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When will Black Lives Matter?
A question with, as yet, only 3/5ths of an answer.
There are political factions who would have us all believe that Identity Politics is something new in US debate: that politics of identity is just a new form of the old — liberal — emotionalism in politics and is, therefore, illegitimate. While it is true that arguing FROM identity has relatively recently clarified itself, full-throated and strong, in the political arena, that’s only because it is a straightforward answer to the long-held prerogative of the white male to impose identity. From the first white man to come to these shores and define indigenous persons as from India and therefore ‘Indians’, to the slavers who robbed lands of their people and then robbed those people of 2/5ths of their personhood, to the 18th-century practice of forcing religious identities upon any and all persons, identity politics has been with us from the beginning, outwardly defined and imposed at the whim of the powers that be.
In that part of the United States known as ‘the South,’ the region of the country centered around but not limited to those states that rebelled and called themselves, however briefly, the Confederate States the imposition of identity was very often lethal. White southerners have an identity: it is a robust and self-defined view of a heritage they take pride in as well as…
