What is wrong with color talk: Towards reversing the false path of the identity-community liberal left

The real function and purpose of talk of the importance of Blackness or being a "Person of Color" is so that instead of talking about capitalism and the oppressive institutions and social practices that are part of it, and in danger of becoming outdated and then replaced with something better, one demographical category of citizens is educated into thinking of another as their natural enemy.

Then, if these subpopulations are different in personality, mores, or what have you, that difference itself can be systematically confused with the 'oppression' of one group' by means of the 'privileges' of another, or the social mechanisms thought of (not altogether wrongly) as reproducing these privileges and with them this oppression.

What this means is that the more fortunate persons in our imperfectly and self-styled meritocracy are to be treated with suspicion, and the less fortune ones favored by those who are drawn to the simplifying politics of Carnival. (Carnival was the European folk holiday in which all hierarchies are overturned and reversed for a day, in a festival whose demarcation as such serves as safety value for the society that helps preserves those very hierarchies).

None of this will change to something better the system of neoliberal capitalism with its liberties for capital and its bearers, and social controls that are increasingly violent and exclusive, and reproduce squalor and despair, for most of the vast majority of persons who count for the system that governs their lives mostly just as labor power and power to consume and buy stuff.

Let alone the relative losers in the competitive game, be they strategically sanctified in some political rhetoric or not. But it will make a lot of people feel better, and inspire others to hatreds that produce nothing good, while keeping alive a system based on stupefaction instead of mass education, on prisons and punishments everywhere, with burgeoning codes of intolerance for every real or imagined infraction of social order or civility. It will keep things as they are, benefitting the very privileged few, and offering the merely relatively privileged middle class less than a better system would, but more than someone else somewhere else that is visible enough.

The choice facing the "left" is to either continue talking about race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, and other variables that enable governments of mass societies to manage their population by identifiable social groups under the false pretenses of a communitarian identity politics whose tacit model is to let a hundred nationalities bloom instead of a single form of citizenship that needs no qualification other than being-here. This politics is conservative and reactionary.

The "liberal left" can either continue this dead end, which produced Trump as reaction to the prospect of the rule of corporate elites In the name of these ideologies of nominal redistribution, or it can stop talking about identities and who is who and resume the discussion left off after 1968 not of class as privileged signifier of subjective empowerment, so much as capitalism as what we criticize and seek something better than. We have seen enough of the mere and cynical consecration of the nobility or virtue of being a member of a scheduled oppressed caste, in the place of the critiques of exploitation, domination, and violence to which these identity political schemes offer only recognition of a status in lieu of a real social struggle, which ought to be for a society that is better for everyone.

It is even possible that it will be better for the children of the very privileged. We saw in the 60s: young people of the haute bourgeoisie could see that the values of their parents were too restrictive, and the alternative might well be a social world that is freer not only for them but for everyone, and more equal, just, and happy as well. Imagine.