hierarchization. And indeed some African-Americans accused her of betraying her race.

Which brings us to the present moment. Again: Progressives need to work across categories of difference to form strategic and tactical alliances to contest and win hegemony by consensus.

(Biodun Iginla)

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