Activism has been moved from the social organization of political projects meant to challenge the status quo and instead has been reduced to donning an aesthetic based on identity alone.
College students seem to struggle with understanding activism. Due to social media, everyone has the potential to perform activism but not necessarily engage in it. One of the most popular movements among young people today is feminism and with March being Women’s History month, this conversation needs to be had.
Women’s History Month calls for celebrating all women who were and are able to overcome the many obstacles placed in their path by the system that excluded them in its construction. Women and, by extension, feminism can and should be celebrated.
However, while the strides women have taken in this country should not be taken for granted, the concern of political activity taking place arises.
The current state of U.S. politics surrounding social issues has stifled political movements like feminism, Black liberation and other people of color liberation movements, as well as economic movements like those found in socialist circles. This has left the idea of identity and activism largely hollow.
In Rashmee Kumar’s interview with Asad Haider, discussing his book Mistaken Identity, he pinpoints the shift that took place in our political movements to around the late 1970s. Identity politics was first introduced to the U.S. political conversation by a group of Black Lesbian Socialist Feminists known as the Combahee River Collective, or CRC.
The CRC women became disillusioned with the Black liberation, women’s liberation and socialist movements because they ignored their unique identities and thus, they faced much racism and sexism within the movements that were said to be for all people.
Their answer to this othering was to create not only a political group based out of their identities but to create an entire political ideology based on their identities. What has happened in the last few decades is a co-opting of identity politics that finds itself stuck at the level of identity.
Identity politics for the CRC was a political lens by which they endeavored to structure their own political agenda and ideology. This structuring, though specific, did not exclude those who lie outside their identity but was just one specific lens that they used to guide their understanding of the ills of the system they were within.
In other words, identity is not an end in itself but is simply a tool for analyzing the world and then creating a political activity or movement based on that analysis.
What began to happen over time and has recently become full-blown, is an embrace of this new hollow identity and activism. This identity takes the form of those subscribers who would rather buy a shirt with the famous Laurel Thatcher Ulrich quote, “A well-behaved woman seldom makes history,” than find themselves misbehaving. A quote which is usually understood as the opposite of the meaning intended by Ulrich.
Additionally, this hollow identity rears its head in bell hooks’ essay critiquing Beyoncé’s Lemonade as an example of trying to separate gender from class. The Beyoncé issue is simply recognizing identity and seeing that as the end goal is not sufficient for creating change.
Recognizing the difference is important, as the CRC showed, but this recognition is merely an analytical lens that is just for bettering one’s understanding of how the system oppresses different groups differently.
Again, enjoy Women’s History Month, the different POC months or Pride Month, but simply recognizing one’s identity and wearing it proudly is not enough to change the country.
Young feminists and society at large must get involved and begin building solidarity across identities and become politically active if real change is to happen.
– Jacob Montgomery is a philosophy senior