Identity Politics

Shifting U.S. Identities

The counter-hegemonic movements that have emerged in celebration of diverse identities since the 1960s challenged the traditional primacy and privilege of Whiteness and of masculinist heterosexuality. The “national identity” has undergone dramatic change during the past 2 decades. Immigration patterns have reshaped the demographics of the United States, so that by 2050, it is estimated that Whites will represent a mathematical minority of the population. With numerical strength has come political expression. Beginning with the Black and Native American civil rights movements of the 1960s, racial and ethnic minority groups, as well as women and sexualized minority groups, have mobilized, demanding a place and a voice that represents their identity. They are “in America's face.” The United States is now in the midst of a cultural shift as identity politics challenges the historical correlation of American-ness with Whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality.

What these movements have shared has been a commitment to the equal valuation and treatment of all social groups. Minority groups and women have asserted claims to freedom from discrimination, to group autonomy, to inclusion, and to participation, that is, to the status of American. Such an approach challenged long-standing and deeply embedded ideologies and practices that consciously sought to devalue “otherness”—Jim Crow laws, job segregation, and sodomy legislation, for example. Actors assert the claim to inclusion and recognition in the broader society on the basis of these stigmatized identities, but explicitly as “different” rather than as “same.”

The experiences of these increasingly vocal counter-hegemonic movements have inspired a corresponding scholarship on the politics of identity that similarly privileges identities grounded in difference. Theoretically, those engaged in a politics of difference challenge the principles of liberal democracy that reify the equal universal citizen. Such long-standing doctrines are said to deny and occlude the reality of exclusion and oppression experienced by those who are not represented by the fictional citizen: Those who are not White, heterosexual, Christian males. Those lying outside these rigid boundaries—by virtue of their group membership—have limited and uneven access to power and resources on all levels of society. Yet the object of mobilization should not be to gain an “equal” footing, according to the counter-hegemonic viewpoint; this leads only to assimilation and the loss of discrete identities. On the contrary, emancipatory politics, from this perspective, must concern itself with the recognition and celebration of difference.

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