Identity politics: mobilisation of difference

The identification of difference as pivotal to social change is rooted in the politics and theory of what is known as ‘identity politics’. Identity politics refers to ideological movements that are motivated by and centre on the interests and experiences of social groups that have been marginalised or discriminated against because of a feature or features of their identity, which could be gender, sexuality, race, religion or other aspects of identity. Identity politics challenges normative political structures, such as patriarchy or White privilege, that have perpetuated the dominance of certain groups over others, and advocates for the political significance of groups who have experienced discrimination and oppression. The identity politics movements from the Civil Rights Movement in the USA in the 1950s and 1960s through to the more contemporary LGBTQ+ rights movements have been drivers for equal rights and have empowered members within these groups by providing a framework to address struggles and effect social change. The recent death of George Floyd in 2020 saw the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, the socio-political movement rooted in the Civil Rights Movement that highlighted racism and discrimination experienced by Black people.

Identity politics mobilises around a shared identity that gives a platform for those with common struggles to unite and tackle inequality. However, this notion of ‘shared identity’ is fraught because it risks essentialising identity. Essentialism about a kind of thing says that belonging to that kind necessarily involves the possession of certain properties. Applying this to identity, it says that all members of a particular group have the same experiences, values or political views. This overlooks the diversity within the group revealed by differences in gender, class or other variables that limits the extent of shared identity.

The double-edged sword of identity politics

In March 2021 the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities recommended that the UK government stop using the term ‘BAME’, which came out of the final report on COVID-19 disparities published in December 2021. ⁷ This was a landmark change facilitated by what had been learnt during the pandemic about the needs of ethnic minority populations, particularly those from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds. Before this report, the acronym BAME, which stands for ‘Black, Asian and minority ethnic’, was the UK’s category term to capture the experiences of Black and minority ethnic groups, used by the Office of National Statistics and other organisations in diversity monitoring. It replaced ‘BME’ and was more inclusive of peoples from/with heritage from Asia.

Both these classifications are rooted in racial identity politics in Britain in the 20th century, in the politicisation of Blackness in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which saw Black and minority ethnic people band together under the common experience of racism. Under the umbrella term ‘Black’ – an identity constructed, not given – the focus was on the consciousness raising of the experiences of these groups within British society. ^{Reference Mercer8} , ^{Reference Chambers9} While it represented a powerful moment in postwar anti-racist British history, the group identity was short-lived. While operating to unite, it failed to capture the significant differences between these groups and arguably brought about harm to certain groups such as South Asians, by overemphasising their similarities with other ethnic groups such as African and African-Caribbean people, rather than meeting their needs in their own right. Tariq Modood, amongst others, argued against the term on the grounds of the harm it caused South Asian people, in the way in which it distorted their sub-ethnic identities and interests. ^{Reference Modood10}

While BME and then BAME represented significant attempts to represent the plethora of identities formerly designated by the term ‘Black’ more fully, and to support the presence of marginalised identities, it showed the ongoing problem of capturing diversity of identity in all its forms. The reality of this came to the fore recently during the pandemic when UK media campaigns targeted BAME groups as a whole and held certain media stereotypes that were harmful to these populations. Some of the views propounded were that BAME groups were less informed about COVID-19, were at greater risk of disease because they lived in housing with close proximity and were from low socioeconomic backgrounds, which contributed to their level of risk in relation to education and housing. The overriding claim here was that these groups did not trust the establishment. While it is true that, relative to the majority White population, BAME groups are, as a whole, more adversely affected by structural disadvantage (such as educational opportunities, employment and socioeconomic backgrounds), the extent of generalisations across these quite disparate communities was grossly problematic.

A nationwide poll by the British Red Cross to tackle vaccine hesitancy in early 2021 highlighted the huge variation in BAME groups between those who had or planned to have the vaccine and those who either would not take it or were not sure about taking it. ¹¹ The 85% of Indian people and 89% of Chinese people in the first category were close to or above the national average of 87% as compared with those in the second category, the 46% of Black Caribbean people, 31% of Black African people and 25% of Pakistani people who were above the UK national average of 13%. ¹¹ The findings of this poll highlighted the significant dangers of treating BAME people as a homogeneous group because it masked the differences between very different communities. By failing to support the more disadvantaged groups within the overarching category, it obscured the plight of the more socially deprived, further disadvantaging them.

The dynamism of ethnic identity

The recognition of the failure of BAME was met with questions about its replacement. The response was that any umbrella term will be fraught with the same problems of flattening differences between identities. The most progressive solution was instead to strive to treat the needs of groups at more specific levels, focusing on more individualised identities. The seeds of this approach can be traced to the pioneering work of the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, ^{Reference Hall and Mercer12} whose concept of ‘new ethnicities’, which emerged in 1988, transformed the field of cultural studies with respect to discourse on identity, race and culture and was part of a broader exploration of the politics of representation and post-colonial identity.Footnote ^a Hall’s theory asserted the dynamism of ethnicity, which he believed should not be viewed as fixed or biologically determined but instead as fluid and socially constructed, shaped by political and cultural forces. This challenged the former monolithic treatment of homogenisation, which failed to recognise the diverse positions that make up identity, how different factors such as generation, class, and gender interact in the shaping of experiences and in the movement of the self. ^{Reference Morley and Chen13,Reference Alexander14} This approach paved the way for intersectionality.

Devised by Kimberlé Crenshaw, ^{Reference Crenshaw15} the concept of intersectionality showed how race, class, gender and other characteristics intersect with one another to shape experiences and define degrees of privilege. Crenshaw argued for the problem of dealing with singular frameworks of analysis, such as race and gender, as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis, which leads to the invisibility of subjects of multiple oppression, such as Black and minority ethnic women. Historically, the more powerful members in identity politics movements had more of a steer on the concerns and identity of the group, meaning that other viewpoints were subsumed, leading to issues about representation. Within the feminist movement, for example, women of colour argued that while feminism championed the rights of women, it did not represent the views of Black and minority ethnic women, who had to contend with multiple forms of oppression – not simply patriarchy but also racism. The failure of the feminism movement to address the needs of Black and minority ethnic women resulted in the creation of new spaces of representation, in the form of separate movements such as Womanism (that addressed the views of Black women’s experiences) and Chicanas (that addressed the views of Mexican women).

The dynamism of intersectionality conveys the fluidity of identity. Any attempts at ‘ethnocentric definitions of collective subjectivity’, which Martin Jay ^{Reference Jay16} discusses, ‘come up against the problem of conflicting affiliations, which cut across any coherent notion of solidarity’. He goes on to say, ‘No one, after all, is just, say, a worker, a Catholic, a woman, a heterosexual, an Italian-American and so on, but at the unstable nodal point of such overlapping identities, all of which may pull in different directions’. ^{Reference Jay16} The greater the awareness of the multiple components that make up identity, and the way they present, the closer one can get to a more well-rounded understanding.

How, then, are we to understand identity?

We understand the world through categories, and this applies too in the case of identity. The relevance of culture – more specifically cultural identity – within psychiatry arose in part as the recognition of a need to respond to growing communities of ethnic diversity in postwar migration, as well as the need, within countries such as North America, Australia and New Zealand, to meet the needs of indigenous groups. Within the UK, the ethnically diverse groups referred in the postwar period to migrants from the former empire, from countries in the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean and, in more recent decades, peoples from other regions of the world. Identity politics served to internally empower these groups, so they could reclaim their identities for themselves, but the on the ground reality has been different because of the silencing of discussions on race, which often takes the form of denying racism or denying that race is relevant in society. This has led to the deepening of White privilege, manifest here in the invisible White spaces of institutional structures, languages and spaces that present risk to people of colour. People of colour have the option to fit in, as Sara Ahmed ^{Reference Ahmed4} discusses, but this requires not standing out in any way, blending in and adapting to cultural codes. Failure to do that makes them hypervisible. This indeed happened to Ahmed herself when passing through New York airport. As a brown person, with a Muslim name and British passport, she stood out and was questioned at immigration. It may not have been an interrogation but was enough to show that some [White] bodies can just flow into space. ^{Reference Ahmed17}

A possible solution lies in thinking about group identity in a looser sense, something akin to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘family resemblance’, which does not discount affiliations within groups but allows for the fluidity of identity. Wittgenstein introduced the idea of family resemblance to explain how many concepts lack a fixed essence or definition but still have points of similarity. ^{Reference Macey and Silverman18} Take the example of a game, which he used to illustrate his points: it possesses no strict definition, there is no single characteristic that all games share. Some are cooperative, others competitive. Some require luck; others require skill. However, in spite of the variety in types, we can see similarities and relationships between the different examples and can still recognise them as games.

Wittgenstein talked about ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing’. ^{Reference Macey and Silverman18} He characterised these similarities as family resemblances and argued for the various resemblances between members of a family in terms of ‘build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament’. ^{Reference Macey and Silverman18} To expand on this example, family members resemble each other in various ways, without there being a single overriding feature. There are overlapping features, which may show up in some cases but not others. Of the four biological children of a pair of parents, for instance, one son might have the nose and chin of his father whereas a second son may have the nose and ears of his father. The daughter might have the ears of her father but the nose of her mother and a second daughter might have the nose and eyes of her mother. Each of these four children resembles a parent but there is no one way in which all the children resemble their parents. There is instead a shifting sequence of overlapping resemblances although no single common resemblance. Yet, they still have a distinct identity as a family group, recognisable to outsiders.

This notion of family resemblance can be applied to the subject of identity, which in this example could be ethnic identity. When we ask ourselves, ‘what does it mean to be Indian?’, there are no essential features that all Indian people have but there are overlapping characteristics. These include linguistic practices, religions, languages and other customs but there is no single defining feature, and these languages, religions and customs vary from subgroup to subgroup, family to family and even within families themselves. By using the model of family resemblance to learn about the broader cultural features of a particular ethnographic group health practitioners can develop a contextual understanding of traits or characteristics that may be shared with others in the group while also allowing for other identity variables that include amongst them caste, class, gender and religion. When combined, these may ‘pull in different directions’, to use Martin Jay’s phrase, ^{Reference Jay16} through which patterns of resemblance may emerge or disappear. A second-generation individual born in the UK of Indian migrants may express less affinity with Indian ethnolinguistic practices, identifying more strongly with the English language. There are many possibilities of identities that exist within these populations that convey heterogeneity. Furthermore, the presentation of the self is contextually specific, and often determined by factors outside one’s control. Fanon talks of his subjugation to the White man in Paris while in Martinique he held much higher status because of his lighter skin. ^{Reference Macey and Silverman18} The tension between the different components also confirms the complex and fluid identity of the self, which cannot be pinned down.

‘Family resemblance’ then should be seen as a schema that can be used to understand identity clustered around difference. It enables a fleshed out understanding of nuance without a fetishisation of difference based around someone’s minority status, which could be their sexuality, gender, ethnicity and so on. However, equally important is the recognition that the significance of characteristics of difference should not de facto be overlooked. To deny that race matters is tantamount to denying the realities of structural racism and constitutes White privilege. As Fanon showed, his phenomenological experience was shaped through his status as a Black man and in what he would describe as a White world. ^{Reference Fanon and Markmann2} It was not a choice to self-represent but was the only reality available to him. Decolonising psychiatry involves recognising this unequal position occupied by people of colour whose bodies restrict them from operating in the same ways granted to those of greater privilege. Understanding why people of colour in the West are viewed through the ‘spectre’ of their bodies is critical to recognising endemic forms of racism and oppression, essential to operationalising change. As Deidre E. Davis states ‘[w]e cannot hope to understand the meaning of a person’s experiences, including her experiences of oppression, without first thinking of her as embodied and second thinking about the particular meanings assigned to that embodiment’. ^{Reference Lee19} The same treatment goes for other variables that contribute to minority status. In the end, then, there is a fine balance between being attuned to differences and the existential challenges they present while not overlooking the compound nature of identity. What this means for psychiatrists is that, in the case of ethnic minority patients, their ‘ethnicity’ should not be viewed as presenting in the same way or as overriding other variables of identity, but should be considered alongside other aspects of identity as they reveal themselves in a consultation. An allied point to bear in mind is the family resemblance model, which will avoid homogenising ethnicity within the context of ethnic minority populations.