Unqualified critiques of identity politics tend to foreclose more possibilities than they offer. Wholesale rejection excludes the possibility that at least some of identity’s insights and approaches might still be generative for political theory and practice. Conversely, any positive account must not only embrace the purpose of defending identity politics against hasty generalizations, but also that of differentiation and assessment. It must provide a criterion for demarcating forms of identity politics, while also proposing a framework for understanding identity politics as a coherent category. In this paper, I draw on the rich theoretical literature on identity politics to take on this task. I intend to theorize identity politics as a category of social thought and practice, while differentiating between its progressive and reactionary manifestations. I start in the first section by discussing how identity politics has often only been assessed in terms of who is doing it, rather than what is being done. For a more generative approach, I turn to the text in which the term was first coined, the Combahee River Collective’s 1977 “Black Feminist Statement.” I highlight three facets of identity politics: specificity, empowerment, and radical liberatory politics. The first two are defining aspects of identity politics, as a process of constituting empowered political agents who can address specific social circumstances. But there is no politics that necessarily comes out of this process of empowerment, and the Collective’s commitment to structural change is a political choice, not a universal marker of identity politics. Therefore, I analyze this level of political goals and commitments as the one on which differentiation and assessment can take place. Ultimately, my conclusion is that, for identity politics to be productively critiqued, it must be understood as a political outlook and strategy, and thus assessed according to its intentions and efficacy.
