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"Identity politics" is a misused term because "all politics is identity politics." Some criticize identity politics as a way to say "stop talking about race, gender, and sexuality"--bad. But there are important left/feminist/radical critiques of identity politics, too. Thread.
I'll focus on what I know best, critiques from 20-21st century black political thought. These critiques appear in work from scholars like WEB Du Bois, Franz Fanon, Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, and even Ta-Nehisi Coates. They've critiqued what they've seen as:
1) A laser focus on racist or sexist rhetoric (e.g., what's now called microaggressions), but considerably less focus on the racist and sexist distribution of rights, power, and material resources;
2) An appearance of hypersensitivity to prejudice against the most successful members of marginalized groups (celebs of color, wealthy white gay men, white women in corporate boardrooms)...
...but less sensitivity toward the struggle of the most oppressed (homeless lgbt youth, young black victims of the New Jim Crow, poor women with de facto no reproductive rights, victims of war);
3) An overemphasis on politicians’ rhetoric around race, gender, and sexuality, and an underemphasis on their past and current policy positions (here's a great Michelle Alexander interview on this point with respect to Bill Clinton );
4) An over-celebration of gains in descriptive representation and the diversification of politics and business, sometimes as a cynical way to do #5;
5) The downplaying of how bad the past 50 years of politics has been for ordinary people, like the 1/3 of black men whose lives are derailed by mass incarceration, the fate of human civilization under climate change—and how excluded the intersectionally marginalized are in the US
The debate around points (1) through (5) have been going on since at least Reconstruction. There are similar debates in feminist, Marxist, and queer theory communities. Here are a few pieces for further reading.
My fav, as usual, is Du Bois, like his essays "The Black Man and the Unions" and "Socialism and the Negro Problem." His book "Black Reconstruction in America" can also be read this way.
Fanon's "Black Skin, White Masks" (especially Chapter 5) and "Wretched of the Earth," as well as Cedric Robinson's "Black Marxism," discuss racial-national identities and alienation.
In the world of critical theory, we can read:
"The Psychic Life of Power" by Judith Butler's
"Who's Afraid of Identity Politics" by Linda Martín Alcoff
"Justice Interruptus" by Nancy Fraser
"This Bridge We Call Home" by Gloria Anzaldúa
Anything by Angela Harris
"The Psychic Life of Power" by Judith Butler's
"Who's Afraid of Identity Politics" by Linda Martín Alcoff
"Justice Interruptus" by Nancy Fraser
"This Bridge We Call Home" by Gloria Anzaldúa
Anything by Angela Harris
Anything by Wendy Brown, e.g., Brown (1995): "Politicized identity thus enunciates itself, makes claims for itself, only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics; it can hold out no future—for itself or others—that triumphs over this pain."
For a contemporary take on identity and today's Democratic Party politics, I loved @jbouie's piece about what Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition teaches us: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/11/jesse_jackson_s_presidential_campaigns_offer_a_road_map_for_democrats_in.html
Overall, the current debates around, for lack of a better term, identity politics are mostly helpful--especially in showing that dominant identity groups practice identity politics too! But the concept is so slippery that we sometimes talk past each other. Hope this thread helps.
