Identity Politics

Identity politics is a mode of political organization in which people make claims and form alliances on the basis of a shared group characteristic, race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, or disability, rather than on the basis of a common citizenship or a shared material interest. The term entered American usage in 1977, when the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black feminist activists in Boston, declared that the most profound politics came directly out of their own identity as Black women.¹

From those origins on the activist left, identity politics expanded over four decades into a dominant frame for understanding social conflict in universities, media, and party politics. Conservatives have criticized it as a solvent of the common goods, shared citizenship, equal treatment under law, national loyalty, on which a free society depends, while its defenders answer that group-based mobilization is the only realistic remedy for group-based injury.

Key Takeaways

• The phrase “identity politics” was coined in the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement and grew out of Black feminist organizing.
• It treats group membership, rather than individual choice or universal citizenship, as the primary unit of political life.
• Conservatives argue it replaces a politics of the common good with a politics of grievance, eroding equal treatment under law and national solidarity.
• Critics across the spectrum, including liberals like Mark Lilla and Francis Fukuyama, warn that it fragments coalitions and provokes reactionary counter-movements.
• The deepest disagreement concerns whether justice is best pursued through universal principles applied to individuals or through recognition of distinct group identities.

History And Context

The Combahee River Collective, founded in 1974, published its statement in 1977 and gave the concept its name, arguing that focusing on one’s own oppression was both necessary and revolutionary.¹ The idea drew on the civil rights and feminist movements of the preceding decades, but it marked a turn away from the universalist language of Martin Luther King Jr., who appealed to a creed binding all Americans, and toward the particular claims of specific groups.

Through the 1980s and 1990s the framework migrated from activism into the academy, absorbing the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 concept of intersectionality, which mapped how overlapping identities compound disadvantage. By the 2010s, identity-based analysis had become a default vocabulary in elite institutions.

The reaction came from several directions. In Identity (2018), Francis Fukuyama traced the phenomenon to thymos, the Platonic hunger for recognition, distinguishing isothymia, the demand to be respected as an equal, from megalothymia, the demand to be recognized as superior.² He argued that the splintering of citizens into ever-smaller identity groups starves liberal democracies of the shared identity they require to function. The political theorist Mark Lilla, writing as a self-described liberal in The Once and Future Liberal (2017), charged that the American left had traded a politics of solidarity for a politics of self-definition, abandoning the question of what citizens owe one another in common.³

The Conservative Position

Conservatives object to identity politics on principle and on prudence. On principle, they hold that a just polity treats persons as individuals before the law, not as representatives of demographic categories. The classical liberal and conservative inheritance, from the American founding through the colorblind aspiration of the civil rights movement, locates rights in the individual, and group entitlement cuts against that inheritance.

Thomas Sowell has supplied much of the empirical case. In A Conflict of Visions (1987) he argued that political disputes flow from incompatible assumptions about human nature, and that the “unconstrained” vision underlying identity politics imagines disparities as evidence of injustice to be corrected by enlightened administrators.⁴ Across his work Sowell maintains that group outcomes diverge for reasons, age structure, geography, culture, historical timing, that have nothing to do with present discrimination, so that treating every disparity as oppression both misdiagnoses the problem and licenses remedies that harm their intended beneficiaries.

Shelby Steele extends the argument to the moral psychology of race. In White Guilt (2006) he contended that the collapse of overt racism left a vacuum filled by a politics in which victim status became a form of moral authority, encouraging dependency rather than the self-reliance that produced genuine advancement. Conservatives add a prudential warning, shared by Fukuyama and Lilla: a politics that sorts citizens into rival identity blocs invites a backlash in kind, as majorities learn to play the same game. The conservative alternative is a renewed emphasis on what Lilla calls citizenship, a status that transcends the labels and binds strangers into a single people.

Differing Positions

Defenders of identity politics begin from a serious observation: formally neutral rules can entrench substantive inequality. A law that treats everyone identically can still leave intact disadvantages produced by generations of explicit discrimination, and a politics that refuses to name groups can render their specific injuries invisible. On this view, the Combahee writers were not abandoning universalism but completing it, insisting that “all men are created equal” must reach the people the original promise excluded.

Proponents also argue that recognition is itself a real human good, not a distraction from material politics, a point Fukuyama concedes even as he criticizes its excesses. They contend that group solidarity has been the engine of every successful rights movement, from abolition to suffrage to the labor and disability movements, and that dismissing identity-based organizing would disarm the very coalitions that achieved past reforms. The strongest version of this case grants the conservative worry about fragmentation while insisting that the remedy for unjust group treatment cannot be a studied blindness to the groups involved.

References

1. Combahee River Collective, The Combahee River Collective Statement (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1986), p. 1.
2. Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), p. 22.
3. Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (Harper, 2017), p. 9.
4. Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (William Morrow, 1987), p. 18.