Photo by Alex Iby on Unsplash

Quick quiz: Which of the following is ‘Identity Politics;’

A) If you are a women you can have one of three pre-approved career paths: teacher, nurse or homemaker.

B) If you are homosexual you must pretend, at all times and in all circumstances, to be heterosexual, until you actually believe it or you kill yourself.

C) Black lives may or may not matter depending upon the mood of the nearest white person.

D) University admissions will have a quota for Jews and Catholics.

E) ALL OF THE ABOVE

Any tension there is in ‘Identity Politics’ comes from the unwillingness of WHITE PEOPLE to accept that they no longer have impunity in determining someone else’s identity. It really is that simple.

Malcolm Little was a small-time hustler and crook in the 1950s. Then he went to prison. In prison he converted to a religion different to the one he was raised in and took a name that would ring out around the world. He became Malcolm X. The X was for the unknown name: a marker of his lost identity that had been stripped away from his forbears by slavers. Malcolm X was defiantly articulating the idea that his identity — indeed the identity of an entire people — had been taken from him. He was not the one to have started this thing we now call ‘identity politics.’ Nor was he the last.