Politics of identity or liberation? On racist anti-racism

There is a common anti-racist myth that is itself racist. It has the character of affirming that the oppressed races really exist in an absolute, rooted, nationalism, and only the privileged, oppressor races wrongly seem to exist, because their identities are constructed on the basis of an historical reality of oppression of others (and what amounts to identity theft of them). This is more common than you might think. A black liberal writer no less gifted than Ti-nehisi Coates appears to hold it. He repeatedly writes of "black bodies" and "the people who think they are white."

From my own admittedly secular Jewish point of view, this essentialism of the identity of the oppressed seems particularly pernicious both because such naturalisms must be false (indeed, we know that race as a 'natural' category, which is after all what every concept of race essential is, and is an attempt to construct, is false; races like nations are historical constructs; contra Elizabeth Warren, there is no national identity or conscience latent in one's genetic code; that is an absurdity). But also because it seems such a false and dishonest response to the reality that no one possessed of much good sense will deny, which is the historical reality of oppression by virtuous of various social and demographic categories and indeed relationships. (No one can deny that patriarchy or male domination -- and these, by the way, are not the same thing-- is not only a conceptual construction but also one involving real relationships -- though of course sex and gender do have a natural component, as race and ethnicity really do not). In our history, it was Nazism and the specifically racial (biological) nationalist racism that made it possible, with the rise of nationalism in the 19th century after the French Revolution and reaction to it, and Darwin and the ideas of naturalistic sociology that referenced it, for Jews to be considered a race. That in turn enabled them to be eliminated. No one could convert any longer to the mainstream society and its values, because the essence of their character was familial if not actually biological.

Fixed ideas of what people are that tie to that what they can or should be are always to be doubted.

In his landmark 1989 book Modernity and the Holocaust, Polish and Jewish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes: "[Anti-semite] Charles Maurras would insist that 'what one is determines one's attitude from the beginning..."....Man is before he acts; nothing he does may change what he is. This is, roughly, the philosophical essence of racism."

Black power thinkers have created a racist anti-racism whose primary victims are their own people. It is based on the idea simply that victims of oppression in terms of historically enforced artificial categories (of which the idea of nation itself is one: it exists, but as a concept has no other reality than the social institutions that make it one as a set of 'facts on the ground') can and should understand that their liberation lies in assumption of an identity that is entirely fixed and rigidly bounded. Not only is power as domination key to liberation through empowerment to power as potentiality (the two meanings in Latin languages of different words translated both as 'power' in English), but the key to freedom (or is it safety?) from domination is the self-mastery and self-conquest collectively that is realized by declaring, affirming, and enforcing a totalizing and naturalistic identity, so that in effect: oppressors are artificial and this is false and a kind of theft, while the oppressed have a reality that the artificial and enforced practices of exploitation and domination (which by the way are not the same thing) rely upon, such that oppression as a relationship is ended by asserting this identity (it is the real essence that an artificial theft appropriated -- so give us back our identity!) as something absolutely rooted and naturalistic. History is reduced to nature. Be what you are, you can only be that. When the oppressed are authentic and realized in this way, there is no oppression, only pure being. Only oppression and domination bring with them difference, freedom of movement, exile in lieu of existential homelessness, indeed creativity as something that must cross boundaries rather than some kind of power (rendered absolute theoretically) as what must stay absolutely within them. Then the oppressed have only to enforce segregation, and always with much resentment. Nor can there be peace, only a war imagined as leading to it, through an absolutizing of discrete and bounded identities and separation. And this obviously is a false and fascistizing political tendency that leads nowhere, and gets there through authoritarian moralisms.