Goodbye to Identity Politics

Does identity politics keep us emotionally and creatively stunted?

Recently, I had dinner with a new friend of mine and we got to talking about the writing I used to do, which focused a lot on Asian American identity. There was a time when that was all I wanted to write and talk about. I’d pen articles, record podcasts, and get into discussions and arguments on social media. Now, not only do I feel that I don’t have a ton left to say anymore on these topics, but it also feels like their cultural moment have passed too. The 2010s was the apex for this genre, first encouraged by a feeling of unstoppable liberal ascension at the start of the decade, and then in the middle, fueled by a crisis of faith in the great liberal project.

By 2023, however, the enthusiasm for identity politics has died down. I just don’t see the same level of thinkpiecing going on about people’s race, gender, and/or sexual orientation has impacted their lives, especially with respect to their self-esteem, media representation, careers, dating lives, etc. It definitely hasn’t helped that in recent years, the public pillars of identity politics like BLM and #MeToo (and its institutionalized form, Time’s Up) have had major scandals and revealing moments of double standards. But those instances did not reverse popular opinion so much as they confirmed what many had begun to feel: these movements, though they started with good intentions, had become hijacked by niche interests with their own unrelateable agendas.

I’ve read both Freddie deBoer’s How The Elite Ate The Social Justice Movement and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s Elite Capture: How The Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else), and they both captured my own disillusionment with identity politics and social justice. Of course, “identity” and “social justice” can mean anything to anyone. We all have identities, and in some form or another, we all desire social justice. But there are very specific ways they are defined and jealously guarded in our culture. 

DeBoer references the philosopher Liam Kofi Bright, whose paper “White Psychodrama” attacks contemporary racial discourse as nothing more than guilt-management therapy for well-off and well-intentioned white people who want to feel better about living so comfortably in an unequal system, and in turn, make the conversation all about themselves. This should be modified to also include well-off white-adjacent minorities. And by “well-off,” I don’t mean having a decent middle-class salary with a nice suburban home. That’s grubby immigrant mentality. In the attention economy, “well off” means having influence, and those elites are in the culture class: academics, writers, so-called creatives, etc. DeBoer says this with respect to BLM as well, noting how the median BLM organizer is more media savvy and fluent in the ways of elite America than the median black American, thus transforming BLM into “BPMCLM—Black Professional-Managerial Class Lives Matter.”

The best way I’d describe identity politics as we know it is the utmost prioritization of the feelings and self-esteem of select groups. Not all identities are equal, not even among minorities or LGBTQ. DeBoer quotes the socialist writer Clare Coffey, who says in her essay, Failure to Cope ‘Under Capitalism’:

What binds these pleas together is an application of “the personal is political” so expanded in scope that, for a certain kind of person, personal problems, anxieties, and dissatisfactions are illegible or illegitimate unless described as political problems.

— Clare Coffey

That’s the frustration I experienced when I earnestly tried to become a part of the whole identity politics and social justice thing. It was all about the personal grievances of an elite in-group-within-a-group, masquerading as something greater for the whole community. Everyone else was then forced to act as if our lot in life was to unquestioningly cheerlead our almost-elite peers as they battled for full membership into an exclusive club that the rest of us would never be allowed into. Táíwò writes in his book about how identity politics has become “deference politics” that revolves around “modify[ing] interpersonal interactions in compliance with the perceived wishes of the marginalized.” He criticizes this apparent power reversal by observing that the prerogative to bestow or deny deference still resides among the established elite. Just as importantly, the ability to receive any deference is reserved for the elite marginalized who are closely in contact with the established elite. Thus, elite capture.

Táíwò also describes “racial Reaganomics,” where the psychological benefits given to the elite marginalized are assumed to translate into material gains for the non-elite marginalized, which is similar to a term I used years ago, “racial neoliberalism,” to express how one’s identity is examined and harvested for its most marketable aspects and, consequently, redefined in those terms. The problem with Asian American identity is that under standard progressive rules, it is largely worthless. There are discrete components that are universally beloved, like food. This is why many Asian Americans freak out so much about cultural appropriation regarding food, because in an environment where identity gives so much social currency, losing such a valuable source of identity would make us irrelevant. Asian American identity can have some value if combined with something else, like feminism or LGBTQism, and even then, it’s still on the lower tier of the progressive hierarchy (except when attacking other Asians). It’s no coincidence that Asian American identity politics primarily caters to name-brand-educated straight Asian American women and the interpersonal discomforts and obstacles they experience as they ascend the social hierarchy into the elite mainstream.

The Lakota journalist and historian Nick Estes describes this as “trauma politics,” which “turns actual people and struggles, whether racial or Indigenous citizenship and belonging, into matters of injury. It defines an entire people mostly on their trauma and not by their aspirations or sheer humanity,” where the performance is “for white audience or institutions of power.” So for straight Asian American men, identity politics is a dead end, where even winning means losing. Damsels-in-distress are beautiful creatures while dudes-in-distress are pitiful and scorn-worthy.

Such supplicating wilting-flower politics ultimately isn’t good for anybody regardless of gender or sexual orientation, but it’s especially bad for any group that society—despite its performative disdaining of gender roles—still expects and desires to act in traditionally masculine ways. The nadir of this incentivized trauma-mining mentality is when Asian guys complain about being fetishized. More than anything else, what Asian American men want is our own sense of cultural relevance, to not feel like vestigial organs as Asian America evolves to fit into a beautifully diverse America that has no place for us. That cannot be achieved by playing this unbecoming game of “please love me” that keeps us stuck in perpetual pubescence. If this is Asian American culture, then I want no part of it.

Seoul metro around this time last year, taken on my Nikon F3

I don’t regret the time and effort I spent on identity issues in years past. I now regard it all as having been a necessary step. Sometimes, I sheepishly joke about the fact that the most popular thing I’ve ever written yet is a critique of a Netflix YA movie. But I stand by everything I said in that piece, as well as in other similar things I’ve written. And though those types of pieces may seem a bit silly now, writing those things back in the late 2010s was enough of a serious offense to get me cancelled in some circles. But that was then, and in 2023, opinions once deemed bold and risky are just passe and mainstream on TikTok. 

But I do run into regrets when I think of what I could’ve read, written, and thought about instead if I didn’t have to get all this out of my system. One of the most persistent feelings I’ve had throughout my life is that I’m behind the pace in some way, that I’m experiencing things in life significantly later than most peers. With writing, it feels like finally, in my mid-30s, I’ve sufficiently dealt with the baggage of identitarian concerns that I can write about things beyond adolescent worries. But how much time have I “wasted”?

That’s why so many are invested in rehashing the same identitarian themes again and again, because if we are indeed starting the race far later than others, then we feel hopeless in catching up. So we want to will our weaknesses into strengths, and revel in our infantilization. At least then we’d have a comparative advantage in the vicious marketplace of ideas and attention. The old things I used to write about, I’d had a lifetime to mull over, and much of it was protected by the high electrified fences of the lived experience. If your writing is based on esoteric experiences and emotions, how could anyone challenge it? That type of writing had a low ceiling, but the floor was high and that fence was comfortingly tall. The allure of centering your problems around things like media representation and personal relationships is that the solutions are clear and achievable on a concrete level. Demand the preferred casting choice. Fuck or date or marry a certain type of person. But easy goals are often revealed to be illusory. If not getting what you want is maddening, then not knowing what you want is petrifying. At least rage feels more satisfying.

It’s not that I don’t ever want to write about identity-related topics again, and I’ve already done so several times on this Substack. There’s still plenty of unexplored territory, particularly given how timid Asian American identitarian writing has been in the past generation or two. And even if I write more about different things now, all my prior writings and podcasts are still out there, hopefully still being useful to people. But it’s not 2018 anymore, at least for me, and I wonder if it’s similar for everyone else. This Substack is just about half a year old now, and I still can’t figure out a demographic or ideological pattern on who’s reading and subscribing. It’s exciting.